slowest pc used for doom ?

Doom on the Commodore64, a 1.85mhz machine and 16 colors!

wow ... i thought my old windows 95, 300 mhz, 32 MB RAM, 4 GB HDD was bad ...

or even my snes ....

but the commodore!? 0_o

I just recently installed Doom 1.1 on a Escom Blackmate 386SXIII, running a a lightning 20mhz, loaded with unbelievable 10 megabytes of ram. The monochrome display of that notebook adds nice "smear" effects to the game, which looks very funny. And I can play the game in inverted grayscale :)

I should make pitures of that.

486DX4 100 MHz with 8 megs of RAM, a one meg video card and a 730 MB hard drive. It ran Doom SW smoothly but Descent 1 never hit 30 FPS.

Found this thread on a google search.

Ultimate Doom 1.9
Doom 2 v 1.666

486 dx2 66
8mb ram
2mb Video
1gb HD
Windows 95 (and yes it did have the maze screensaver)

Ran fairly smoothly 25-35fps, esp on low detail and ran well within windows amd when exiting windows and using DOS.

Quake and Duke Nukem 3D both worked with no problems but were a bit choppy. Maybe 10-20fps. Duke worked better.

Next PC was Pentium 200 with MMX, and there was hardly any slowdown.

A 12 year bump.

Is this a record?

inb4 thread locked

An Amiga 3000 (68030 CPU at 25MHz) with 8Meg of fast RAM but no graphics card, which meant playing in a fairly small window.

The first time I ever played Doom was on an Aptiva 386.

RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE

All these people saying they played on a 486 or a 386, and I'm sitting here never having played doom on anything short of 2.4Ghz Dual core and an integrated graphics setup. Did I miss the experience of the early days of doom? :(

EDIT: Oh wow that necropost.

archviled back into the land of a living, lol.

fortunately, had a 386 desktop at the time of dooms release my dad bought. his company IBM thinkpad laptop was a shiny new 486. was pretty much the two machines I'd play doom back and forth on. several months later he got us a newer 486dx2 66mhz desktop because he got tired of me using his company laptop all the time to get better performance lol.

Rayzik said:

All these people saying they played on a 486 or a 386, and I'm sitting here never having played doom on anything short of 2.4Ghz Dual core and an integrated graphics setup. Did I miss the experience of the early days of doom? :(

EDIT: Oh wow that necropost.

It may be worse for me, I was only a baby when they all enjoyed Doom with their old computers. So yes, I completely missed that experience.

I played it on my 486DX50 with 4MB RAM.
Doom 1 was fine with it. The early maps of Doom 2 were also playable, but it performed poorly with the more complex maps. I couldn't enjoy it before I upgraded that machine to 8 MB.
Some of the larger PWADs were very slow, which could be fixed by building a proper reject map in many cases. That by itself could take several hours on some maps, though.

Rayzik said:

Did I miss the experience of the early days of doom? :(

Use DOSBOX and limit CPU and RAM to find out. Make sure to apply the v1.1 downgrade as well. Or just load shareware Doom v1.0.
Also playing with PC speaker and no soundcard was a common experience, since there were no onboard sound chips.

What's amaster doing he-- oh.

LogicDeLuxe said:

Use DOSBOX and limit CPU and RAM to find out.

That can be tricky. Do you just guess the number of dosbox cycles? Does your front-end program (if you use one) provide handy setting for various classes of machines? (XT, AT, 286, 386, 486...)

The way I do it for really ancient hardware is to use an old DOS benchmark program: MIPS.COM v1.20, by Chips and Technologies (1986). It runs various tests and in the end outputs a "global performance" ratio for a few classes of machines:
4.7 MHz IBM PC
8 MHz IBM AT
COMPAQ 386 (no clockspeed given)
The idea is to adjust your dosbox cycles to get as close as possible to a "1.00" ratio for the machine you want to emulate. In my case, that ends up being around 300 cycles to approximate the slowest of those machines.

Well there's also MESS, if you can find the correct bios roms. Anyway, that all works fine for the really old IBM PC and clones. But I don't know if there's another benchmark program that can accurately represent something like my first DOS machine:

486DX/33
4 MB RAM
32-bit VESA Local Bus video (can't remember exact card...)
PAS-16 sound card
Gravis gamepad :-)

That thing ran Doom perfectly (I think it was Doom 1.2 originally), but chocked a bit on some of the bigger Doom II maps (MAP29 especially). Adding another 4 MB RAM fixed all that. It also ran Descent, Heretic, and Hexen really well. And of course: Tyrian, Raiden, Raptor, OMF: 2097, Blackthorne...

