Sir Fragsalot and the Coprocessor of Doom

Time to let off a little steam.

On the weekend, I decided to try networking my computers to play a bit of Doom. My other computer is a 486SX/33. Its CD-ROM drive went kaput a year or two ago, so the only way I could put Doom 2 onto it was copying the iwad and executables to disk. Browsing the "DOS" section of the source ports on Doomworld, I decided to copy Boom and Doom Legacy onto the old computer. I downloaded the zips, and, after an hour trying to compress the files and the Doom 2 iwad with DosRAR, succeeded in splitting the files into seven 1.44 mb rar files.

And then my troubles began. One of the disks I was using decided to die, so it ended up taking me half an hour to copy the rar files over to the 486. Nevertheless, I unrared and unzipped the files correctly. I organized the directories and decided to try out the ports. Even though Boom takes 1 minute and 17 seconds to start, it runs fairly quickly and is great.

Doom Legacy is another story. I installed it because it has the best network capabilities. Upon starting it up, it took 3 minutes to detect the stupid iwad. After that, it crashed. Not only did the program crash, but DOS hung too. Reading through the 4 or 5 general protection fault errors displayed on my screen, I noticed something odd.

Doom Legacy crashed because my 486 doesn't have a math coprocessor (FPU). I think that this is weird because the great thing about the Doom engine is that it doesn't need to do any complex calculations. What does Doom Legacy do different that requires a coprocessor?

My new network card for the 486 didn't work either, but that's another story.

C'est la vie!

man, I HATE trying to copy stuff with 3.5 floppies. I've had to shuffle through a huge stack of the damn things to find a good one so I could copy stupid little text files =P

I haven't even tried running Legacy on a 486 (DX or SX), but aren't most source ports pretty much rewritten from the ground up(aside from all the new stuff, of course)?
I'm pretty sure that the coder for Legacy wrote all the new stuff(and rewrote some of the old) with the assumption that most users would be running at least a DX33, which is unfortunate.

It's sort of the same way now that there are games coming out that won't run without a D3D/Open GL video card. I'm sure that some day I'll install a new game, and when I try to run it, I'll get an error message saying "what do you MEAN your video card only has 64Mb and doesn't support displacement mapping or voxels?", at which point I will proceed to get pissed and throw stuff ^__^

it does suck that it won't run though =(

copying with disks and not CDs makes me sick to my stomach,
Thank god I don't know enough about computers to do anything overly fancy...

You should try laplink http://www.laplink.com for transfering files, as you say you networked them I assume you could use laplink to transfer straight from one to other