slowest pc used for doom ?

[Maes]

I have once fucked around with a way to make half-resolution textures automatically for my Mocha Doom port. That would result in decreased memory usage and a bit faster rendering. Also, you could say that the Jaguar port (and all of its derivatives) is a kind of "downgrade port", as it's built with lower static limits, simplifies a lot of data structures, eliminates redundancy etc. in order to be able to run a more or less authentic Doom on more restricted hardware.

However the ultimate in reduction must be the Commodore VIC-20 port of Doom: it still uses a significant portion of the original IWAD data and game logic, enough to set it apart from remakes using "Wolfenstein" engines.

[invictius]

proprietary 386 sx, had to take it back because it had a non-standard expansion slot and I obviously wanted sound. Most of my early dooming was on a 386dx-40 with 16mb(!!!!) ram. On the cyrix 586 I got, I spent $100 on a 1mb/4mb video card because I thought it would speed up the framerate on doom95 640x480! How wrong I was, these days I would have realised that only the cpu determined that.

[june gloom]

I don't remember what my neighbor's computer was, but the first PC of my own I played it on was an old NEC Ready series PC. Still have fond memories of it. Pity I broke the sound trying to get Quake to work.

[Jello]

I think it was a Tandy 386. I believe the processor was 33mhz, with 4 mb of ram. We had to boot directly to DOS because if you loaded Windows 3.1 and then went to DOS it didn't have enough RAM to play Doom. And I had to manually add +sound and +mouse to the command line. Good times. Luckily my Mom bought an additional 4 mb of ram, for $200. After that I could load Windows, go into DOS, and I could play in glorious hi-def. Meaning I could press F5.

[Koko Ricky]

My dad ignored the system requirements and installed shareware Doom on our 386sx, which had 20mhz clock speed and just a couple megs of RAM with no sound card. Ran acceptably in low detail mode with a shrunken screen.

[baja blast rd.]

Since I opened this thread without realizing it was so old, you can imagine my reaction when I got to this post.

Grimm said:

Yep, Shareware is my Doom story.

I still have my computer. It was bought back in '93, around 2000 smackers, and it was really high-end back then, apparently. A 486, probably somewhere aorund 60mhz, like these guys said, 8 megs of memory, around 350 hard drive space, and a Soundblaster. By way of comparision, aproximately 2000 dollars today netted me a Pentium 4 2.4ghz, 80gb hard drive, 512mb of RAM, a 17 inch LCD monitor, a GeForce4 MX440, a Soundblaster card, and Windows XP. DAMN!

[VGA]

2000 dollars for a geforce 4 MX?

Regardless of year, I'd rather castrate myself.

[Maes]

Not just for the GeForce, for the whole shebang. Computers, including those that a few years down the line you will look down upon and laugh at the specs, are unfortunately not free when new. Actually, for 2003, that was a pretty nice computer, and with some upgrades to the RAM and graphics card it could be kept ticking for quite a few more years, even upgraded to Windows 7 eventually. I remember than my first laptop I got in 2003 was Athlon-XP based, and my roomates had a Pentium II and a Pentium III (Tualatin).

[Deleted_Account]

If I recall correctly, the first time I played Doom was on an IBM Aptiva (I think?), that feels like forever ago.

[ReFracture]

I bet a lot of that money in 2003 was that LCD. It was either late 2002 or early 2003 that we dropped $1,000 on a Pentium 4 2.4ghz Northwood, 512mb of ram, 80gb HDD, and a GeForce 2 MX. This was for only the tower, and my parents paid somebody to build it for them so I figure at least a couple hundred dollars of that build was not components related.

[Maes]

ReFracture said:

I bet a lot of that money in 2003 was that LCD

Heh, I dread to remember how LCDs looked back in 2003. In many aspects, they were a step back compared to CRTs.

Resolution, color depth and scaling were all crap, and any of them still in use will have developed dead pixels and/or dead/dim backlights. In 2005, when I got an Athlon 64, CRTs had reached the peak of their perfection, and for 200 Eur I got a very nice 19" Samsung SyncMaster 939, which I still have. The closest (per price) LCD didn't hold a candle to it, specs-wise. But soon after, you simply couldn't buy new CRT computer monitors. Their peak also was their (planned) death.

[june gloom]

Yeah I was a big LCD hater for years. Didn't make the switch until 2011 when I realized my old CRT wasn't doing Deus Ex HR justice, so I bought a Dell Ultrasharp. I've been really happy with it.

