Dermuda's Mac Wolfenstein 3D Archive!

[Dermuda]

Hello all!

I’ve noticed there there are occasional posts on here about Mac Wolfenstein 3D. For instance, I’ve seen a few posts asking about old scenarios for that engine. There’s also the excellent thread about high-resolution Wolf 3D sprites, which is what brought me here. That thread includes a fair amount of material from Mac Wolf, both from the main game, but also from some talented Mac Wolf graphics designers – not least from my friend Clubey.

So I thought some people on here might be interested in a recent project of mine.

At the end of last year, I released Dermuda’s Wolfenstein 3D Archive. This is a huge, comprehensive collection of fan-material created for Wolfenstein 3D for the Mac. It is the result of many years worth of careful collecting, starting from my initial searches for new material in the late-1990s, and continuing right through to the present day. Containing over 500MB of scenarios and utilities, and over 1000 scenarios in total, it’s by far the largest collection of Mac Wolf 3D material ever released publicly. Much of the material it contains is now unique to this collection. Some of it hasn’t been publicly available for over 20 years (including, for instance, the full version of WolfAddict’s very first scenario!). And some of it has never seen a public release before now.

The material in this Archive has been assembled from a wide variety of sources. I carefully searched through online software collections, CD collections from various Mac magazines, websites of Wolfenstein fans, forums and BBSs, and so on. The Internet Archive was used when necessary. I also collected a large number of scenarios through my website: 'Dermuda's Rare Scenarios Page'. This was online in the early 2000s, and accepted submissions of material both new and old, with a particular emphasis on finding material that was no longer online.

In addition, I contacted as many designers as I could, starting from my initial enquiries in the late 1990s, and continuing to 2021. To date, I have contacted the vast majority of the major Mac Wolfenstein designers, including most of the members of WolfAddict, and the big names people on here will probably be familiar with. I have received many valuable contributions from many people. I would like to give particular thanks to Clubey, Laz Rojas, Cyber1999 of AOL, JMC of the Macintosh Garden, and serpens of the MacenWolf project.

I have done my best to credit every scenario contained in this Archive. While I haven’t been able to list every single scenario designer, I have done so in the majority of cases.

You can read more about the Archive, and download it, at the link below. There’s a version available in a disk image specially formatted for Classic Mac OS, along with a .sit file that can be used on more modern operating systems:

https://macintoshgarden.org/games/dermu ... 3d-archive

For people interested in graphics, the scenarios in this Archive contain a lot of graphical material. This includes works by the big names: Laz Rojas, Clubey, and Jon Wigand (whose work, sadly, tends to get misattributed to Laz these days). But there’s a lot of material by less well-known designers that’s really worth a look too. For instance, to give just two examples from many, there’s ‘It’s only a dream’ by Pier Luigi Andreoni, and ‘Mechstein Demo Blue’ by Geoff Chant. All in all, there are over 150 scenarios in this Archive with new graphics, and many of those graphics are quite decent. They're worth seeing!

All scenarios with new graphics are flagged in the Contents databases, which can also be downloaded separately at the same link. Scenarios listed as ‘PC’ (Partial Conversion) modify some of the graphics, while those listed as ‘TC’ (Total Conversion) modify most of the engine's graphics.

People on here might also be interested in DOOMenstein, WolfAddict’s big project to port over DOOM II to the Mac Wolfenstein engine. This Archive contains what I think is the first widely-available release of the shareware episode of DOOMenstein as it was originally intended: in a standalone, modified application. Many thanks to Jesse Dowdle, without whom the application side of this release might have been lost forever! Also included is ‘DOOMenstein Edit’, an editing application specifically designed to create DOOMenstein scenarios. Do take a look at these releases – they’re quite interesting!

If you look through my Archive or my databases and come across anything I’m missing, do by all means let me know – either on here, or at the address included in the Archive’s docs. This includes any credits I might be missing! This Archive is still a work in progress, and I’m always looking for material to add to it.

Also, if you know of any communities that might find this Archive interesting, please do consider letting them know about it. Or let me know, so I can tell them myself! The more word spreads about this Archive, the more likely it is that it will come to the attention of old Mac Wolf players, designers or collectors – and that might just lead to more material coming to light!

Anyway, sorry for making a non-DOOM post. But I hope it’s of interest to some people on here!

(Here’s a quick note for the forums moderators. My Archive contains Mac material that was, at one time, released for a shareware fee. I just wanted to be clear that I have obtained permission to freely distribute this material. Much of this permission dates back to some smaller packages I put together in the early-2000s. I suspect that some of the material in the high-resolution Wolf graphics thread was based on some material in those old packages of mine!)

[Kinsie]

A stunning archival effort. I poked at this the other day. Not a lot of this stuff is fun to play, per-se, but damned if they typically don't look like a million bucks, and there's a lot of interesting ideas for modders here to mine and get inspiration from!

[Dermuda]

Thanks for the kind words!