I'm surprised at how many people here claim to have had RAM amounts equal or well in excess of 8 MB back in Doom's heyday, especially on old 486s, which would mean 30-pin SIMMs. I recall that RAM was probably the most horribly overpriced commodity back then. Until 72-pin EDOs and the such appeared, I recall that a single MB of 30-pin RAM cost nearly the equivalent of $100 in Greece. 2 MB or 4 MB SIMMs were even more steep, and the 8 MB or 16 MB pieces were nearly legendary.

When 72-pin RAM hit the market, prices were slashed to a fourth, and that's when I finally upgraded from 4 to 8 MB.

Of course, with 4 MB, you couldn't play pretty much any 3D game of the time (including Descent or Duke 3D), at least not smoothly, as they would all trash the hard disk as they kept swapping stuff in and out. Assuming of course, they would run at all.

4 MB were really the minimum for Doom. Barely tolerable for Doom, but heavily showing their limitations in Doom II. I can't imagine how Plutonia or TNT would have played.

I wonder though...if somehow one could cobble together a weird setup with e.g. 3 MB or 3.5 MB (it would require a weird combination of memory modules), could Doom still -even if barely- run?

Well I can assure you that my 486 with only 4 MB RAM managed Doom (not Ultimate Doom, just the original game) perfectly, and also Heretic. I played the hell out of those two games. I didn't play as much Descent, but I don't remember any major problems. Doom II and Hexen did benefit from upgrading to 8 MB though, and I was even able to play megawads like Icarus and Memento Mori without trouble (even in co-op mode over 10base2 LAN). Duke3D didn't run well though, so I didn't get into that game back then.

RAM was really expensive, like you said. That's why I only had 4 MB to begin with in 1994, and it wasn't until two years later that I upgraded when I found 4 used 30 pin SIMMs for only $120 total. It was kind of a waste though, since I ended up selling that mobo that same year and upgrading to a p120 for Quake...

BTW, I bet having a fully 32-bit 486 machine (VESA Local Bus) made a huge difference. A lot of 486's had only ISA video...

I remember well that I paid DM 300 for 4 times 1 MB SIMMs. Yes, it was expensive.

Dark Forces was my first game which wouldn't run with only 4 MB. It refuses to start in plain DOS, but did start under Windows. I've tried that at a friend's computer, but it turned out to be pretty much unplayable. There were frequent loading delays, and when the screen finally updated, you realize, that you actually just died during the loading delay.

hex11 said:

Well I can assure you that my 486 with only 4 MB RAM managed Doom (not Ultimate Doom, just the original game) perfectly, and also Heretic.

For that matter I had finished Doom, Doom II and Ultimate Doom on 4 MB, but I couldn't help but notice the difference with 8 MB installed. It was there, period. Also, if we bring PWADs into play, especially large maps like Castle Of The Renegades 2 (COTR2) or TCs such as AlienDoom, the difference was really night and day.

hex11 said:

BTW, I bet having a fully 32-bit 486 machine (VESA Local Bus) made a huge difference. A lot of 486's had only ISA video...

I had VLB, and also tried setting up a "pure ISA" machine years later, with specs otherwise similar to my original 486 (DX/40 CPU, later overclocked to 50 MHz, full story here), and while having a slower video card surely didn't help, by far the greatest bottlebeck one could have was the disk trashing caused by lack of RAM. It's pointless having the fastest video card (or even having had 3D acceleration, somehow) if just moving the player forward or opening a door resulted in the hard disk being accessed.

LogicDeLuxe said:

Dark Forces was my first game which wouldn't run with only 4 MB.

What struck me as weird at the time, was that there were games which would run on 4 MB on my friend's 386 DX/40, but not on my 486. NASCAR racing (the very first one) was the offender. I mean, seriously, why?! Was there something dramatically different when running 386 and 486 code in fucking-protected-mode?! Was there even a difference?

Maybe you were running different version of Doom? After Doom 1.2 they started changing the engine in preparation for Doom II. It probably needed more resources to run then...

Also I never loaded any DOS drivers or whatever, not even mouse. I was keyboard only player those days, just like now. :-) So the entire machine's RAM was available for Doom.

