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Gez said:
See this to help you make a choice.

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Spleen said:
That chart doesn't give information about how well these ports run on older computers with older OSes. :P

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Gez said:
ChocoDoom, Eternity, PrBoom+ and ZDoom should all work fine on a WinXP-capable machine.

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Gez said:

Windows XP is "not that old" given that Win 7 is still the "new" Windows and Vista is considered machina non grata by the majority of gamers.

ChocoDoom, Eternity, PrBoom+ and ZDoom should all work fine on a WinXP-capable machine.

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Spleen said:
Oops, you're right, sorry! Still, I wonder what would be the best choice of source port for someone who keeps around a Windows 95 or 98 machine for older games? People occasionally ask these kinds of questions.

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John Smith said:


I hate to be a nitpick but I'm pretty sure even the developers of ZDoom will tell you that it wont run particularly well on a machine like the one he described.

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John Smith said:
Now I can't say that ZDoom runs really poorly on a 500MHz or 600MHz computer, because I don't have a 500MHz or 600MHz computer at my disposal, but considering the resources that just FmodEx uses on my computer, I cant imagine how ZDoom is going to perform in a stellar, or even necessarily enjoyable, fashion on a computer over 10x as slow as mine. And by enjoyable fashion I mean something simple like being able to play through the IWADs at 35FPS most of the time.

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Gez said:
Maybe you can't run KDiZD on ZDoom on a Pentium M. Okay. Fair enough. Can you run KDiZD on that machine with PrBoom+? If yes, then, the argument is fair; if no, then it's quite irrelevant isn't it? If you play the type of mods that Doom95 can load, ZDoom is fast enough on such hardware. So I stand by what I said: ChocoDoom, Eternity, PrBoom+ and ZDoom should all work fine on a WinXP-capable machine.

True, PrBoom+ is the fastest software-rendered Boom port available. In case of sluggishness issues on that computer, it's probably the best choice. But you're not going to run nuts.wad smoothly on such a PC, even with it. That doesn't make nuts.wad a fair benchmark or a proof that PrBoom+ should be avoided.

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Quasar said:
Do note that if you run EE on Win95

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E.J. said:
My pick would be PrBoom at first glance, but I'm unsure how to add the timidity support to the config file.

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Gez said:
See this to help you make a choice.

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kristus said:
One of the computers I had were some old junk I got from my sister. The processor was something like 800mhz.

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entryway said:
PrBoom+ supports Chex

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Maes said:
If it helps, it's possible to run ZDoom at full framerate on a Pentium I@ 166/200/233 MHz under Win 98 and XP, if you limit the resolution to something reasonable like 400x300 or 640x480. Anything above that will be overkill, especially with PCI and AGP videocards <4x.

Using OpenGL may actually make things worse if the drivers take up too much memory, and with very old cards they may just break apart.

However, heed this warning: ZDoom only performed adequately with the vanilla levels. When loading even the smallest PWAD, performance plummetted, at least with old versions. Also, there may be major performance differences between SDL and pre-SDL versions (regarding audio).

PrBoom is much more solid in performance on such an old machine, but again, make sure you turn all visual embellishments off.

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Spleen said:

If your hardware can't handle low resolutions, you can run ZDoom with the -2 or -4 parameter for pixel doubling or quadrupling, respectively. In older versions, you could use set the r_detail variable to 3 in console.

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Maes said:


Still, that will still generate too much bandwidth towards the video card, which is what we want to avoid by using a lower resolution.

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