Playing Heretic in zdoom is worlds better.

www.zdoom.org

Pros
Everything just works. Twice the frame rate, twice the res, stable internet play. I prefer 640x480 with vertical doubling to get some slightly reduced old fashioned pixelation. It even recognizes your steam install... no setup necessary.

Cons
Zdoom lets you configure looking up/down, jumping, and crouching even if the original game didn't allow it. Heretic DOES have looking up/down but does NOT have jumping/crouching.

Multiplayer requires bat files. To play 2 players make a simple text file and paste this in:
zdoom -host 2
change the file name from .txt to .bat and give player 2 this bat file with your ip address(www.whatismyip.com):
zdoom -join 192.168.0.100

Pretty cool, but it doesn't look like my previous saves are compatible

[CannibalBob]

Problem is, jumping and to a lesser degree, crouching, is kind of like cheating because there are a few parts in levels that you can 'skip' by jumping. You normally cannot skip it and need a key or something. Same goes for Doom.

[djZM]

I may have to try this out. I've been playing Heretic again but it does look fairly muddy on my 22" widescreen lcd, and the framerate isn't as smooth as it should be even with maxing the CPU cycles in dosbox..

[Redboy]

Originally Posted by CannibalBob

Problem is, jumping and to a lesser degree, crouching, is kind of like cheating because there are a few parts in levels that you can 'skip' by jumping. You normally cannot skip it and need a key or something. Same goes for Doom.

+1

I don't allow to jump for Heretic and same goes to Doom it clearly as cheat but ok for Hexen because it does jump in original.

Zdoom is fantastic port for 3 great games...

[The Unbeholden]

Originally Posted by spinning

I prefer 640x480 with vertical doubling to get some slightly reduced old fashioned pixelation. It even recognizes your steam install... no setup necessary.

I noticed the "vertical doubling" and "horizontal doubling" options are missing from the latest version of ZDOOM.

the purpose of pixel doubling was so that you could get a 320 by 240 (or on 200) style resolution on devices that only supported a minimum screen resolution of 640x480 to reproduce the original gameplay look on newer hardware...

If anyone still wants to do this, you can try using the -2 and -4 command line options.

[RamblinBob]

Have they fixed co-op play?

Last time I tried, no matter what it would spawn the death match weapon spawns (much easier than co-op spawns) and you could not carry weapons over from level to level.

Anyone know if co-op works properly? How do you specify you want to host a co-op game in the batch file?

[Trojax2010]

Doomsday is pretty cool too. Ive used Vavoom for Strife as well but I think it supports Heretic too. Lots of great efforts to improve our favorite classics.

Vavoom : http://vavoom-engine.com/
Doomsday : http://dengine.net/

[the_focus89]

i think its better ZDoom and Gzdoom. they are very stable for Heretic / HeXen Coop. Strife only DM sadly

for the people that dont want to use Bat file to run a server you also can use ZDL (Zdoom Launcher) its like the doom95 launcher just this for ZDoom / Gzdoom or Any sourceport (i guess this only works with ZDL 3.1)

only configure ZDL and its ready to play you can download it here.
http://biohazard.drdteam.org/data/file/zdl-30.zip

[killerkrieg]

How do you play Heretic and TNT evilution on Zdoom?

[XenoSpyro]

This is info obvious to the standard user. The one ran through DOSBox is for the classic play method.

[WO Saotome A.]

Originally Posted by spinning

www.zdoom.org

You have my thanks mate, I've played all of ID games probably thousands of times in their respective eras, but ever since I've bought the ID pack in may last year I have been procrastinating to play the old titles because I have been grown accustomed to mouse aim and such, and with this I can see myself playing at least the doom engine titles again.

A thousand imaginary reps to ya.

[Excuritas]

My question is now, how to say steam that it should open gzdoom instead of dosbox ? pls help

[Verwandlung]

Just delete the Dosbox.exe and rename Zdoom.exe to Dosbox.exe.

Have fun

[Excuritas]

Tryed that, dont helped ;/