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The-smartest-masterm

DOS computer

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Randy87 said:

Yup, was pretty cool. The pic is pretty blurry though. I didn't think someone would reply in five minutes.


I will go even further and say you watched the demo. When I saw that on the display, the first thing on my mind was the demo which plays for that episode.

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GhostlyDeath said:

I will go even further and say you watched the demo. When I saw that on the display, the first thing on my mind was the demo which plays for that episode.


Ha, had to go check myself. I think your right! Thanks for pointing that out.

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First computer to run Doom for me was also my first computer, period:

Packard Bell (aka Packaged Hell)
486DX4 75 MHz
4 MB RAM (eventually upgraded to 16)
*No* external cache
500 MB hard drive
4x CD-ROM ("revolutionary" at the time apparently >_> )
3.5" floppy drive
Voyetra ISA 16-bit SB-compatible (eventually replaced with genuine SB16 after it mysteriously burned out, probably due to transient phone line voltage entering the integrated 14.4K modem)
101-key PS/2 US keyboard and 2-button PS/2 mouse
Initial OS: DOS 6.20 (with the banned version of disk caching software!) and Windows 3.11 (eventually upgraded to Windows 95).

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Quasar said:

Initial OS: DOS 6.20 (with the banned version of disk caching software!)

I thought, DoubleSpace was the banned app. It was replaced by DriveSpace in DOS 6.22, which was fully compatible.

The disk caching software was SmartDrive, which had a fatal bug when write cache is enabled. Microsoft knew that and thus installs it with /X by default, which disables write cache.
An interesting curiosity is that SmartDrive in DOS 6.2 can also cache CD drives (must be loaded after MSCDEX), while it doesn't do that in Windows 95. Some CD games therefor were noticeable faster in DOS 6.2 than in Windows 95's DOS mode.
Nowadays, you would use a full install anyways, so it doesn't matter, but back then hard disk space was tight.

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My First Doom Play was with Doom Port for Amiga, Not with DOS. Adoom, AmigaDoom and later the PPC/WarpOS Versions. That was on a Amiga 4000, PPC, 148MB Ram, PicassoIV GFX and SoundCard. I think that was ~1998

This was very cool ;)

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I actually have before, despite my young age of 16.

My dad has a pretty rad MS-DOS computer sitting in the attic. I was around 10-11 years old, and we were up there cleaning, and I came across the computer. I asked him about it and he said "Oh! I forgot about that beast! Waddaya say we bring it down and see if it still works?" I said yes, and was super excited.

Eventually he brought it down and a big box full of diskettes. He plugged in the computer, and surprisingly enough, it worked! He pulled the Doom diskette out and put it into the...thing? xD anyways he booted it up, keep in mind, I had no idea what Doom was at the time.

He sat me down in front of it, gave me basic controls, and let me play. Needless to say, I had a blast. I played the whole first episode and then some and I was shellshocked at how much fun it was.

I apologize for the long story, but it's important to the point I'm trying to make. MS-DOS was an amazing OS for it's time, and Doom was also amazing for it's time. People only think Doom isn't as good on MS-DOS then on a modern port is because most people start playing Doom on either Windows 95, or higher. So, Doom on MS-DOS was mostly defunct. However, if you go back and play it on an ACTUAL MS-DOS computer, it's a blast. It makes you feel like you're back in 1993, especially when you quit the game and the whole ID Software screen comes up. It's quite an experience :)

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facelessdoomer said:

MS-DOS was an amazing OS for it's time


Millions of contemporary bitter, bilious, vitriolic exchanges between MS-DOS and Amiga/TOS/GEM/MacOS users beg to disagree ;-)

MS-DOS was widely considered to an anomaly, a primitive OS still stuck to its single-tasking, single-user, text-mode CP/M roots from the 70s, which somehow managed to live on until the mid 90s, while the rest of the (home) computing world used multitasking, GUI-based OSes since the mid 80s. This was also an era where an OS was pretty much "married" to the hardware platform using it.

On the other hand, it did little to stand in the way of fully harnessing the hardware's power, so at least games like Doom could push it aside and do their thing without being forced to use any restrictive APIs (like it was the case e.g. on the Mac or on UNIX-based OSes). To be fair, most Amiga games also functioned in "OS-less" mode.

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The-smartest-masterm said:

Oh okay must be a pain in the arse to set it all up.


Not really. DOS wasn't hard, just more technical than a GUI. Some people need pictures. A lot of people are dumb.

I played it on a 486 DX4100 with DOS 6.22 back in 1994. It was awesome. As awesome as Doom ever was. But I wouldn't take that over the source ports with options turned on (cl_capfps=true for a more authentic feel). Even WinDoom in 640x480 is a much better experience overall.