As for swapping to disk, I'm sure I would have noticed it. I basically never saw the floppy icon in Doom (or Heretic), except when loading maps. It wasn't at all like playing Doom II with 4 MB RAM, when the floppy icon would frequently flicker on some maps and you could feel it getting sluggish.

^ I was referring to NASCAR racing, where I simply got a flat-out refusal to run on my 486, while my friend's underpowered 386 (which at the time had the same amount of RAM as my 486: 4 MB) did run it.

Being it a protected mode game (like anything made after 1994, presumably), the amount of DOS device drivers, as well as the free conventional memory one had would (should?) have been irrelevant. For that matter, my friend was able to run it straight off the CD (!) (it was a demo), which just bepuzzled me even more.

I first played Doom on a 486 DX, which was fine. However, years later, in high school, after my family had gotten a much faster computer, I picked up a 486 SX at a garage sale - it wasn't much, but I had a fascination with older computers, and with seven siblings, it was a computer that I could keep in my room and didn't have to share. That allowed me to play games, make Doom maps, and have time to play around with Qbasic (ah, I'm suddenly nostalgic for my Qbasic programming days). Anyway, point is, I thought being a 486, it'd be fine for Doom, but it quickly became apparent how much slower the 33 mhz SX was compared to the 66 mhz DX - I could still play Doom, but it had a much slower framerate and I had to use the "low detail" option. Nonetheless, I do miss that machine - heh, I even connected it to the Internet once, using a DOS-based web browser, which I didn't even know was a thing.

Derrick said:

Doom on the Commodore64, a 1.85mhz machine and 16 colors!

Jeez, and here I thought Doom running on the SNES stretched it to the limit. I'm surprised it managed to do floors and ceilings, although I'm guessing ID could have given the SNES version floors and ceilings too if they didn't mind having it chug like that. XD

Maes said:

Being it a protected mode game (like anything made after 1994, presumably), the amount of DOS device drivers, as well as the free conventional memory one had would (should?) have been irrelevant. For that matter, my friend was able to run it straight off the CD (!) (it was a demo), which just bepuzzled me even more.

Conventional memory as such is irrelevant in protected mode. It is still part of the total memory, which does matter, of course.

Could it be, that the 386 had some memory manager installed which uses a swap file for virtual memory? Windows 3.1 did this when running. That would indeed allow to start some games with less physical memory than they actually demand, but they would be pretty much unplayable that way, I guess.

Nope, just vanilla DOS, and the total memory was exactly 4 MB in both cases. Both of our machines had Windows 3.1 installed of course, but none of us ever dreamt of starting DOS games from within Windows -there would only be memory and CPU penalties and all sorts of runtime weirdness to run into.

Also, since somebody mentioned the C64: at the time of the original thread (2003) DOOM/MOOD hadn't been made yet (it would be in 2006):

Though it's debatable how much similar 3D engines are really "Doom".

Later still, a VIC-20 version of Doom was made. Unlike others, the author actually made an effort to use data structs and data from the original game:




Also, I *think* some Amiga source ports allow one to start Doom with less than 4 MB of total RAM (Amiga memory subtleties aside), but I have no idea how playable that would be. The "computron formula" for Doom seems pretty constant no matter what platform you try porting it to, at least without altering the engine and/or data significantly: you need about 4 MB and 40 MIPS from the CPU for DOS Doom-like performance, with RAM being the most constraining factor if you want to use ALL of the original IWAD data.

Maes said:

Also, since somebody mentioned the C64: at the time of the original thread (2003) DOOM/MOOD hadn't been made yet

Mood is more like a Wolfenstein engine.

Yet, there is a real source port on the C64:

It requires the SuperCPU, which is hard to come by and rather expensive, but you can emulate it in VICE.
It might become playable and more colorful, if optimized a lot, which it isn't.

We had an old 4MB 386 in my house that I certainly saw Doom running on. It was pretty much unplayable, even in postage stamp-sized screen size.

It was a "laptop" (maybe "portable" would be more accurate) in a huge docking station thing with a primitive LCD monochrome screen, further adding to its unplayability.

My earliest was using the family's Packard Bell 25 Mhz 386SX with 4MB of RAM. I occasionally had the hard drive light come on for like half a minute at some points but that all went away when I had an upgrade to a 486DX 100 Mhz with 8 MB of RAM.