[ReFracture]

Absolutely. I have a 'RealSYNC' LCD monitor from 2005. 17", heavy as hell, puts out a lot of heat.. looks like utter shit. Just like how it did when we got it.

We got it to replace our dead IBM P200 CRT.

I really wish I could find a nice CRT locally. I used to have a 15" Dell CRT from the late era before they stopped making them, I used it to play Doom 3 and Thief: The Dark Project in 2011 when my LCD at the time died. Even now you can't just go out and buy a modern flat panel that makes dark scenes look as good as that old CRT could.

[VGA]

Maes said:

Not just for the GeForce, for the whole shebang. Computers, including those that a few years down the line you will look down upon and laugh at the specs, are unfortunately not free when new. Actually, for 2003, that was a pretty nice computer, and with some upgrades to the RAM and graphics card it could be kept ticking for quite a few more years, even upgraded to Windows 7 eventually. I remember than my first laptop I got in 2003 was Athlon-XP based, and my roomates had a Pentium II and a Pentium III (Tualatin).

Geforce 4 MX was shit the day it came out.

[ReFracture]

The point isn't about the quality of that GPU, it's about how fucking expensive even a very middle of the road PC was back then.

[Maes]

A Pentium 4 @ 2.4 GHz would actually be mid to high end for 2003 -you couldn't buy much better than that even if you wanted to. The top Pentium 4 at the time would be what, 3.0 GHz, and that would be with 512 KB of L2 cache and a 133 MHz FSB, at best.

What would make the difference between a crappy and a future-proof system however, was (and is) the mobo, as well as paying attention to certain details: e.g. there were both 100 and 133 FSB Pentiums 4 @ 2.40GHz, and if you got the former (and a mobo to match) you were screwed: you wouldn't even be able to fully use future upgrades for the 478 socket.

Mobos could be made with or without AGP 8x or 166/200 MHz FSB support, and you could be stuck with a piece of crap a few years down the line. Some chipsets of that time were quite nasty, like the P4X-266. I have such a mobo somewhere...newer Pentium 4 chips do work in it, but sloooooowly, due to the 100 MHz FSB, and the overclocking feature which should allow one to go up to 133 MHz was fucking broken. Nasty piece of garbage.

Ugh. Other future-proofing features would be built-in SATA connectors, USB 2.0 etc. It was quite easy to buy a crapper that would be terribly inadequate just in a couple of years, while a few extra bucks got you something much more future proof. That always held true BTW, not only in 2003.

[Pirx]

386sx 25 mhz. a friend one's. i had to lower the resolution to make it playable. i must have had good imagination back then because i still could make things out. oh, and no sound card. those squeaks out of the pc speaker, lol. a sound card made doom a totally different world (soundblaster 16 i think)

a 486dx/50 is played doom2 on later was clearly much better, but lagged totally when i tried recording demos, apparently because of its only 4 mb ram. a 486dx/66 with 8 mb and a 540 mb hdd was a dream machine. until quake came, and required a pentium.

[TheWizard]

Maes said:

I have once fucked around with a way to make half-resolution textures automatically for my Mocha Doom port. That would result in decreased memory usage and a bit faster rendering. Also, you could say that the Jaguar port (and all of its derivatives) is a kind of "downgrade port", as it's built with lower static limits, simplifies a lot of data structures, eliminates redundancy etc. in order to be able to run a more or less authentic Doom on more restricted hardware.

However the ultimate in reduction must be the Commodore VIC-20 port of Doom: it still uses a significant portion of the original IWAD data and game logic, enough to set it apart from remakes using "Wolfenstein" engines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7h3H-_8N_o

That reminds me of this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMli33ornEU

[SilverIce]

486sx 33 MHz, 4mb RAM, 250mb hard drive, VGA video card, Sound Blaster Pro, DOS 6.0.

[mjf6866]

mine was an HP branded desktop (the kinda that sat under the monitor) and it had a 486(DX4) 100mhz with 8MB of RAM! I was 14 at the time in 1995 and remember going to Office Depot with my mom to buy it and asking the sales rep if it would play Doom :) He said that the math co-processor is what would really help and that sold us on that computer. that was right when the Pentium first came out and was a lot more expensive. Pentium 75mhz if i remember correctly...we opted for the cheaper 486 and it ran doom fine!

