Duke4.net Forums: NWINTER DOS installer and Plutonium Pak - Duke4.net Forums

I'm not sure if this belongs in the Addon Installation Guide thread, since that seems to be for installing for use with EDuke32, Vaca+ and things like that, whereas this is an Old Skool DOS question.

Having finally acquired a copy of the PP so I can generate Duke3D V1.4, I am having trouble with the DOS installer of Nuclear Winter. This is for part of a game launcher andI want to be able to support hardcore traditionalists using DOSBox, as well as people using EDuke32 or Duke3DW.

When the NWinter installer scans the DOSBox C "drive", it bombs out saying that it can't find the game. This is a freshly patched V1.3, upgraded to V1.4. Yet if I run the windows setup program for NWinter, that doesn't complain if I point it at a V1.4 installation of DUKE3D.

I'm not sure if this is a DOSBox problem, so has anybody ever encountered this?

Also, as far as I know, the DOS installer of NWinter merely copies the GAMEDATA directory contents into the DUKE3D directory and does nothing else. If this is true for V1.4 as well as V1.5 of DUKE3D, then I can work around the problem; does anybody here know about what these installers do?

Puzzled I am :?

Martin Howe, on 19 January 2013 - 11:26 AM, said:

Martin Howe, on 19 January 2013 - 11:26 AM, said:

I think you answered your own question. The DOS installer is scanning your hard drive--that is, probably checking for files named DUKE3D.EXE, DUKE3D.GRP, etc., then either checksumming them or checking their timestamp. Since the Win32 installer lets you specify a folder, it will happily go along with what you tell it.

Hendricks266, on 19 January 2013 - 11:33 AM, said:

Thanks H266. I had guessed that much, since it seems logical, though I don't know why it also doesn't check things for valididy of what you point it to. However I am still confused by the DOS installer.

You may have noticed on the other thread that the Plutonium patcher needs a -nochecktimezone flag in the command line; maybe it is another timestamp situation indeed; wish they'd stuck to using CRC or MD5 and left it at that.

I was kinda hoping somebody here knew for sure what it did, but I agree these are the best guesses.

Short of disassembling the installer or spending lots of time on trial and error to see what passes and what fails, no one will know exactly what the installer does.

Hendricks266, on 19 January 2013 - 12:06 PM, said:

LOL, the reason I said it is because in the gaming communities it sometimes happens that people do do that sort of thing. Look at DeHackEd or Strife support in ZDoom, for example. No wonder the general public think we are all nerds and geeks