# Chocolate Doom installation

These are instructions for how to install and set up Chocolate Doom for play.

# Obtaining an IWAD file

To play, you need an IWAD file. This file contains the game data (graphics, sounds, etc). The full versions of the games are proprietary and need to be bought. The IWAD file has one of the following names:

IWAD | Game
--- | ---
doom1.wad | Shareware Doom
doom.wad | Registered / Ultimate Doom
doom2.wad | Doom 2
tnt.wad | Final Doom: TNT: Evilution
plutonia.wad | Final Doom: Plutonia Experiment
chex.wad | Chex Quest
freedoom1.wad | Freedoom: Phase 1
freedoom2.wad | Freedoom: Phase 2
freedm.wad | FreeDM

If you don’t have a copy of a commercial version, you can download the shareware version of Doom (extract the file named doom1.wad):

- https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/idstuff/doom/win95/doom95 (idstuff/doom/win95/doom95.zip in your nearest /idgames mirror)

If you have a commercial version on a CD-ROM, obtaining the IWAD file is usually straightforward. Simply locate the IWAD file on the disc and copy it off.

The Doom games are available to purchase for download on Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/), all releases containing the classic games including Doom 3: BFG Edition are supported. Chocolate Doom will autodetect IWADs installed by Steam and you do not need to do anything.

The Doom and Strife: Veteran Edition games are available for purchase on GOG.com (https://www.gog.com/). Chocolate Doom will autodetect IWADs from the standalone or GOG Galaxy installers and you do not need to do anything.

Older floppy disk versions are harder to deal with. The easiest way to install from floppies is to run the original installer program inside an emulator such as DOSbox (https://www.dosbox.com/). As an alternative to using an emulator, it is possible to extract the files manually. On the install disk(s), you will find several files with numbered extensions (eg. “doom_se.1”).

From the command line it is possible to combine these files into a single large file, using a command similar to the following:

copy doom_se.1+doom_se.2+doom_se.3+doom_se.4+doom_se.5 doom_se.lzh

The resulting file is an LHA archive file, and it can be extracted using an LHA archive tool (there is one available for almost every operating system).

# Running the game

Chocolate Doom needs to know where to find your IWAD file. To do this, do one of the following:

- Within Explorer, simply place the IWAD file in the same folder as the Chocolate Doom files, and double-click `chocolate-doom.exe`.

- Run Chocolate Doom from the command prompt with the `-iwad` command line parameter to specify the IWAD file to use, eg.

      chocolate-doom -iwad c:\games\doom2.wad

- Set the environment variable DOOMWADDIR to the location of a directory containing your IWAD files.

- If you have multiple IWADs in different directories, set the environment variable DOOMWADPATH to be a semicolon-separated list of directories to search (similar to the PATH environment variable).

# Playing with Freedoom

Freedoom is an open content project to create a Doom engine-based game that is entirely free software. The website can be found here:

https://freedoom.github.io/

Check out the Chocolate Doom wiki’s page on Freedoom for more information.

# Playing with Chex Quest

Chex Quest is a game based on Doom with some minor modifications that was distributed with boxes of Chex cereal in 1997. It is possible to play Chex Quest using Chocolate Doom. To do this, the following files are needed:

- The IWAD file “chex.wad”, from the Chex Quest CD.

- The dehacked patch “chex.deh”, which can be found here: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/themes/chex/chexdeh (themes/chex/chexdeh.zip in your nearest /idgames mirror)

Copy these files into a directory together and use the `-iwad` command line parameter to specify the Chex Quest IWAD file:

chocolate-doom -iwad chex.wad

# Installing upgrades

Chocolate Doom requires a version 1.9 IWAD file. Generally, if you install a recent version of Doom you should have a version 1.9 IWAD. However, if you are installing from a very old CD version or from floppy disks, you might find you have an older version.

The most obvious symptom of an out of date IWAD file is that the game will exit at the title screen before the demo starts, with the message “Demo is from a different game version!”. If this happens, your IWAD file is out of date and you need to upgrade.

Upgrade patches are available that will update your game to the latest version, the following sites have the patches:

- http://www.doom2.net/doom2/utils.html
- http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames/idstuff/doom
- http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames/idstuff/doom2

Please see the Doom Wiki’s page on game patches for more information.

As the patches are binary patches that run as DOS executables, on recent 64-bit versions of Windows you will need to use a DOS emulator (such as DOSBox) to run them.

# Music support

Chocolate Doom includes OPL emulation code that accurately reproduces the way that the in-game music sounded under DOS when using an Adlib/Soundblaster card. This is, however, not to everyone’s taste.

Chocolate Doom includes a number of different options for better quality MIDI playback; see the file README.Music for more details of how to set these up.