How well did the first Doom run on average PCs of the time?

[Jack9955]

I know Doom runs on anything (Even literal potatoes!) But how well did it run on the average PCs of 93' and 94'?

[Edward850]

 

[DNSKILL5]

I think the answer you’re looking for is basically that it varies. Some people had to shrink down the view screen to get the game to run at a stable enough framerate, some had to deal with not having audio and or music, and others had no problems whatsoever. For me it was the latter. I no longer remember the specs we had in the mid to late 90s, but it ran Doom, Heretic, Duke 3D, Quake, and 7th Guest with no issues. I remember we got Witchaven 2 and thought our computer couldn’t run it properly but it turned out that game was just a buggy mess anyways. 

[Jack9955]

Quote

some had to deal with not having audio and or music

So sound back then was costly in FPS?

[magicsofa]

18 minutes ago, Jack9955 said:

So sound back then was costly in FPS?

 

No, it was just a pain to get working sometimes:

 

[Murdoch]

At the time of release, you only had 386s and 486s. 286s were still around but couldn't run it at all. Speaking from personal experience, the correct technical description for how the game ran on a 386SX 40mhz with 4MB RAM was "like ass", even on low detail mode. The other half of my family had a 486DLC 40mhz with 4MB (which is basically a 386DX with delusions of grandeur) and the technical term for the performance on that was "marginally less like ass". It was basically playable on high detail mode, but the 386 wasn't. I believe it wasn't till you got to the 486DXs, which were a lot more expensive, that you started seeing performance that we today might classify as decent and playable though I never saw it myself. I jumped from the 486 to I think an AMD K6 a few years later.

 

33 minutes ago, magicsofa said:

No, it was just a pain to get working sometimes:

 

Also a lot of people were running on budget PCs which just had PC speaker sound - for any youngesters reading this think dial up modem noises with a little bit more class and control, and less an aura of "robot being tortured in the depths of robot hell". The aforementioned 486DLC didn't get a sound card fitted until probably a couple of years into it's life.

[Foebane72]

I got a full-blown multimedia PC in 1995 to replace my Amiga 1200, solely for the purpose of running Doom, or in this case, Doom 2. I'm not sure what the processor spec was, but it was definitely a 486, and only 4mb of memory. It ran OK for the most part, but it crashed on the Icon of Sin a couple of times with "out of memory" messages, probably because of the spawn cubes teleporting too many demons. Yes, it had full sound as well, and a CD-ROM drive, too.

 

6 hours ago, Murdoch said:

Also a lot of people were running on budget PCs which just had PC speaker sound - for any youngesters reading this think dial up modem noises with a little bit more class and control, and less an aura of "robot being tortured in the depths of robot hell". The aforementioned 486DLC didn't get a sound card fitted until probably a couple of years into it's life.

 

Would teenagers in this day even use or even know what a dial-up modem sounded like? And PC speaker audio wasn't as bad as that noise. Just tell them the PC speaker sounded like an 8-bit computer like the original ZX Spectrum's beeper or an Amstrad CPC with its crap audio, but more primitive.

 

Ironically, I jumped to the PC cos I thought the Amiga was done for, but it wasn't. Quake officially came out for faster-CPU Amigas, as did Quake 2, Heretic, Hexen and Doom itself, as source ports, and did quite well. And the Amiga's Paula meant audio support was straight out of the box as standard, so to speak.

 

[Murdoch]

17 minutes ago, Foebane72 said:

Would teenagers in this day even use or even know what a dial-up modem sounded like

 

It's frequently referenced in shows and movies. And yes it could sound ok in the right hands but some games were pretty bad. Not as bad as modem noise, no, but sometimes not far off.

[No-Man Baugh]

1 hour ago, Foebane72 said:

And PC speaker audio wasn't as bad as that noise.

 

granted, I'm talking as someone who didn't growup with either dial-up internet nor pc that had speakers in them (beyond a battery alert); but I love listening to the dial-up sound whenever I come across it and I legit can't stand Doom PC speaker sfx

 

 

1 cool thing about them tho is that the item pickup sounds close to picking up treasure in Wolf 3D and that's a great historical artifact in itself

[Murdoch]

1 hour ago, No-Man Baugh said:

granted, I'm talking as someone who didn't growup with either dial-up internet nor pc that had speakers in them (beyond a battery alert); but I love listening to the dial-up sound whenever I come across it and I legit can't stand Doom PC speaker sfx

 

This sounds wrong. It's the same sound effects, but it's like they are being played at too high of a pitch, or too fast. Maybe it varied per PC speaker. I remember it being not exactly pleasant, but nowhere near this ear-rapey.

