Every time I come across one of these AAA+ doom maps, I kinda blanch at the setup involved in running these with no background knowledge.
You need an old Doom2.wad, to download an appropriate sourceport from Sourceforge, probably without an installer, maybe some looking up commandline options to run the game with a pwad if it's not immediately apparent.
Sure, none of this is a problem for the HN crowd, but what I'd like is a "Click to run this wad" button on a WAD gallery page that would download and run the WAD either via NaCl or even just javascript, making the experience of playing these fan created levels seamless and opening it to a much wider audience.
edit: yes I realize the IWADs are not freely distributable even though the engine is OSS
> "Click to run this wad" button on a WAD gallery page that would download and run the WAD either via NaCl or even just javascript
The Internet Archive's "Internet Arcade" project (https://archive.org/details/internetarcade) is the perfect place to preserve and display these, just as much as it is for old arcade cabinets.
What that implies, though, is that MAME/MESS would need to get over their singular goal of emulating real hardware, and build in support for "abstract" platform-neutral virtual machines that games have been built on: say, ScummVM, or the Z-Machine, or even Shockwave Flash(!).
If they started down that path, they could maybe go further, and also support the execution of low-level game engine "runtimes" like Löve2D.
But go any further than that, and I'd question whether we're really doing "emulation" of a game using an interpreter, rather than shipping a game engine and loading levels in it. With things like the Doom engine—or, say, the RPG Maker 2000 runtime—you get to a the point where, to faithfully run a "game" made with these things, your emulator would have to include the original asset bundle that came with the reference engine. That's not quite an emulator any more.
Maybe what we really need is a Docker-like abstraction for MAME: the ability to have "base images" for game engines, and then "derivative images" that represent projects loaded into those engines—where you only have to load a new "game engine" layer into the emulator when the game you're playing references a version you don't have cached yet.
You could even split things into three layers: a layer for the OS (Windows 95, say); a layer for the game engine; and then a layer for the game project. And the whole thing gets "pulled", revived into a merged container, and then loaded into DOSBox.
> You could even split things into three layers: a layer for the OS (Windows 95, say); a layer for the game engine; and then a layer for the game project. And the whole thing gets "pulled", revived into a merged container, and then loaded into DOSBox.
You can do this today with dosbox on archive.org. Here's how:
Upload the game engine (Doom, to keep with the current theme) as an IA item; this may or may not have already been done (I happen to know that Doom is hidden because you can buy it on Steam, but I'm pretty sure the shareware version is there somewhere). For the sake of this example, assume that your item has "foo" as its identifier, and the game is in "foo.zip".
Then upload your game or level (WAD, in this case) as another item. Assume that this one is called "bar", and has a "bar.zip" containing the level and a batch file that I'll describe.
Edit the metadata for your item named "bar" so that it includes this information:
The batch file "bar.bat" is responsible for starting the game, which might include copying files, changing config files, specifying command-line arguments, etc.
If you want to use windows you can use the same system to load it as well. Of course this really only works with the earlier versions of windows which ran in dos, and thus can run in dosbox. Check out https://archive.org/details/win3_SKIFREE for an example.
You can also host everything on your own webpage; I recommend my own project, the Emularity, which simplifies a lot of it (http://emularity.com/).
Sounds like you want something along the lines of libretro. It's an API and reference implementation (Retroarch) for emulator "cores" to interface with a standard front end which handles inputs, UI, and other things. MAME/MESS and many other popular emulators have been ported to libretro, as has Doom via prboom
I don't see why this needs to be in MAME. The Internet Archive already hosts games for platforms not covered by MAME. For instance, DOS titles are served using EM-DOSBOX.
If you download zdoom you just unzip, run an executable (no install required) and it will find the required files from steam. Zdoom has lots of niceties like the ability to aim up and down with the mouse and support for modern hardware.
I think at one point in time, the Freedoom project was moving in the direction of cloning the Doom assets closely enough that it'd suffice as a replacement for the original iwads, and as such would've made a setup like you described possible (without committing copyright infringement). People argued that the iwads are easy enough to get now, and somewhat recently, the freedoom project seemed to take on a new direction, which is less about making close clones of the original assets and more about being a game on its own right with its own theme and roster of enemies and all that. It's a bit weird, especially considering that they're still maintaining the vanilla gameplay elements unchanged, as if it were still built for the original purpose, yet the assets won't look good with pwads. Needless to say, I'm not super happy about this new direction.
There are launchers that supposedly make it easier to run pwads though. I don't have the background knowledge to recommend one though; source ports are available to me through my package manager.
You can install gzdoom and freedoom off the AUR and run several mods and third party wads with it (most aren't compatible with freedoom, but some are), in like three commands, and it adds the file association for wads to gzdoom so if you open any wad in a file manager it runs in gzdoom.
That setup works out of the box without any copy / paste of files anywhere.
Yes, it is a PITA the first time around. But if you love these games then its worth banging your head on the keyboard for about an hour until you have the setup to play.
It is totally worth it to play and experience a masterpiece like Doom 2.
Sure, none of this is a problem for the HN crowd, but what I'd like is a "Click to run this wad" button on a WAD gallery page that would download and run the WAD either via NaCl or even just javascript, making the experience of playing these fan created levels seamless and opening it to a much wider audience.
edit: yes I realize the IWADs are not freely distributable even though the engine is OSS