As much as I’d like to argue about the gameplay aspects, I’m not sure I can do so on here, haha. Mac Wolf is a much simpler engine than something like DOOM, and has far more constraints. I’d like to think that the community has done – and still does! – some really creative things within these constraints. (For instance, I’m still impressed by Clubey’s invention of the looping puzzle level in his scenario 'The Spear of Longinus', which almost came out of nowhere!) And I still have fun with the engine, as do some of the community members who are still around! But it’s difficult to make a direct comparison with a more complex later engine like DOOM.

That being said, graphics were a highlight of Mac Wolf, and the community did some really great graphical work. If some of these graphics, or the even just the ideas in some of these scenarios, give some modern modders some inspiration for future work, then that will be a really nice bonus! We do have a variety of interesting settings to choose from, after all. How about a World War II Japanese setting, for instance, as in Clubey’s ‘In the Wolves Lair’ (aka 'Nipponstein')? Do take a look. It’s really nicely done!

That reminds me of something. When I was searching for material for this Archive, I came across a whole slew of material for the other big Mac shooter games: Marathon, Quake, Hexen, and so on. What might interest people on here is that I found many, *many* WADs for Mac DOOM. There were easily several hundred of them. The WADs seem to be mainly for DOOM II, although I did come across at least one WAD for Ultimate DOOM.

At some point, I’ll have a look around and see how many of these WADs are still available online. If a good chunk of them aren’t, I might put together a Mac DOOM WADs package and upload it to the Macintosh Garden. I’m thinking of doing something like that for Marathon, so it would make sense to do so with DOOM as well. A DOOM package wouldn't be anything like as comprehensive as my Mac Wolf package, I’m afraid, since I’m much less familiar with the engine and the community. But I do still think it’s worth preserving this material for future players even so!

[Kinsie]

As much as I’d like to argue about the gameplay aspects, I’m not sure I can do so on here, haha. Mac Wolf is a much simpler engine than something like DOOM, and has far more constraints. I’d like to think that the community has done – and still does! – some really creative things within these constraints. (For instance, I’m still impressed by Clubey’s invention of the looping puzzle level in his scenario 'The Spear of Longinus', which almost came out of nowhere!) And I still have fun with the engine, as do some of the community members who are still around! But it’s difficult to make a direct comparison with a more complex later engine like DOOM.

That being said, graphics were a highlight of Mac Wolf, and the community did some really great graphical work. If some of these graphics, or the even just the ideas in some of these scenarios, give some modern modders some inspiration for future work, then that will be a really nice bonus! We do have a variety of interesting settings to choose from, after all. How about a World War II Japanese setting, for instance, as in Clubey’s ‘In the Wolves Lair’ (aka 'Nipponstein')? Do take a look. It’s really nicely done!

Oh for sure, they also don't seem to have had the proclivity for source code editing that the DOS Wolf community had so there's another set of restrictions for them to deal with. Despite that, yeah, a whole lot more interesting theme-wise than the DOS community was seemingly willing to stretch for a long time.

That reminds me of something. When I was searching for material for this Archive, I came across a whole slew of material for the other big Mac shooter games: Marathon, Quake, Hexen, and so on. What might interest people on here is that I found many, *many* WADs for Mac DOOM. There were easily several hundred of them. The WADs seem to be mainly for DOOM II, although I did come across at least one WAD for Ultimate DOOM.

At some point, I’ll have a look around and see how many of these WADs are still available online. If a good chunk of them aren’t, I might put together a Mac DOOM WADs package and upload it to the Macintosh Garden. I’m thinking of doing something like that for Marathon, so it would make sense to do so with DOOM as well. A DOOM package wouldn't be anything like as comprehensive as my Mac Wolf package, I’m afraid, since I’m much less familiar with the engine and the community. But I do still think it’s worth preserving this material for future players even so!

If you do find any Mac-centric WAD collections that aren't on idgames, do be sure to share! There are other similar archival efforts, like the work to put old shovelware CDs with potentially-lost WADs onto The Internet Archive, so any such projects will be right at home.

[OceanMadman]

I would like to export sprites from some of the mods there. Is there any way to do it in a windows computer? thanks.

[Dermuda]

I would like to export sprites from some of the mods there. Is there any way to do it in a windows computer?

I’m afraid extracting graphical material from these scenarios onto modern systems is not entirely straightforward. I’m going to suggest a few different approaches you could use. Feel free to give them a try, and see which one works for you! I'll start with something complicated, but there are easier choices below!

1. One method would be to use the tools Mac designers themselves use. To do this, you’d need to emulate Classic Mac OS. There are several good emulators that work really very well these days, including SheepShaver:

https://sheepshaver.cebix.net/

and Basilisk II:

https://basilisk.cebix.net/

I believe both these emulators work on Windows machines. You’d need to set these emulators up to run a Classic OS. Any system from Mac OS System 7 to System 9 should work; System 7.5.3 seems to be quite popular these days.

