Doom95 compatibility

Hi. I have a couple questions about Doom95 running under Windows XP.

Was there ever a way figured out to run Doom95, with mouse & music support, in WinXP?

Does the Windows service pack level matter? SP1, SP2, SP3?

FYI - This isn't for my primary PC. Alternative port suggestions won't be helpful, unless they will run on an AMD 500Mhz PC, without a GFX card.

No. Doom95 mouse support only works under Windows 95. The architecture they used to communicate with the mouse was entirely dropped in Windows 2000 and later.

It is advised to use a modern source port instead; all of them are at a minimum 5000% more awesome than Doom95. See this to help you make a choice.

PRBoom+ is one of the fastest ports around, so I'm willing to bet that it will run on your computer. It might even run faster than Doom 95!

Gez said:

See this to help you make a choice.

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

Both Chocolate Doom and the Eternity Engine will run just fine on a 500Mhz processor.

Spleen said:

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

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.

Gez said:

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'd say Boom

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.

Bah, my 600 MHz P3 laptop runs ZDoom quite well. More complicated levels like KDIZD make it choke a little, and heavily populated levels like NDCP2 Map02 actually freeze it, but the thing runs well enough that it's my main source port for the laptop. (Even though PRBoomPlus runs smoother in most cases.)

Someone who says that "levels like KDIZD make [ZDoom] choke a little" on a "600MHz P3 laptop", is someone who's post I'm going to take with a grain of salt. Because I remember running it on a Pentium M processor and it choked a lot, at a lot of places.

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.

Bitch you need to read and understand the posts you're talking about before you comment on them. I said that I'm taking wildweasel's entire comment with a grain of salt because I have trouble believing that KDIZD suffers from a "little" choking on his P3 laptop. Your oh-so-clever little comment about running KDIZD in PrBoom+ is completely irrelevant to what I was saying. It's called reading comprehension pumpkin tits, you should consider learning it.

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.

Do note that if you run EE on Win95 you may have some problems. Hobbs has found that the version as released suffers sporadic BSODs, at least in a vmware environment (it isn't known how or if having real hardware might affect this).

When the program was relinked with SDL 1.2.11 (vs the current version of 1.2.14) these problems went away, so it's likely that SDL's Win9x support is suffering some bit rot.

Also you need to make sure that EE uses the SDL DirectX video backend, by using -directx or by adding the SDL_VIDEODRIVER=directx environment variable to your autoexec.bat (this may be autodetected as of the next release). The GDI backend is known to have especially bad issues on Win9x.

And by Windows 95 what Quasar means is any DOS based Windows, be it 95, 98, or presumably ME. :P

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.

I haven't had such a machine in a long time either but with graphics resolution turned down to 640x480 it should be ok unless you play large maps - and then the RAM factor comes much more into play than the CPU.

To load the average KDiZD map even the software renderer needs 32+ MB so running such WADs on a 500MHz system which rarely came with more than 128 MB won't run well at all.

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.

What about Sunder? :P Or, I don't know, SOD map28. There are BOOM-format WADs released these days which have decently high system requirements.

Though I kind of wonder how fast older versions of ZDoom are compared to newer versions.

On my old AMD 450 Mhz, while ZDoom runs at playable speed with Vanilla WADs, it slows down to a crawl for the average ZDoom WAD. And the Vanilla WADs are a lot faster in PRBoom anyways. So there's not much point using ZDoom on old machines indeed.

Quasar said:

Do note that if you run EE on Win95

He's using WinXP. ;)

Quick comparisons at 320x240 resolution, with settings as close to vanilla as possible:

Chocolate Doom = Great Speed; Minimal dropped frames, and lag present.

Doom95 = Great Speed; No noticable dropped frames, or lag present; No BGM, or mouse support.

Eternity Engine = Good Speed; Minimal dropped frames, and lag present.

PrBoom Plus = Great Speed; Minimal dropped frames, with no noticable lag.

zDoom = Average to Slow Speed; Medium to major frame dropping, and lag.

My pick would be PrBoom at first glance, but I'm unsure how to add the timidity support to the config file. Actually same goes for Eternity...

Actually going completely off topic here now...

Since I don't have an alternative Windows to install, would there be any improvements if I installed a Linux (with a Linux port) to run on this machine?

The OS at least needs a GUI interface, as the person who'll be using it is not DOS, or CLI able.

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.

I don't think that this would be a good idea, because Timidity eats up quite some CPU time on its own, thus slowing down the game significantly on such old systems.
A hardware synthesizer was pretty much the way to go. The best choice for Doom is a Soundcanvas. But if you prefer a cheaper solution, pretty much any soundcard designed for gaming should come with some synthesizer.

Doom Legacy (lol) worked great on my P2 400mhz, 64mb ram supercomputer back in 1999...

Here's my 2 cents of anecdotal evidence. :p
I used to have a 3 computer lan set up when I had a 2room apartment. One of the computers I had were some old junk I got from my sister. The processor was something like 800mhz. It didn't run Skulltag well at all (this was before the release of the first .97 version) So no one would ever play on it when we played Skulltag since it couldn't even play the smallest DM maps at a reasonable FPS.

Gez said:

See this to help you make a choice.

PrBoom+ supports Chex

kristus said:

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

It's somewhat funny, considering when Doom was released, this would be some overkill machine you couldn't even do with excessive overclocking, and the 80286 were the junk. A 80486 with 4 MB RAM and 1 MB graphic was considered a typical gaming PC. Most games were released on floppy disks.

entryway said:

PrBoom+ supports Chex

It's an open wiki, feel free to edit.

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.

Well, here's my account of playing ZDoom on a Pentium/S P133 under Win98 for more details.

A more helpful account on a similar machine, using more modern ports.

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.

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 set the r_detail variable to 3 in console.

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.

Still, that will still generate too much bandwidth towards the video card, which is what we want to avoid by using a lower resolution. If you just stretch pixels to cover a 1024x768 desktop, you're not saving at all on the bus bandwidth, which comes at a premium.

It's always better to use direct video modes, preferably on CRTs that won't look like crap when doing so.

Here's a more helpful account on a similar machine, using more modern ports.

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.

Wait, really? I thought the CPU was the bottleneck on ZDoom WADs, since the calculations of the software renderer aren't actually being done by the video card, and all it actually sees is the screen data. If you don't have a video card bandwidth bottleneck when playing a Vanilla WAD in a given resolution, I wouldn't think you'd have it when playing a ZDoom WAD in that same resolution. Instead, I'd think that the major problem would be the inability of the CPU to do the thinker and renderer calculations quickly enough, as well as the matter of possible cache misses from the smaller CPU cache of older CPUs.