Wolfenstein 3D for DOS/4GW!

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After reading about the Blake Stone compile fixes, as it was a Wolf3d port, I came across a post on the forum Wolf3d Haven about trying to find the source code to something called wolf4gw.  Now wolf4gw is a port of the Borland C source of Wolfenstein 3d to Open Watcom C++‘s 32bit MS-DOS extender DOS/4GW, done by ‘ripper’.

The project eventually gave way to wolf4sdl, and as they say the rest is history.

Sadly it seems that just about all the source copies of wolf4gw were lost, except I did manage to find an ‘improved’ version simply refered to as wolf3dx.  From the blurb:

Tricob has released the Wolf4GW-based source code of WolfDX. Included is a text file called (Tricob).TXT.

So I have been using Watcom 10.0 for Duke Nukem 3d, however, this version relies on the _asm inline assembler which was introduced in Watcom 11.  However Watcom 11c had issues with some of the assembly forcing me to go even further to OpenWatcom 1.3.  For me the install was easy, I used CrossOver to install OpenWatcom for DOS-DOS32bit only, copied the compiler into DOSBox, and played mostly with the makefiles, and finally got a working exe!

Screen Shot 2013-07-12 at 11.57.24 AM Screen Shot 2013-07-12 at 11.58.00 AM

I know it may not look like much, but really it is running in 32bit protected mode!

Since all of this is open/freeware/shareware I can redistribute OpenWatcom, the source to wolf3dx, and the shareware levels of Wolfenstein.  Naturally I’m using DOSBox to compile and test, but you can use anything that can run MS-DOS 32bit stuff.

Download my archive here.

22 thoughts on “Wolfenstein 3D for DOS/4GW!”

  1. Very cool! Unless the build process is really strange, it should be possible to build the binary on Windows or possibly even Linux natively.

    And a nit-pick… it’s spelled “DOS/4GW”, not “DOS4G/W”. The full product was called DOS/4G, it’s predecessor was DOS/16M (of Lotus 1-2-3 R3.0 fame).

    • I’m sure it can even cross build from OS/2.. Watcom was pretty cool with things like that.

      It is interesting to me that not only is Tenberry still in existence, but they still sell DOS extenders. I guess someone must still buy them? Although Phar Lap seems to have been absorbed and phased out.

      • I believe Tenberry has some aerospace industry customers… there it’s all about certified tools and being a known quantity. New/shiny/cool doesn’t count.

        There is also probably enough need for embedded systems which need very little from an OS and are 99% custom development. For those, using Linux or Embedded XP instead of DOS isn’t a win.

        And yes, in general if you can build something with (Open) Watcom on one host platform, you can build it on the others, too.

        • DPMI into the stratosphere & beyond… now that is. … scary. and sad, it should have been OS/2’s domain.

          But there is a lot to be said for magical ‘IJW’ when it comes to old/existing systems.

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