[No-Man Baugh]

14 minutes ago, Murdoch said:

 

This sounds wrong. It's the same sound effects, but it's like they are being played at too high of a pitch, or too fast. Maybe it varied per PC speaker. I remember it being not exactly pleasant, but nowhere near this ear-rapey.

yeah even playing them back thru Doom v1.9 via dos box on the same system as I do any other sourceport like DSDA-Doom the sounds are way rounded down compared to eachother

 

I think it's just how the vanilla exe renders sfx not quite as clean as most ports default to (not to totally discount hardware and software as an additional factor, I just don't got the equipment to do that deep of testing), like try playing perkristian hi-res sfx patch thru vanilla doom and it sounds way more muffled and honestly kinda badass

[Foebane72]

31 minutes ago, Murdoch said:

 

This sounds wrong. It's the same sound effects, but it's like they are being played at too high of a pitch, or too fast. Maybe it varied per PC speaker. I remember it being not exactly pleasant, but nowhere near this ear-rapey.

 

Aagh! I take back what I said! Those sound HORRIBLE! But then my own PC (my first) had a soundcard, so I heard the wonderful sampled sounds and MIDI music as I heard them on my friend's PC (when I first saw Doom and was blown away).

 

[Murdoch]

45 minutes ago, Foebane72 said:

 

Aagh! I take back what I said! Those sound HORRIBLE! But then my own PC (my first) had a soundcard, so I heard the wonderful sampled sounds and MIDI music as I heard them on my friend's PC (when I first saw Doom and was blown away).

 

 

It was quite the revelation to go from PC Speaker sound to a proper sound card, not dissimilar to going from software rendering in Quake II to hardware rendering when I got my first 3DFX card. But yeah, even though I have not heard the OG PC Speaker sound since like 1996, I swear they didn't sound THAT bad on my setup. They were lower in pitch and not as grating.

[Master O]

2 hours ago, No-Man Baugh said:

 

granted, I'm talking as someone who didn't growup with either dial-up internet nor pc that had speakers in them (beyond a battery alert); but I love listening to the dial-up sound whenever I come across it and I legit can't stand Doom PC speaker sfx

 

 

1 cool thing about them tho is that the item pickup sounds close to picking up treasure in Wolf 3D and that's a great historical artifact in itself

 

PC Speaker .. the one part of the DOS gaming era I do not miss at all...

[aRottenKomquat]

I recall having to shrink the screen 2 - 3 borders so it wouldn't feel sluggish. I think this was on a 486, not totally sure since I was only 5 - 6 years old at the time.

[Biodegradable]

13 minutes ago, Master O said:

PC Speaker .. the one part of the DOS gaming era I do not miss at all...

 

Ah, the stupidly-violent bleepity bloops of our youth. :^P

[PsychEyeball]

First played Doom on some Cyrix processor that came out after the 486 so I never felt any slowdown. I first played Wolf 3D and Blake Stone on a 386 with PC Speaker sounds, so going to Doom with the proper processing power and a Sound Blaster card was quite the eye-opening experience and upgrade.

[ImproversGaming]

Honestly, I feel like it ran great but this was very subjective. Performance was not really a thing for me at the time and everything was a revolution so the bar of expectation was low - it either ran or did not - there were no other grades (for my younger self at the time). I could put up with a lot of lag, or other issues, without even thinking about it as the alternative was to go play outside with a stick.

I came from a decade of loading tempermental cassettes into my ZX Spectrum Plus, VGA arrived, the double-sided high-density floppy disk, sound cards, I bought a 20mb HDD to upgrade one of my systems and partitioned it into two drives as it was a crazy size, the turbo button came and went, there was a revolution every week.

I think I was up to a 486SX/DX at the time Doom launched and remember my friend bringing over a shareware disk. It played great and we loved it. I do remember playing with the settings and getting better performance (less judder/lag) as I messed with the viewing size but it was pretty good compared to what I was used to. The hardware and software were changing so fast it was not long before it made no difference.

[Individualised]

10 hours ago, Foebane72 said:

Would teenagers in this day even use or even know what a dial-up modem sounded like?

It's still a popular sound in pop culture and depending on country of origin some older teenagers may still remember the dying breath of dial-up so yes.

[MObreck]

I first played doom on a 486 compaq with 4 mb of ram. I had to load my pc with a special boot disk floppy that stripped down DOS in order to get doom to even run on it (otherwise DOS used too much ram).

