DOOM II: Hell on Earth Forum

Doom 2 is now available via steam, which is why I submitted it for the COG database. This is an old dos based game, and the steam distribution uses dosbox to run it. So, it's trying to run dosbox under Crossover Games and it fails miserably.

There are options tho for those that want to run it, listed in top to bottom IMHO methods of launching:

1) Download native Doomsday engine for your platform (avail for OSX, Linux, Windows, etc.)
2) Download doomsday for windows and attempt to run under crossover games
3) Download Dosbox for your platform and run the game through that.

I have tried the native doomsday engine for OSX, and it works fairly well. There are some graphics anomalies, but nothing major - it also offers drawing at higher resolutions then normally offered, and more advanced configurations within game.

I will try running doomsday for windows under crossover later when I'm at home to see if that works too.

I have also tried running native dosbox (dosbox for osx) and tried out Doom 2 and it seemed to work just fine.

So, basically if you get this game through steam, it won't work out of the box with the current implementation of CrossOver Games (7.2.0 at this moment) - this IMHO is by no fault of codeweavers, or wine, but rather the use of dosbox and trying to implement dosbox under wine and where the app in dosbox is using a dos extender (dos4/gw) to access more memory appears to be asking for trouble.

DOSBox is a Windows program, and to my knowledge it doesn't do anything nasty. It is a full emulator and shouldn't need any special memory access or CPU features to function.

In general, it should work as well as on Windows. If it doesn't, that is a (minor) Wine/CrossOver bug.

Well, it's not a matter of dosbox being nasty - to be honest - I've used it stand alone (as they have a OSX port of it), but running under wine seems to be an issue (at least with Doom 2).

If I recall correctly from what popped up on the screen, it was either a memory allocation issue or gaining access to some resource (I don't remember which), I can run it again later when I'm at home and post up screenshot links. Now this could just be an issue on OSX, or a combination of dosbox n game using dos4/gw + wine - but it definitely didn't work last night.

Ok here's an update:

1) I was able to get it a bit farther on 3 out of 4 attempts.

The 3 attempts I could get it to the first splash screen of Doom II but it wouldn't go any furthur - I should also note that it took a VERRRRRRY long time to get this far. Basically, a program that should have taken about 10 seconds to launch, max, got me to the first splash screen in between 2 and 5 minutes (I wasn't watching the time close enough, but it was well over a minute, but I know it was less then 6)

2) On the 4th attempt I got a stack overflow error (screen vanished faster then I could get a screenshot).

On the first 3 attempts I was running with an 1024x768 virtual desktop

On the 4th attempt I was running with no virtual desktop.

There is definitely something up with dosbox+dos4/gw+7.2.0 crossover games that is making it un-useable. The dosbox app appears to run at normal speed until it starts loading doom.