SOURCE PORTS,
IWADS, AND PWADS
This article was written under the assumption that the reader is entering the classic Doom community with little or no knowledge of its associated software.
The 1993 release of Doom was run through an executable program / application (.EXE). When you start it up, it looks for and then loads its associated .WAD file. WAD is an acronym - "Where's All the Data?" - and it contains all of the game's resources from music files to sound clips, sprites, textures, and the maps themselves. The longevity of the community stems from the ability of its members to:
- create their own WAD files
- make and edit new maps
- share these WADs, especially over the internet
- load it in the .EXE alongside the WAD that came with the game
The last operation patches the original's data as it is loaded, replacing and adding resources without having to permanently alter anything. For this reason, user-created WADs are typically referred to as PWADs (P = Patch) and the commercial files are called IWADs (I = Internal / Initial).