[Nirvana]

So many 486ers in here. Same machine I played Doom on for the first time...possibly played it on the 386 we had before it but I'm not sure. The CRT we had was a piece of garbage so you often had to turn the gamma up to see on darker levels, and if you had too many monsters on the scream it would slow to an absolute crawl. Good times though. Dehacked, D!Zone, making levels with Doomcad -which I used well past its sell by date, until I stumbled across some youtube videos of Doombuilder and was in absolute awe.

[Koutana]

I'm a bit of a younger person, so my DOOM experience stems from a Dell Inspiron laptop.

I gagged a little from that.

It could run (Z)DOOM with low fucking settings at what i guess would be 25 frameos per second.

I now have a Toshiba Satellite and my life is much more ok, bsods all the time though because of my mouse driver, its a problem that i have yet to destroy this pile of chips and lcds over

[raymoohawk]

all that talk about CRT monitors has gottem me nostalgic

are good CRTs not produced anymore?

[Maes]

raymoohawk said:

are good CRTs not produced anymore?

They are, but they are considered niche/premium products (e.g. monochrome hi-res for medical imaging, or special color grading applications), with prices in the 4-figure range. Not quite your office-grade CRT monitor that reigned supreme until the mid-2000s.

There are more regular VGA CRT monitors available too, but most of them will be unsold NOS (New Old Stock) or refurbished, not actually newly manufactured. The current demands for computer CRT monitors can be met by the used/NOS/refurbished market, so there's no real reason for any manufacturer to invest in a CRT manufacturing plant now.

[Jan]

Maes said:

In many aspects, they were a step back compared to CRTs.

In some aspects they still are, especially for (retro) gaming.

- LCD's have more latency, they generally support lower refresh rates (60Hz is the "standard", whereas CRTs commonly supported 85Hz or 100Hz)
- They still suffer from ghosting.
- Viewing angles are poorer, especially on more gaming oriented TN screens. IPS has better viewing angles, but has more ghosting, latency etc.
- Upscaling lower resolutions to the native LCD resolution is still problematic because it produces artifacts and oddly sized pixels if the native resolution is not an exact multiple of the original resolution. For example, if I play vanilla Doom (320x200) in Dosbox on my 1920x1200 screen, there are some oddly sized pixels in the status bar.
- They are almost exlusively 16:9 format nowadays which is only really good for watching movies and playing recent games. For desktop work or reading webpages having more height is more useful than having more width, so something like 16:10 or even 5:4 or 4:3 would be much better.

4k screens and freesync/gsync are starting to mitigate some of these issues, but they are not common yet.

Of course, the upside is that we have much higher resolutions and much bigger screens now that don't take up an entire desk and don't weigh 100kg. LCD screens also don't flicker and we never have to use various knobs and dials again to try and get a non-trapezoid properly aligned image on the center of the screen. I do miss the degauss button though :p

[Hellbent]

dr_qui said:

Anyone remember there first rig for playing doom on ? I do , it was an Amstrad 386/16sx ! Soundcard ? whats that ? Pc chip only and a frame rate to make grown men cry (hit double figures twice I believe)

hit F5, bud.

[Jan]

mjf6866 said:

that was right when the Pentium first came out and was a lot more expensive. Pentium 75mhz if i remember correctly...

I believe the P50/P60/P66 came out first, then the P90 and P100 and only later the P75,P120 and P133.

My Pentium 100 was the first PC that I could play Doom on by the way, and the first PC that I bought with my own money, so I still have a good memory of all the specs back in the day :)

[vadrig4r]

janvknn said:

I do miss the degauss button though :p

Don't we all!

[perkristian]

My first Doom PC was a 386DX, 33mHz with 4 megs of RAM and a Media Vision Thunder Board sound card - it was soundblaster compatible but could only play 8bit mono sound at max 22kHz.

[Maes]

perkristian said:

Media Vision Thunder Board sound card - it was soundblaster compatible but could only play 8bit mono sound at max 22kHz.

Well, that's what the original Sound Blaster v1.0 specs called for -the v2.0 version which I had could go up to 44.1 kHz in playback, but only Windows and tracker music players could use it like that. Most games just supported the 1.0 specs.

Many of those "compatible" sound cards could perform better if set to operate in Soundblaster Pro 1.0 mode (again 8-bit, 22 kHz, but OMFG STEREO), or in Windows Sound System mode (up to CD/DAT quality).

It's interesting how most "compatible" sound cards only emulated 8-bit Soundblaster (Pro) 1.0, not 2.0, so none of them could do 44.1 kHz.