486

So far!

Odamex - Runs choppy, 640x480 minimum - fixed with -directx.
Sound engine is quite the cpu hog, -nosound increases performance to 21-35fps.
Net code seems to be CPU hoggy, fps fluctuates often from a full 35 to 17 when even just looking at a wall on a server without any players.

Chocolate Doom - 320x200, directx/gdi, 3fps, 11025hz sound even :(


Will try more.

Try out Zdoom and MBF.

What OS are you running on it?

Plus I doubt many people care about such old systems anymore :/ DOSBox can perform faster than that on a modern computer.

Windows 9x most likely. I'd offer Leileilol a Pentium Overdrive processor if I hadn't already given it to a tech college for their display of vintage computer hardware.

MikeRS said:

What OS are you running on it?

Plus I doubt many people care about such old systems anymore :/ DOSBox can perform faster than that on a modern computer.

You're not allowed to post here anymore.

MikeRS said:

I doubt many people care about such old systems anymore :/ DOSBox can perform faster than that on a modern computer.

So? I doubt many people care about command line interfaces anymore. A GUI can perform tasks faster than that on a modern computer.


:D

Csonicgo said:

So? I doubt many people care about command line interfaces anymore. A GUI can perform tasks faster than that on a modern computer

Um, no. CLI is still waaaaaay faster for many things. In fact, there are many things on Linux that you can't do with a GUI.

What are the specs of this system?

I don't think I've ever seen Win95 running on a 486 (assuming that you are, in fact, running Win95). The lowest was probably a P75 or thereabouts with 8MB RAM...

exp(x) said:

In fact, there are many things on Linux that you can't do with a GUI.

Still? ;-)
(WARNING: OFF TOPIC)
I was being facetious earlier. I'm not really talking bad about CLI for simplifying mundane tasks like a mass rename or an svn update, compiling, that mess... I can understand why a CLI would be better in such circumstances.


No, I'm talking about a subculture whose people dedicate their lives to a dumb terminal, with their mouse collecting dust. They abhor GUIs and, in extreme cases, flaunt their imaginary superiority over tech discussions. These are the kind that say "Mouse? Oh, that device used to click on a terminal window to type in? :-)", or "I don't feel like running X" when you give them a youtube link. If you befriend one, they start asking questions about your uptime, as if it were a penis size comparison. What exactly do those people do for a living? Worship Stallman?

I had the unfortunate opportunity to befriend such a person, hoping that I could learn how Linux worked. What I got: A person who actually hated Linux, and said "RTFM" when I asked a question. I didn't even know how to do that! And his friends were no help either. In fact they once attempted to convince me into running a script that would have essentially destroyed my computer. It's akin to the little rascals tree house club, only that it's nerds and their sign says "no casual computer users allowed".

If they're going to be nerds that just might think they live in the Matrix, they should reasonable about it. Don't use a supercomputer just to run IRC in a terminal. it's like an SUV with one person in it.

It's the same with DOSBox. I can understand using DOSBox to play games but-- if you have the opportunity to use old hardware to play games as they were intended... Why wouldn't you? At least you can convince myself that you're in the 90s for 30 minutes. Radical!

Note that I'm not trying to accuse MikeRS of being such a person. He might have picked on me for running Chocolate-doom in WINE once, but I can take that. The person I am referring to isn't in this community anymore.

And that's why I dislike the CLI. In fact I have become so disgusted by that certain person's opinions to what I prefer on a computer (Once I was told to "take your shitty mouse and hang yourself with it") that I make scripts to everything svn related just to bypass the terminal. :( *twitch*
(end of lameness)

CODOR said:

I don't think I've ever seen Win95 running on a 486 (assuming that you are, in fact, running Win95). The lowest was probably a P75 or thereabouts with 8MB RAM...

I remember running win95 on a 486 with 16 MB RAM. Doom2 ran "Bottlenecked" on it. there wouldn't be many problems playing, but some areas just started to be choppy.