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facelessdoomer said:

MS-DOS was an amazing OS for it's time

It really, really wasn't.

The history of MS-DOS:

  • It was originally 86-QDOS, a "Quick and Dirty Operating System" that Microsoft bought out because they needed something quickly to compete with CP/M when bidding for the contract to supply software for the IBM PC. It was basically a cheap knockoff of CP/M that got into a dominant position by being the OS shipped with the original PC.
  • I remember reading (unfortunately I forget where now) that MS-DOS was itself only intended to be a stopgap OS before Xenix would become the standard OS for PCs. Unfortunately by the time Xenix was ready, DOS was too ingrained.
  • By the early '90s all PCs were being shipped with 80386s at the minimum, which support all the essential features of modern CPUs - memory protection, preemptive multitasking, etc. These are the features you need to make a reliable operating system and DOS doesn't use them. Even when Windows 9x (a continuation of the DOS code base) finally introduced them in 1995 it was limited in the extent to which it could support them, because of the need for DOS backwards compatibility.
  • OS/2 and Windows NT were both conceived as successors to DOS and were technically superior in every way. The latter finally succeeded in 2001 with the introduction of Windows XP, but it essentially took 10 years because of the ingrained need for DOS backwards compatibility.
  • The command line essentially became an anachronism in 1984 when Apple introduced the Macintosh and popularized the concept of a graphical user interface (and yes, I know they didn't invent the concept). Despite this, PCs soldiered on in the dark ages of the command line for another 10 years, even if Windows 3.x made things slightly more usable. It's interesting to see what other home computers from the '80s / '90s were doing that weren't burdened by backwards compatibility: the Atari ST, Amiga and Acorn Archimedes all had OSes with graphical interfaces.
In summary MS-DOS was a blight on the tech industry that after being introduced as a stop-gap measure, held it back for over 20 years because, even though superior alternatives existed at every point in its history, it had application support. That's literally all it ever had going for it.

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I don't fully agree. NeXTSTEP was certainly ahead of it's time. It was also expensive and had fairly limited support. OS/2 was a pain to configure with minimal gains over DOS; mainly a GUI. A Honda may not be as sexy as a Ferrari but they're generally reliable.

A lot of the limitations in DOS came from memory management, which were solved by things like Dos Extenders, QEMM, and eventually Win95. It wasn't all roses of course, but calling it a blight strikes me as a bit of hyperbole.

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I played it on DOS with Norton Commander plugin back in 1995 on 486 dx machine with 8mb RAM. I miss the good old startup screen with "init Doom refresh deamon...".

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RunningWild said:

I don't fully agree. NeXTSTEP was certainly ahead of it's time. It was also expensive and had fairly limited support. OS/2 was a pain to configure with minimal gains over DOS; mainly a GUI. A Honda may not be as sexy as a Ferrari but they're generally reliable.

As a rule I don't try to understand car analogies so your latter point went over my head.

I think you're misinformed about OS/2: it actually introduced some innovative features and did so several years before Windows NT came on the market, or Windows 95 popularized them - specifically things like an object-oriented user interface, journalling filesystem, memory protection and preemptive multitasking.

There's a good video from the '90s I linked to a few weeks ago that demonstrates some of them:


A lot of the limitations in DOS came from memory management, which were solved by things like Dos Extenders, QEMM, and eventually Win95. It wasn't all roses of course, but calling it a blight strikes me as a bit of hyperbole.

No, I think you're confused. The main problems of DOS were the lack of memory protection rather than memory management. QEMM solved the latter (allowing drivers to be loaded into upper memory on an OS that was originally designed to only support 640KB). DOS extenders (like DOS/4GW used by Doom) provide some of the features of an OS that provides memory protection but only to a single program.

And that's the point, really. Memory protection is something that you absolutely need to have at the OS level. Without it, any rogue program can crash the machine. Nowadays we take it for granted that if a program crashes you can kill it. If you used DOS you know that if a game or other program crashed, it was time to reboot.

The 80386 (the first x86 CPU to support this) was introduced 1986. OS/2 introduced support for memory protection in the late '80s. It wasn't until Windows 95 that Microsoft introduced a comparable feature in its consumer OS line. Even then the ubiquity of the "blue screen of death" shows that they didn't do it in a fully airtight way, and that's mainly for compatibility reasons.

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fraggle said:

I remember reading (unfortunately I forget where now) that MS-DOS was itself only intended to be a stopgap OS before Xenix would become the standard OS for PCs. Unfortunately by the time Xenix was ready, DOS was too ingrained.

Never heard of that. I wonder how important Unix and Linux would have become for gaming PCs, if Xenix were the main OEM system back then.

