winquake refuses to launch.

[Anna]

so i launch winquake.exe, the usual small 'starting quake' window appears, then for a moment the screen goes black, then the game closes itself. whats causing this? im confused

[Seamus]

Open the quake folder, make a shortcut to winquake.exe, right click on the shortcut, go to properties and add this after winquake.exe on the target line:

 -width 800 -height 600 -bbp 32

[Anna]

didnt work. i think theres something wrong with my system, today couldnt even initiate some source ports like mark v

[Seamus]

Odd. Winquake uses a software renderer the same as dos quake so it should more or less always work on windows. I checked before posting and it works fine on my new win 11 system.

You may have some stuff to diagnose, yeah.

[Anna]

maybe i messed up something after tweaking settings in services tab

[Anna]

i dont think thats it. gosh what happened?

[Seamus]

Not sure. I don't believe winquake generates any error logs or anything so I'm not sure where you'd even start looking.

[Anna]

I give up for today. I'll try sorting it out tomorrow, i just wanted to go to winquake instead of glquake for the 'original' versions for the most vanilla feel.

[Seamus]

Winquake is a good option for that, yeah. glquake kills the visuals with how badly implemented the opengl renderer is.

Personally, I'd go with vkquake. If you go into the graphics options there's an 8bit color option and you can set the render resolution to 1/4 of your screen resolution to make it a bit chunky. Or 1/8 if you want more chunky. Just, turn off texture filtering while you're at it.

Upside: vkquake actually preserves things like fullbright unlike glquake.

[Seamus]

https://i.imgur.com/c727Pna.png

Don't mind the big framerate spikes. It's from me alt tabbing to get printscreen to grab something vaguely useful. Vulkan is weird about printscreen.

[Anna]

huh thats weird, vkquake keeps yelling me gl_texturemode is an unknown command

[Anna]

its like winquake and any source port that uses the software renderer refuses to launch

[Seamus]

Vkquake isn't software rendered.

Where did you install it?

[Anna]

github page

[Seamus]

No, I mean where on your pc did you put it. Because it sounds like there's an autoexec.cfg messing with startup

[Anna]

oh. i just put it into my quake directory and i have no autoexecs in my id1 or other folders