CODOR said:

I don't think I've ever seen Win95 running on a 486

I have, and used to have it for my main machine probably back in 1995. A 486DX 50MHz with 8MB of RAM...

As for how it felt, I would rather have a lobotomy. I'd rather have my balls go through an industrial shredder. No seriously it ran like shit. "Faster performance for MS-DOS games" the setup said, but it was completely retarted bullshit marketting. Did it mean faster to exit Windows in order to just play a game? I don't know, but Windows 95 took half as long to shut down as it took to boot up (and it would take literally 10 minutes to boot). It was complete ass. Vanilla Doom alone ran as a slideshow. Think trying to run Doom 3 on some old Pentium 2 with a Voodoo card, yeah... The only thing worse than Windows 95, was that I once borrowed a copy of Windows 98 to install on the same computer, and that was just absolutely horrible, it almost made you miss Windows 95.

And then in early 1998 I switched to Red Hat Linux where I could run LinuxDoom at full speed without having to exit X11, on the same computer. Not to mention I was 10 years old so impressing all my friends with different titlebar styles was kind of cool.

Csonicgo said:

He might have picked on me for running Chocolate-doom in WINE once

We've all done stupid things anyway. Once I tried running Firefox and OpenOffice.org in Wine... not for serious use, though...

CODOR said:

I don't think I've ever seen Win95 running on a 486 (assuming that you are, in fact, running Win95). The lowest was probably a P75 or thereabouts with 8MB RAM...

oh ho ho, this one is running Win98SE and Win2000

I almost threw up after hearing that. Thanks for almost ruining my laptop.

MikeRS said:

I almost threw up after hearing that. Thanks for almost ruining my laptop.

no problem spoiled nerd

How well do Doom and Boom run on that system (under Windows)?

Once I had Windows 2000 installed on a Pentium 120. If you got over the 20 minute boot, it wasn't too bad (the desktop ran about 3x faster than Win'98 and 2x slower than Win'95...), but that was never a serious install anyhow, so I didn't install much on it... I did use the machine with FreeDOS solely installed on it for games for a while, but now I've converted everything to running in DOSBox, heh

myk said:

How well do Doom and Boom run on that system (under Windows)?

Haven't tried Boom yet
but Doom runs roughly 25-35fps in high detail with just the statusbar visible
Low detail full size hits the full 35fps

MikeRS said:

Once I had Windows 2000 installed on a Pentium 120. If you got over the 20 minute boot, it wasn't too bad

20 minutes? You suck at OSes. My 486 can boot Win2000 (SP4!) in just 1 1/2 minutes.

leileilol said:

Haven't tried Boom yet
but Doom runs roughly 25-35fps in high detail with just the statusbar visible
Low detail full size hits the full 35fps

On which OS (assuming you're not cheating and running it in pure DOS)?

leileilol said:

20 minutes? You suck at OSes. My 486 can boot Win2000 (SP4!) in just 1 1/2 minutes.

Hacked, slimmed down versions don't count. It takes longer than 1 1/2 minutes to boot plain Win2k even on modern machines.

Pretty sure I had Win'95 on my old 486 66 but I think I was on my first Pentium by the time I had '98.

MikeRS said:

On which OS (assuming you're not cheating and running it in pure DOS)?

Equal performance in both, of course it doesn't run in Windows 2000

MikeRS said:

Hacked, slimmed down versions don't count.

It's not hacked nor 'slimmed down'. You suck at OSes; end of story.

I saw Win98 on a 486 as recently as a few months ago. Of course, it's so slow that Win95 should be preferred.

I had a 486 until 2001 (yes, for THAT long), OS was Win95, some pretty early version of it. Vanilla Doom ran slower than in pure DOS, I think I almost never reached 35fps, on stock maps it was about 20-25 (in DOS, I didn't play in Win95). Boom was noticeably slower than that (maybe twice), I remember I had trouble recording demos in Boom-only maps.