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fraggle said:

I remember reading (unfortunately I forget where now) that MS-DOS was itself only intended to be a stopgap OS before Xenix would become the standard OS for PCs. Unfortunately by the time Xenix was ready, DOS was too ingrained.

Actually, Xenix was released at the same time as DOS, as an option for IBM PCs. (Yes, Microsoft once offered users a choice when it comes to operating systems. The early days of home computing were crazy times.) Everybody used the technologically inferior DOS for one simple reason: it was backwards compatible with CP/M, so people could still use all their old programs. Indeed, CP/M was only popular because it meant you could run the same programs on different brands of hardware, at at time when "portability" meant being able to lift the machine with one hand - if you've been working out.

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LogicDeLuxe said:

Never heard of that. I wonder how important Unix and Linux would have become for gaming PCs, if Xenix were the main OEM system back then.


Well since this was before the conception of Linux (and possibly earlier than GNU, or at least contemporary) the starting conditions would be radically different and who knows if we would have ended up with GNU/Linux at all.

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Foxpup said:

Everybody used the technologically inferior DOS for one simple reason: it was backwards compatible with CP/M, so people could still use all their old programs.


Unless there were many x86 CP/M programs around before DOS, I doubt that was the reason. I know the Z80 CPU was backwards compatible with the Intel 8085 and 8080 CPUs, but there was no direct upgrade path to anything 8086 based (there was, however, at least one dual-CPU, dual-OS capable XT clone that could run both DOS and CP'M).

There was a CP/M 86 meant for 8086 CPUs, yeah, but it was incompatible with other CP/M platforms, and also with MS-DOS or PC-DOS.

Foxpup said:

Indeed, CP/M was only popular because it meant you could run the same programs on different brands of hardware, at at time when "portability" meant being able to lift the machine with one hand - if you've been working out.


That's true, but at least the CPU architecture had to be the same (e.g. you couldn't directly use 68000 or 6502 CP/M software on a Z80/8085/8080 platform), and you needed a platform-specific CP/M boot disk anyway. You couldn't boot e.g. an Amstrad CPC (also CP/M capable) with a disk meant for e.g. a Tatung Einstein, though they could run the same e.g. word processing app, as long as everything else about it was "vanilla".

A more valid reason for using DOS or a CP/M derivative back in the early 80s was the high cost of RAM and hard disks: the fact that DOS could use up to 640 KB didn't mean that all PCs came with tha much RAM installed: they could start as low as 64 KB, and it's unthinkable that a UNIX derivative could be usable at those low amounts of RAM. In fact, UNIX-anything remained a "professional" OS throughout the 80s and most of the 90s, until Linux became a sort of "Unix for the masses", only made possible because even entry level computers could satisfy UNIX's insatiable appetite for RAM and virtual memory (as an Amiga user had put it, "UNIX workstations need 8 MB and several SCSI hard disks just to display a login prompt").

Oh, and just to prove the point, taken from the Xenix 3.0 release summary:


4. HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS
The absolute minimum hardware requirements for XENIX Version 3.0 are as follows:
• 512k bytes of main memory.
• 10M bytes of hard disk storage.
• One backup device (mag tape or Hoppy disk).

...

No system without a hard disk will be able to run XENIX Version 3.0. [/quote

N.B., those are minimum requirements, and quite honestly, they would be almost stratospheric for 1983. OK, the OS was clearly more capable than primitive DOS, but the average IBM PC user couldn't justify the overhead in order to have features like multitasking, time sharing, multiple users etc. It was clearly a "professional" OS, targeted at a different market demographic.

A DOS or CP/M "workstation", on the converse could be productive for the average Joe with just a single floppy drive and total addressable RAM under 256KB. But anything UNIX based, including that Tanenbaum's Minix? No way.

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Maes said:

Unless there were many x86 CP/M programs around before DOS, I doubt that was the reason. I know the Z80 CPU was backwards compatible with the Intel 8085 and 8080 CPUs, but there was no direct upgrade path to anything 8086 based (there was, however, at least one dual-CPU, dual-OS capable XT clone that could run both DOS and CP'M).

There was a CP/M 86 meant for 8086 CPUs, yeah, but it was incompatible with other CP/M platforms, and also with MS-DOS or PC-DOS.

I stand corrected. I'm not sure where I got the incorrect information from; I only recall reading it "somewhere". I think I (or my source) got confused about the fact that DOS is more-or-less assembly-compatible with CP/M, so it requires no special effort to produce software for both platforms, which is apparently what most software companies started doing when DOS was released. In any event, there was never a Xenix version of Wordstar etc, which is all most users cared about.

