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LGN-76

Playing ZDOOM on computers with crappy or no video cards and/or drivers

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I have no trouble whatsoever running ZDOOM on my two home computers (one desktop and one laptop), so that's out of the way...

Here the thing though: I play the DOOM games off a flash drive all the time. The way ZDOOM is set up, it SHOULD be able to run on ANY modern computer with little, if not any trouble.

Unfortunately, I found an exception to that: The computers currently set up at the Traverse Area District Library. The computers are fairly new, but the video cards in them are so crappy, that they can't run ZDOOM or pretty much any other game and/or emulator out there.

There are a few exceptions, like DOSBox in surface video mode, which is what I currently use to run DOOM on those computers. But I don't wanna resort to using DOSBox anymore unless I have absolutely no other choice.

So this is what I was thinking: I live 40 miles away from Traverse City (where that library is), and I don't get to go there very often anymore because I have a job in my hometown now. However, my hometown has a library, and even though their computers have no trouble running ZDOOM, I can uninstall the video driver* from one of them in order to emulate the state of the TC Library's computers. I can experiment with ZDOOM's settings from there until I find something that will enable me to run ZDOOM on even the worst computers with no trouble.

If you guys could give me some help on this ordeal, it'd be greatly appreciated. I will say this: If there's a way to run ZDOOM in GDI rendering or something like that where it doesn't have to rely on DirectX, that would most likely do the trick...

*Any modifications made to my hometown library's computers (including uninstalling the video drivers) are automatically averted upon restarting the computer, so it's all right for me to do something like that there.

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So,these computers run in plain VGA or SVGA mode or something, with no DirectX support whatsoever? AFAIK, brute-forcing through GDI wouldn`t be much better in terms of performance.

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I just decided it'd be too much trouble and went back to DOSBox. Nothing wrong with the original.

Plus, the way I have DOSBox set up, I can switch play between those crappy computers and their Mac computers on the fly, and I may even be able to link up in deatchmatch between four of them. Only problem there is I have to find three people at the library willing to test that out...

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As a curiosity, could you run some hardware diagnostic/detection utility on one of these computers and post the log into pastebin or something? Even the standard Windows System Information will do. I'm really curious to see what hardware could be so bad, in this day and age.

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Since Windows95, none. However, with only the Standard VGA Mode Drivers, most stuff won't work. Even basic Internet browsing might be impoosible or a chore, unless very old browsers and/or fallback modes are used.

Another possibility is having some really crappy integrated chipset like some older S3 Savage, Voodoo, Cirrus Logic etc. which make Intel's IGP look like the latest NVidia (I've seen an XP machine struggling with a Cirrus Logic SVGA 1M once...barely enough for office work and Minesweeper).

N.B.: up to Windows XP many of these old chipsets did have at least somewhat functional drivers and some could even run DX5/6 games with acceleration, but on Vista and afterwards, esp. on 64-bit versions, they might be totally unsupported.

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Maes said:

As a curiosity, could you run some hardware diagnostic/detection utility on one of these computers and post the log into pastebin or something? Even the standard Windows System Information will do. I'm really curious to see what hardware could be so bad, in this day and age.


Next time I'm at that library, I will...

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All right, I'm going back to Traverse City on Saturday, and one of the stops is gonna be the Library. So if you still want your hardware diagnostics, how exactly do I access Windows System Information, and then copy and paste its details?

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It should be enough to search for "System Information" in the Start button's search box (if it's not disabled).

Otherwise, System Information is found under Start->Accessories->System Tools

and a direct path to the executable:

%windir%\system32\msinfo32.exe

You can save all information as an NFO file (nothing to do with crackers/1337 d00dz ;-)

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Sorry for making you guys wait longer, but there was a change of plans and I ended up not going to TC last weekend after all. But rest assured, I will get that information to you guys...

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Well, by then they might have upgraded the computers ;)

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I recently fucked around a bit with Windows 10 on an old laptop with an Intel 915GMA video card, and noticed that it's not supported at all on Windows 8 and above, you just get a generic SVGA framebuffer driver. Didn't test ZDoom, but I suspect it wouldn't run terribly well under these conditions. Maybe that's what's wrong with your library's computers?

FWIW, the Intel 915GMA is perfectly usable for ZDoom under Windows 7, with the Vista drivers. Can't use them on 8 or 10, though.

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Maes said:

I recently fucked around a bit with Windows 10 on an old laptop with an Intel 915GMA video card, and noticed that it's not supported at all on Windows 8 and above, you just get a generic SVGA framebuffer driver. Didn't test ZDoom, but I suspect it wouldn't run terribly well under these conditions. Maybe that's what's wrong with your library's computers?

FWIW, the Intel 915GMA is perfectly usable for ZDoom under Windows 7, with the Vista drivers. Can't use them on 8 or 10, though.


The TC Library's computers are all Windows 7, except for the Macs.

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RexFesto696 said:

The TC Library's computers are all Windows 7, except for the Macs.


Still, it takes some manual digging to find the proper driver. The Intel GMA drivers are not automatically installed, nor available through Windows update (in fact, not even Intel offers an official generic Vista/7 installer). Only through the websites of some OEM's can one find the proper driver, so if the TC Library has a lazy IT admin...

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Maes said:

Still, it takes some manual digging to find the proper driver. The Intel GMA drivers are not automatically installed, nor available through Windows update (in fact, not even Intel offers an official generic Vista/7 installer). Only through the websites of some OEM's can one find the proper driver, so if the TC Library has a lazy IT admin...


Could be. The computers do have Intel graphics.

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How can there be Direct3D but not DirectDraw acceleration? O_o

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DirectDraw doesn't accelerate anything. All it does is to provide direct memory access to the framebuffer. It may well be that some boneheads disable that for 'security' reasons.

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Graf Zahl said:

DirectDraw doesn't accelerate anything. All it does is to provide direct memory access to the framebuffer. It may well be that some boneheads disable that for 'security' reasons.


That's exactly what's going on. Given that it's a public computer, it's likely the survelliance software installed doing this. DeepFreeze used to do this with Quake 3, turning the display grey after five minutes of play, making the game unplayable.

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Does it even make sense to leave Direct3D available without DirectDraw? Can you run a game that uses Direct3D? What about OpenGL? It would be weird if you could run an accelerated port of Doom but not a software-rendered one. O_o

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Maes said:

Does it even make sense to leave Direct3D available without DirectDraw? Can you run a game that uses Direct3D? What about OpenGL? It would be weird if you could run an accelerated port of Doom but not a software-rendered one. O_o


From my most recent tests, it's pretty much hit-and-miss. PPSSPP (That really fast, really good PSP emulator) ran fine in OpenGL mode, but DOOM 3 (Original not BFG) couldn't even start up.

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Well I finally told the library staff about the crappy video setup on their computers, and they said they're gonna talk to the technicians and hopefully get it all fixed.

Good riddance. I like playing ZDOOM, and I prefer to play it on any computer I have access to...

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Sorry for bumping this thread, but I might as well end it by saying I went back to the TC library today, and the crappy video setup was never fixed, so the staff obviously doesn't give a s***. Plus, I noticed a while ago that not all the computers in their computer lab have those issues, so that makes the situation even dumber than it already was...

I now use Chocolate DOOM to play the DOOM games off a flash drive, on any Windows or Mac computer I'm able to access. The DOSBox SVNs require more non-portable crap every update, and I don't wanna go back to older versions, so DOSBox is no longer an option.

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