All Windows ports (like Zdoom) used to run at 1-2 fps. ZdoomDOS 1.17 was pretty good, though. Demonizd.wad left the best memories, it ran at 1 fps nearly from start to finish, and it took me 3 days and a million savegames, but I still beat it in UV without any cheats :P

Now, Win98SE is just flying on a Sempron 2800+, loads in ~15 seconds (25 seconds from powering on to Windows GUI).

This is that same system you were talking about on the ZDoom forums, right? I think you're cheating a little bit by calling a 5x86 a 486... When most people hear "486" they're probably thinking a DX2 66MHz or something, maybe up to a DX4 100MHz if they're being generous :) I had a 486 SX 25MHz with 4MB of RAM - now THAT was a 486. High detail was a pipedream on that thing, although when the RAM was doubled it was fairly playable on low detail.

You should get a copy of OS/2 Warp and try running Doom in that. I've seen it running on a DX2 50MHz and I think ran at roughly the same speed as MSDOS, which was very impressive.

MikeRS said:

I have, and used to have it for my main machine probably back in 1995. A 486DX 50MHz with 8MB of RAM...

I don't recall running Win95 in less than 16MB of RAM - that was OK on DX2-66's and on a 386 DX-40 it was bearable provided you weren't doing much more than running the OS.

david_a said:

I think you're cheating a little bit by calling a 5x86 a 486...

it IS a 486. The "5x86" was just pure marketing. Real 586s started at Pentium, K5, and Cyrix 6x86 (O WAIT THAT LAST ONE MUST BE A 686 LOL).

david_a said:
I think you're cheating a little bit by calling a 5x86 a 486...

It might have had some Pentium instructions and ran at then-obscene clock speeds, but it fit into 486 boards and was still a 486 at heart. Not quite as impressive as running Win2000 on an SX/25, though...

Donce said:
I had a 486 until 2001 (yes, for THAT long)

I'm still using a 486 at work (DX4/100, I think) with the somewhat more contemporary MS-DOS 6.22 for running bookkeeping software. It only has a Hercules-compatible graphics card though, which limits its use as a mid-1990s gaming machine...

CODOR said:

It might have had some Pentium instructions

It has 0 Pentium instructions
you're thinking of Pentium Overdrive


right now i can't test anything since i'm doing some insane cinebench r10.

I was running one a few years ago, back in 2004. I know it has a sb16 in it, I think it's 66 Mhz, 8 MB of RAM, and dos 6.2? Should still work, I recall Doom running choppy on status bar or more sized screen.

I know the whole "586" name is just a gimmick, but it's still misleading. I had a machine with a "586" in it for quite a while, but I really don't see what's so special about running Doom on a 100MHz+ x86 system. That machine ran Legacy, DOSDoom, and Boom just fine. ZDoom was slower because it ran in Windows (I think it was version 1.16 or 1.17, something like that).

It would be more interesting to get one of the minimum machines that could run vanilla Doom (some 386, I guess) and see if any port even runs on that.

leileilol said:
you're thinking of Pentium Overdrive

No, I was confusing it with the Cyrix chip of the same name...

(That particular one is similar to a Cyrix 486DLC I once owned. It was a 486-class chip that fit on a 386DX board, but despite the "D" in its name it lacked a math coprocessor. It was good enough for Doom, but it meant I couldn't run Quake until that system was replaced sometime in 1997.)

Reminds me of back in high school when we would play Doom on their computers (our teacher was a coach/ie. an idiot who spent half the time out of the classroom, BTW). When I was a sophomore all we had were some 66MHz and 75MHz DX4's (Intel), although we only played Doom on the 75MHz ones, as the older 66MHz ones had serious issues with them. Then when I was a junior our school got a few new computers with 120MHz DX4's (AMD iirc) and I remember half the students fighting to get on those, LOL (I always got there early enough to never have to worry about it :p).

We played Stunts a lot as well.

Heh, those were the days...

How about Linux + XWindow + WM2 (or similar) + lxDoom?