Hexen II Demo (Raven Software / Activision, 1997)

App hexen2_demo (candidate hexen-2-demo, localOnly), demo 1.11. Registered 75a71cc30. Quake-engine game: data in data1/pak0.pak and progs.dat.

The bundled sublicence forbids reverse engineering: debug it from traces and runtime behaviour only.

Source

• archive.org HexenII_1020 is mislabelled: its h2demo.zip is the Heroes of Might and Magic II demo (H2DEMOW.EXE). Not used.
• The real one is a member of win-98-games-e-j.-7z, served directly as .../Win98_Games-E-J.7z/Hexen2%20demo-SW-OpenGL.exe (15334912 bytes, SHA-1 dcb5ab7c…): a collector's WinZip SFX holding the InstallShield setup plus an already installed Install/Hexen2/ tree. The fetcher copies that tree to installed/.
• HEXEN II SUBLICENSE.doc: Activision, personal use of one copy, no copies, distribution or reverse engineering. Hence localOnly.

Two executables

• GLRoot/glh2.exe (OpenGL) is the registered route. It sits in GLRoot\ next to a bundled opengl32.dll that is a **3Dfx Voodoo MiniGL**. The fetcher copies glh2.exe beside data1\ without that DLL, so LoadLibrary("opengl32.dll") reaches our GL. (Like Heretic II and Kingpin, that load answers 0x00400000, the exe's own handle; harmless so far.) It opens with an informational OK box ("GLHexen is a special, accelerated version…").
• h2.exe (software) loads SciTech WinDirect / PM Pro (wdir32.dll, pmpro32.dll, with 16-bit partners wdir16.dll/pmpro16.dll); both stop with MessageBox "Unable to link to KERNEL32.DLL!", presumably the 16-bit thunk entry points. Not pursued.

Route (headless, --batch-size=50000, --headless-gl)

Enter at 50 dismisses the notice; the main menu is up by about b600. Enter at 900/1000/1100/1200/1300 goes Single Player → New Mission → class (Paladin) → difficulty. The first load then shows "Meshing models/…" until about b7500: GLQuake-style triangle-strip building for every model, very slow under emulation (its .ms2 cache would make later loads faster if it persisted). First person as the Paladin by b8000; Right turns, Up walks. Evidence: scratch/runs/20261011T0830Z-hexen2_demo-gameplay-claude1863.

Not looked at: the browser, combat, sound, the software build, why meshing is so slow (worth a profile; Kingpin's level load has the same shape).