It may be a strange state of mind for a source port author, but recently I have been appreciating Vanilla Doom more and more (as in DOOM.EXE and DOOM2.EXE from latest releases of either Doom 2, Ultimate Doom, Final Doom, or those found in ID Anthology collection), to the extent of considering it (and all truly Vanilla-compatible stuff) superior over other ways and forms of playing the game. That as well as some discontent with my LCD monitor's scaling of non-native resolutions like 320x200 - something with I swear gets worth with age! - got me add a new scaling mode to Tartar, specifically to scale 320x200 renderer output to the native 1280x1024 resolution of my display. So, with particles and translucency effects switched off, and darker default "gamma" setting mimicking v1.1 of Doom, the new old looks of Tartar are thus:
The setting is activated from Video Options where one can now toggle between Off, x2 and x4 as the values for Scale to higher resolution, and will be available with the soon to be published October testing build.
For those familiar with DOSBox configuration scaling is similar to using normal4x scaler, and hence is the x4 label (although technically output image is 16 times bigger than the rendered frame, not 4).
Now, talking about the coming build, the way Tartar was distributed has been reorganized during past month. I was no longer comfortable with having multiple places for storing my assets, and it was easier for me to wipe them and consolidate everything in just one place. That place being ModDB, full Tatar distribution with extras, as well as source code only and more lightweight binary distributions have been uploaded. Testing builds have originally been part of the full distro, found in TESTING directory, but since downloading the distro for just the updated EXE feels like an overhead, a separate lightweight testing distribution will be added to Tartar Files section soon. As part of the clean-up the "portable" distribution (that is the one with DOSBox in it) has been marked redundant and will not be updated with new versions anymore.
In addition to the x4 scaling mode the following stuff is now in TESTING (when compared to the July build currently considered stable):
- Tartar will show different funny prompt messages when quitting the games, depending on whether Doom or Doom II IWAD is used and the messages will in fact be random
- "Wiggly wall" bugfix using code from Doomworld users @entryway and @kb1
- Tartar will no longer complain in console if a map references floor or ceiling texture named "-" (which is considered to be synonymous with nothing)
- When Next/Previous music track console commands or hotkeys will not get stuck if playing Shareware version of Doom
- Fixed a crash in Windows 9x when changing current palette on the fly with WAD file having a file name longer than 8 characters
- Eternity Options, Tartar Options and Weapons menus were reworked
- New option under Weapons Options to stick with fists while berserk powerup is on, even when picking up a more powerful weapon or ammo
- New option under Weapons Options to always keep the favorite weapon despite even when out of ammo or when picking up a more powerful weapon, ammo or a powerup
- Tartar jargon word "TAPE" is going away and is being replaced with "SHIM"! TAPE directory becomes SHIMS, -tape command line argument becomes -shim, and console output for when a shim is loaded has been made more clear
- Testing build uses a slightly modified version of the Allegro sound library that supports playing MIDI-s with more channels than usual, like in some of Bobby Prince's original tunes
Oh, and one more thing... Are you ready to die?
Tartar's "sister port" Bernewfie now has a page of its own on ModDB with source and binary downloads available. More details on this Hexen port for DOS in one of the upcoming articles.
