Chocolate Hexen installation

These are instructions for how to install and set up Chocolate Hexen 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
hexen.wad Hexen

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.

Hexen and its expansion pack are available to purchase for download on Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/). Chocolate Hexen will autodetect IWADs installed by Steam and you do not need to do anything.

Running the game

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

Installing upgrades

Chocolate Hexen requires a version 1.1 IWAD file. Generally, if you install a recent version of Hexen you should have a version 1.1 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The most obvious symptom of an out of date IWAD file is that the game will exit at the title screen before the demo starts, with the message “Demo is from a different game version!”. If this happens, your IWAD file is out of date and you need to upgrade.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:

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 Hexen 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 Hexen 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.