Once you’ve set up the emulator, download the .dmg version of my Archive at the link above, and mount it as an external disk on your emulator. When you run the emulator, you’ll see a disk named ‘Dermuda’s Wolf3D Archive’. Navigate to the ‘Utilities’ folder, and look for the ‘WolfEdit Full 2.0.4’ folder. Open the application in this folder. Then use the application to open the scenario you want to extract the sprites from.

You can look at all the art in the scenario from the various listings in the ‘Art/Music’ menu. If you select a piece of art, and ‘Copy’ it, it will be placed in the emulator’s memory. If you then go back to Windows, and open a graphics editor, you should hopefully be able to paste the art straight into that editor. This is how things work when emulating on a Mac, so I’m guessing this will also work on Windows.

If that doesn’t work, however, you’d need to paste the image into a graphics editor inside the emulator (try ClarisWorks), export it to a .bmp or .pict, and then manually move the file from the emulator into your Windows system. You can do this through the disk called ‘Unix’, which will attempt to read your Windows file system.

Either way, you can use this approach to move the art out of the scenario onto a modern Windows graphics editor.

2. The above approach is rather complicated. It’s also a little slow, as you need to deal with each sprite frame one at a time. Thankfully, if you don’t want to do this, someone else has already done the hard part for you!

The MacenWolf project is effectively a modern port of Mac Wolfenstein 3D to modern Windows systems (and to other systems, too, since it runs on WINE). It was released a few years ago. They’re also working to port over the entire catalogue of Mac scenarios. They’ve already made some pretty good headway on this. And because they’re porting the scenarios to Windows machines, they’re porting the *graphics* to native Windows formats, too.

Take a look at the MacenWolf ModDB page, and see if they’ve ported the scenario you’re interested in:

https://www.moddb.com/mods/macenwolf/downloads

If they have, download the MacenWolf version of the scenario. Inside its folder, you’ll see a file named VSWAP.WL6. This contains the graphics. You can look at them using a Windows Wolf editor, and use those editors to extract the graphics. From what I’ve heard from the Windows side, you could use WDC:

https://wl6.fandom.com/wiki/WDC

or ChaosEdit:

https://wl6.fandom.com/wiki/ChaosEdit

Alternatively, I hear that Wolf3D SpriteRecolor can export all the graphics at once, so you might want to try that:

https://www.cemetech.net/downloads/files/707/x707

3. If the scenario you’re looking for hasn’t been ported yet, MacenWolf might still be able to help you. They have a tool for porting over Mac graphics into a Windows format. If you ask them nicely, there’s a chance they might give you that tool so you can use it yourself. They’ve been pretty good at releasing other aspects of their code, after all!

To ask them, make an account on ModDB if you don’t have one already, and send a private message to the person listed as the project Creator: OKducky. A link to their profile is under the MacenWolf ‘Profile’, on the righthand side of the ModDB page.

4. If you only wanted a small selection of graphics, some Mac designers have made it quite easy by exporting their graphics for you. You may be able to get at them without an emulator! Download the .sit version of my Archive, and extract it. Navigate to the Utilities folder. There are several graphics packs in there, and most of the graphics are in formats that Windows should hopefully understand. Take a look in these folders:

Custom Graphics Pak Release 1
objects
objects2
walls
walls [Different]
Wolf3D Enemies
WolfWalls

5. If there’s something very, very specific you want, I might be able to get it for you myself. But I could only really commit to that if it was a couple of graphics, and you knew exactly what you wanted!

Oh for sure, they also don't seem to have had the proclivity for source code editing that the DOS Wolf community had so there's another set of restrictions for them to deal with.

Here’s just a quick comment on this. There’s a good reason why there’s no code-modifying in Mac Wolf. The source code was released much, much later than on the PC. It was only released in the year 2000, 6 years after the original Mac release. By that time, most designers had already gotten used to the limitations, or had moved on to more powerful engines. In my experience, the designers who were still around didn’t have much interest in working with the source. The only person I’m aware of was Greg Ewing, who started work on a version of Mac Wolf which was a little more modding-friendly: the 4th Encounter. But this didn’t progress much beyond a simple demonstration version, albeit it a nice one, I suspect mainly due to lack of interest from the community!

So, even though it might sound strange, to my knowledge no Mac designers have ever done any custom coding for their scenarios.

Since this thread’s mentioned Mac graphics several times, here are a couple of demonstration shots! This is from WolfAddict’s ‘Amnesia’:

https://i.imgur.com/HwVWuXf.png

This is from Geoff Chant’s ‘Mechstein Demo Blue’:

https://i.imgur.com/T1lTBkP.png

[Blzut3]

If you can be bothered, another download option of a zip full of the scenarios in macbin format would actually be quite helpful. The development version of ECWolf can read Mac scenarios, but they need to be in macbin format. Something that's easy to accomplish if you have a Mac, kind of a pain if you don't.