Noticed yesterday on the most-active-projects on CIA:

Not bad for a 13 year old game.

Just some google food for anyone having trouble with the music in PrBoom on amd64 systems. There is a bug in SDL_mixer 1.2.6 (and earlier), which causes this problem; this is the version of SDL_mixer in Ubuntu Hoary and Dapper, and in Debian at the moment. It is this patch:

--- ./timidity/config.h	2006-08-12 11:59:44.492723500 +0100
+++ ../sdl-mixer1.2-1.2.6-cph1/timidity/config.h	2006-08-12 11:30:06.988427250 +0100
@@ -185,14 +185,8 @@ typedef double FLOAT_T;
 #define LITTLE_ENDIAN
 #endif
 
-/* DEC MMS has 64 bit long words */
-#ifdef DEC
 typedef unsigned int uint32;
-typedef int int32; 
-#else
-typedef unsigned long uint32;
-typedef long int32; 
-#endif
+typedef int int32;
 typedef unsigned short uint16;
 typedef short int16;
 typedef unsigned char uint8;

to the timidity code that fixes the problem. You can download a fixed libsdl-mixer1.2 and libsdl-mixer1.2-dev if you don't want to rebuild the packages yourself.

I have spent half the weekend putting together and testing PrBoom 2.4.0. This finally brings 2.2.6 up-to-date. Thanks in particular to Andrey Budko, who has been tracking down a lot of bugs over the last year, and who kindly supplied us with patches for many of them.

Proff was asking about the demos that I use to test PrBoom releases, so I have compiled a list; it may be of interest to some people.

I had not seen this before — Linspire apparently offering a bundle of PrBoom and Freedoom as a "Click-N-Run" package. They don't mention either up front, but the specifications page makes it clear that it is PrBoom, and it is in the package name (plus the status bar is definitely Boom-like). It looks like they are shipping the GL version.

It seems a bit dodgy the way they use the Doom trademark, and one of id's promotional images for Doom 2, and even list id as the vendor. Okay, the source code is half from id, but it doesn't contain any of id's design or artwork, so using id's trademark for it looks very suspect.

I just spotted that Linux Format included an article about PrBoom in their February issue (LXF63). No online version I'm afraid. They talk about it in the context of client-server network games, and it has a little column to itself in amount their "Network Everything" series of articles.

…We'll examine PrBoom, a modern version of the classic shooter. Linux and Windows versions of this are available…

Like many other network games, PrBoom is separated into client and server parts… the server is started first and the client's machines log in to the server to play.…

It's particularly nice for me, because the network code is the one bit of PrBoom I can claim is all my own — since I rewrote it years ago, and am responsible for the current client-server design. They liked the wget-retrieval of WAD files to clients, although it is years since I wrote that — I'm surprised that it still works.