"Is Doom playable on a 386 DOS PC?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQEHHc1q06c

Maybe old, but still cool to see. I remember trying classic DOOM on a couple 386s. They were slow, but playable.

I'd be wary of this particular test. It's not clear how the screen captures were made (remember, this supposedly ran on real hardware and on a typical Cirrus Logic VGA card, which have no composite video output, and capturing VGA signals requires quite expensive hardware).

Whatcha bet that this was simply done on an emulator set to "386 level performance"?

Edit: NM, turns out there's no actual footage of Doom running on a 386, just a table with numbers flashed for a few seconds near the middle of the video. On the part of the vid where actual game footage at real-time speed is shown, there is a "Pentium 100" logo on top. A 386 could in no way deliver that kind of smoothness at full screen and high detail, and the guy would have no way to easily capture the screen output at that quality anyway. With a Pentium 100 it's slightly more plausible because after 1996 it was easier to find video cards with composite video outputs as well.

Ofc you only has his word that the numbers on that table are real and not pulled out of his ass.

I was able to play it on a 386 20 years ago. It was so choppy that most today wouldn't consider it playable. My memory could be fuzzy. No video proof. The story is my friend got like 20 386s from his cousin's company that went out of business. So naturally the way we test computers was... put Doom on it.

With more effort I found these:

For the first year or two that I owned Doom, I played it on a 386SX with just 20Mhz. Had to reduce the screen to a postage stamp and play in low res mode, with PC internal speaker sound. Just pitiful. I think with those restrictions I could get a decent frame rate.

Well, at this point it is a matter of semantics: where do you draw the line between "executable", "playable" and "enjoyable"? If you aim for bare executability, then look no further than what the box says:

-------------------------------------------------------------
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
-------------------------------------------------------------
DOOM(TM) requires an IBM compatible 386 or better with 4 megs of
RAM, a VGA graphics card, and a hard disk drive. A 486 or
better, a Sound Blaster Pro(TM) or 100% compatible sound card
is recommended. A network that uses the IPX protocol is
required for network gameplay.

In practice, anything that can execute the i386 instruction set, runs a DOS-like OS and has 4 MB of addressable RAM can execute DOOM.EXE, in the strictest interpretation of what it means to execute a computer program. So let's say even a 386SX/16 (yeah, the one with the 16-bit data bus) can run it.

But will it be playable? Well, the controls will respond, one way or the other, and you will be grosso modo able to follow the action. So yes, in the loosest possible meaning of "playing" a video-game, it will be playable.

Will it be enjoyable? Common sense says "no" but as it turns out years of experience taught me that that's just as subjective as politics or religion, and can turn equally sour to debate (or I just stumbled upon all the online flamewarrior smartasses, I dunno).

Some people can tolerate no slowdown from the nominal 35 fps, some cannot even play without uncapped framerate anymore, and some are masochists that (so they claim) would enjoy it even reduced to postage-stamp size and slideshow frame rates, as they are "just fine" for them. Can't argue with that now, can we? ;-)

I ran Doom1 and 2 on a 386 when it first came out, that had 25 and 10mhz speed modes. It also had 4mb of ram.

Of course, I can't remember at all how well they ran after all this time, but I don't recall any major issues at all. But back then, I didn't have anything to compare to.

Vermil said:

Of course, I can't remember at all how well they ran after all this time, but I don't recall any major issues at all.

Not a personal attack by any means, but that's exactly the kind of abstract, anecdotal story telling which makes it hard to draw any conclusions without having any more info on the context. For example, what would you consider as major issues at the time? E.g. the game not starting up the first time/without some MS-DOS fuckery with TSRs and drivers? No sound? The mere fact that it simply started up made it "having no major issues"? Can't tell without more context.

Vermil said:

But back then, I didn't have anything to compare to.

Other 1st person, fully textured FPS, maybe not (unless you were familiar with Ultima Underworld). But you might had seen e.g. Wolfenstein 3D, or non-textured 3D games at the time (mostly driving and flight sims) or fully textured games at the arcades (e.g. Sega's Nascar). Certainly, Doom couldn't have performed just as fluidly as those games on specs parity. Or could it?

This "performance on specs parity" later would plague Descent and Duke Nukem 3D: none of them could claim framerate equality at resolution and hardware equality with Doom (than again, their engines were much more complex).

And in any case, even lacking any comparison with other 3D games of any kind, certainly you could judge if movement was "realistically smooth" or not based on real life or a scene in a movie. If something looked like a slideshow in 1993, well, I'd certainly have noticed, even without having seen any other game moving faster (or slower).

