Frankly, there aren't a whole lot of reasons to choose this port over the original. The game crashes when you lose your first life. The reverb is permanently stuck in the "on" position (using the NOECHO parameter doesn't help). The only thing it's got going for it is its frontend, which simplifies some of the more (slightly) complicated actions like choosing an alternate RTL file, and even that is easily done with a shortcut to ROTTs SETUP.EXE set with a DOSBox frontend liks D-Fend or whatever.

I suppose if ROTT hadn't been built with a heavily modded Wolf3D engine, or if it had been built with the Build Engine (and more than only a couple of said Build Engine games were popular), then there would be more opportunities for source development on it. That said, is there anything better than WinROTT available?

Crashes when you first die? Can't say I've experienced that. The only crashing I was getting was due to the added wind effect that WinROTT added (it would crash when I entered an area making use of it), but with it turned off it's been fine.

I think it's actually just WinROTTGL that does it. When I die, the screen fades to black as if to load my last checkpoint (or the beginning of the level, since ROTT doesn't have checkpoints), and it stays black for five seconds or so, and then the program just exits.

The .dbg file, which I assume is the "Debug" text (I opened it with Notepad), didn't contain any crash info. It just had the OS and file detection info that it displays when you run the frontend.

Well, I've used both WinRoTT and WinRoTTGL (GLRott) and haven't had this happen. My actual current installed version is WinRoTTGL 1.58. As I said before, the only crash I've had is when using the wind effect but that might be because I have onboard sound and not a dedicated soundcard.

Have you just tried reloading your latest save manually just after you die? If anything it might just prevent it crashing and so let you keep playing.

While I can't say if there is anything better than WinROTT out there (as I think DOSROTT is the best way to play it), I can show you a list showing just about every ROTT port out there and let you try out the others.

Over at the ROTT HQ i've created a list of all the source ports I could fine for Rise of the Triad and the general page can be found here.

May or may not help, but at least you'll get an idea of whats out there.

That link is a 404.

Well, there's this:

http://rotthq.com/rottpository/source-ports/

Also, rather amusingly, your Rep at the time of me posting this is 404. :P