 

The game would run at full detail, albeit with moments of bad slowdown. Doom2 on the other hand had unplayable lag freeze.

 

Heretic ran about the same as doom 1. Hexen required too much ram. Once my dad upgraded our pc to 8 mb of ram all the idtech1 games ran pretty smoothly.

[MissArgent]

Pretty decently on a 486DX2 at 50MHz with 8MB of RAM and a ATI Rage VLB video card if you're running in DOS, but it's just too much for Windows 3.1's DOS mode.

[Klear]

I remember having to slightly decrease the viewport size on Wolfenstein 3D on my 33MHz 386, never mind Doom. I played that in a window the size of a postage stamp. 

[Foebane72]

11 hours ago, MissArgent said:

Pretty decently on a 486DX2 at 50MHz with 8MB of RAM and a ATI Rage VLB video card if you're running in DOS, but it's just too much for Windows 3.1's DOS mode.

 

I'm sure that MS-DOS back then was still the dominant OS, and that Windows 3.1 was the optional graphical front end and so didn't have a "DOS mode" itself, and that DOS ran underneath.

 

Yeah, I remember that my PC always booted into DOS, and to use Windows back then I had to type "win" at the DOS prompt. But Windows was definitely not "in charge", so to speak.

 

[Foebane72]

12 hours ago, MObreck said:

I first played doom on a 486 compaq with 4 mb of ram. I had to load my pc with a special boot disk floppy that stripped down DOS in order to get doom to even run on it (otherwise DOS used too much ram).

 

Oh GOD, don't get me started on MS-DOS and trying to run games on it!!

 

The number of times I had to edit the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to get individual games working with the necessary drivers was mind-numbing! It was an acquired skill, to be honest. But I'm glad I got my first PC in 1995 so that Windows 95 solved most of these problems by one year later.

 

Also, I made the leap from Amiga to PC which was like stepping back into the Dark Ages. Amiga games could run, guaranteed, every time, from floppy or hard disk, and not having to fiddle with configurations at all, but unfortunately, Doom wasn't on Amiga, so that's why I had to "go back in time" and endure the medieval hardships of MS-DOS.

 

[Azafran]

On 5/26/2023 at 1:24 AM, Edward850 said:

 

 

Yeah, the summary of that topic and my own research is that nobody could run Doom at full speed and full details at the end of 1993. It's surprising to realise that the community of map makers and speed runners that formed the following year wasn't playing the game at its full potential.

Doom can be compared to Crysis in 2007. The best graphics at the time, and it would be some years later when people would be able to max out the game.

 

One thing I'd like to know if the guys at ID software could run Doom at full speed on their NeXT computers while developing it.

[jnbutler]

I got my first computer in 1993. It was a Packard Bell 486 with 4mb memory, 512 mb hard drive, sound blaster sound card. To get doom to run nicely you had to make a boot floppy that would load only what you needed to run Doom or Doom2. Then it ran quite fast. Wouldn't run very well if Windows was loaded so you had to run it in pure DOS baby.

 

[Foebane72]

10 minutes ago, jnbutler said:

To get doom to run nicely you had to make a boot floppy that would load only what you needed to run Doom or Doom2. Then it ran quite fast. Wouldn't run very well if Windows was loaded so you had to run it in pure DOS baby.

 

Listen, when I ran Win 3.1, it was only when I needed the paltry apps used there, and I never had Word or any of that crap. Win 3.1 was purely OPTIONAL, as I stated.

 

What I'm saying is: Who, in the pre Win95 days, would run ANY version of Windows AT ALL, when they were about to run an MS-DOS game??

 

[OleBumma]

my pc from '96 would crash 8/10 times, I think this law applied to Doom aswell.

I do remember completing the game back then, so it was maybe one of the few games I had that could run without major issues.

[smeghammer]

I had a 486DX2 back in the day. A Dell IIRC. Pretty sure I upgraded from 4MB to 8MB of RAM to get better performance out of Doom. I remember buggering about with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get the sound working. 

 

Wasn't a bad machine for it's time though it still didn't run Quake - but that's another story.

[Jack9955]

1 hour ago, smeghammer said:

I had a 486DX2 back in the day. A Dell IIRC. Pretty sure I upgraded from 4MB to 8MB of RAM to get better performance out of Doom. I remember buggering about with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get the sound working. 

 

Wasn't a bad machine for it's time though it still didn't run Quake - but that's another story.

 

Did it run Hexen?