The above being said...I realized much later that I had ploughed through Doom and Doom II and even Final Doom at what must have been effective frame rates in the 15-21 range, and that by switching constantly between window sizes and high/low detail modes depending on the situation. On a 486 DX/50 with a shitty Cirrus Logic card. Why? Well, because that's what I had at the time. And while it was good enough (actually: had to be good enough), I distinctly remember me wishing that it was faster/smoother, how cool it would be if I could just play without tweaking detail and window sizes all the time and not experience any slowdown etc).

Someone should try to get doom '16 running on a 386. THAT would be entertaining to watch.

I seem to remember my 486 SX 25mhz running Doom faster than that 386.

Is my memory just flaky? Would a 486 have been a significant upgrade at similar clock speeds? Why?

Significatly more cache if I remember correctly

I was on a 386DX-40 when I got my hands on Doom for the first time and I simply had to limit the screensize to get rid of the lags. It was playable, however. Modern mapsets would probably choke it to death, but the optimized simplistic IWAD experience was okay after playing around with screenblocks.

RightField said:

Someone should try to get doom '16 running on a 386. THAT would be entertaining to watch.

Maybe a Vanilla mod that makes it look like Doom 2016. :P

One of my old roommates had a fast 386 (probably DX/40) and Doom 1 was playable if you set low-detail mode and shrunk the screen a couple notches. We used to play lots of coop and deathmatch (I had my own 486). It was good enough to experience the game, and probably better than being stuck with some console port.

AlexMax said:

I seem to remember my 486 SX 25mhz running Doom faster than that 386.

Is my memory just flaky? Would a 486 have been a significant upgrade at similar clock speeds? Why?

Better internal architecture, nearly 4 times the transistor count, more cache, and use of much more advanced chipsets and buses on 486 mobos. The 486 had an almost RISC-like 1 IPC performance ("one instruction per clock cycle!"). 40 MHz ~= 40 MIPS. And the Pentium went even further, further doubling on that performance increase, clock-per-clock.

RightField said:

Someone should try to get doom '16 running on a 386. THAT would be entertaining to watch.

It would take the entirety of that machine to be able to process a native-resolution screenshot of it.

WildWeasel said:

It would take the entirety of that machine to be able to process a native-resolution screenshot of it.

I'm guessing not in true color. :P

WildWeasel said:

It would take the entirety of that machine to be able to process a native-resolution screenshot of it.

Assuming that you could even fit the required OS (Windows 7 as a minimum?), rendering code and graphical assets on a typical 386 PC -or even the best 386 PC to have ever existed.

BTW, Doom '16 doesn't have a software rendering mode...and if you offloaded all GPU work to the CPU that would make it unplayable on most modern PCs as well...so what about giving that 386 an edge to make the comparison fair? Like developing a DOS or standalone version of Doom '16, and putting a modern GPU and plenty of video RAM on an ISA card?

AlexMax said:

I seem to remember my 486 SX 25mhz running Doom faster than that 386.

Is my memory just flaky? Would a 486 have been a significant upgrade at similar clock speeds? Why?

I have the same feeling, since I was usually playing Doom on my 486SX/25 MHz these old days.

I played Doom on a 386. It wasn't really that playable though. The viewport had to be reduced to a tiny size to get it running at a reasonable speed. I bought my 486 specifically for Doom.

Back in 1993, people with crappy computers got like 6 FPS and they still played, because it was the best graphics they had ever seen and Doom is playable at this framerate compared to the game you have today. It was the same with Quake.

I remember playing Unreal Tournament Gold at a resolution lower than 640x480 and it ran at ~15 FPS. It was pretty normal back then. The first LCDs couldn't even scale resolutions properly if it wasn't their native resolution, so it was ever uglier.

Maes said:

BTW, Doom '16 doesn't have a software rendering mode...and if you offloaded all GPU work to the CPU that would make it unplayable on most modern PCs as well...so what about giving that 386 an edge to make the comparison fair? Like developing a DOS or standalone version of Doom '16, and putting a modern GPU and plenty of video RAM on an ISA card?

For that to work, you'd basically have to gut everything out. It would no longer be a 386, it would be a modern PC with a 386's casing. I jokingly said just make a Vanilla mod to make it look like Doom 2016 but even that wouldn't give very smooth results.

I played it on a 386SX 25Mhz with 4 MB RAM, it is playable but it occasionally had the blue disk pop up in the lower right corner for about 20-30 seconds before resuming again. Once my 486DX 100Mhz with 8 MB RAM came into play, the blue disk was a thing of the past.

Glaice said:

it occasionally had the blue disk pop up in the lower right corner for about 20-30 seconds before resuming again

OMG. That is so slow. I have never seen something slow like that. Floppy disks may be faster.