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Foxpup said:

Actually, Xenix was released at the same time as DOS, as an option for IBM PCs. (Yes, Microsoft once offered users a choice when it comes to operating systems. The early days of home computing were crazy times.)

I don't think that's quite right. Initial release of DOS was August 1981 according to Wikipedia. The initial release of Xenix was 1980 but that was not for the PC - it originally ran on the PDP-11 and Microsoft were selling it for other computers before the PC even came on the market. It seems like the PC port of Xenix was long delayed and eventually appeared for the PC/AT in 1983 (which had a 286 chip).

I haven't been able to find a source for the "DOS as a stopgap for Xenix" story (other than, in Google searching, one of my own Slashdot comments from 2002, much to my amusement), so maybe disregard that. But it was certainly a knockoff of CP/M.

Foxpup said:

Everybody used the technologically inferior DOS for one simple reason: it was backwards compatible with CP/M, so people could still use all their old programs. Indeed, CP/M was only popular because it meant you could run the same programs on different brands of hardware, at at time when "portability" meant being able to lift the machine with one hand - if you've been working out.

Right, backwards compatibility again... only thing DOS ever had going for it.

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My neighbor's computer as well as my first real computer with a soundcard (it was an NEC Ready 486, really nice) both were host to Doom's shareware. My first computer after my parents divorced became home to Doom 2, and it ran Win98. I didn't get the full version of Doom 1 until... I wanna say early 2000s? And by that point I was on yet another computer... WinXP if I remember right.

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i built a retro rig recently, and doom performance is abysmally slow.
rig spec:
ali m1489 mainboard
cyrix 486dx-25
512kb onboard cache
64mb edo ram
ati mach64 2mb isa videocard
creative sound blaster pro
8gb ide ssd drive
i run vanilla doom in win95osr2 command prompt from boot menu, with -nosound.

timedemo results:
doom shareware demo3: 9fps
hell revealed 2 map32 uv speed: 1.5fps

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noshutdown said:

i built a retro rig recently, and doom performance is abysmally slow.


You might want to check out a thread of mine of how I was able to squeeze every bit of performance out of an equally borderline rig. I used overclocking, wait-state tweaking, everything in the "old farts" book of tricks, enough to make a nearly 25% difference.

fraggle said:

Right, backwards compatibility again... only thing DOS ever had going for it.


You mean, it was the "golden standard" to which all other OSes that hoped to gain any significant market share for the next uhhh...15 years had to conform with ;-)

CP/86 was released only in 1982, a bit too late to be considered as a compatibility target by MS-DOS itself (if anything, it was CP/M 86 that had better be MS-DOS compatible!). Also, binary compatibility between, say, MS-DOS .COM files and CP/M .CMD files, assuming of course both were x86, was limited. I don't understand where that "mutual compatibility" argument comes from. "Close enough for developers to support both" is one thing, but saying that MS-DOS was CP/M and CP/M was MS-DOS is another.

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noshutdown said:

cyrix 486dx-25

It is a bit slow for Doom. I recommend a DX66 at least. 3rd party wads might need even more. Especially if they have many sectors and monsters and the author didn't bother to build a reject map.

noshutdown said:

ati mach64 2mb isa videocard

That would be the real bottleneck then, I guess.
ISA is slow. A gaming 486 should have at least a VESA local bus graphics card.

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LogicDeLuxe said:

That would be the real bottleneck then, I guess.
ISA is slow. A gaming 486 should have at least a VESA local bus graphics card.


Thank Heavens for ISA bus overclocking (though with a 25 MHz CPU, it's probably already slightly overclocked (CLK/3, so 25/3 = 8 1/3 Mhz vs the 8 "vanilla" ones. I don't think many BIOSes/mobos offered a CLK/2 option). The ATI Mach is actually almost as good as it gets for an ISA card, but it may require tweaking with ISA bus overclocking, wait states, cache write-back policy etc. to maximize its potential.

In any case, any improvement to that system passes through a CPU overclocking, at least to 33 MHz, or replacing the CPU with one that has a higher native bus speed (Intel's fastest was 33 MHz, 40 MHz and 50 MHz bus speeds were only used by Amd and Cyrix, and especially 50 MHz was problematic for VESA. But the ISA overclocking potential was wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiicked. Modern 0v3rcl0xx0rz fux0rz d00dz would dream of doing a nearly 25-50% overclocking with impunity as a matter of course ;-)

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Well, it's certainly possible to refresh the screen 35 times a second with arbitrary content even over the ISA bus (you need about 2.24 MB/sec), and the ISA bus can handle up to about 16 MB/sec, in theory.

In practice, not all VGA cards (or programs using the VGA...) are equally capable. There are wait states to consider (on some VGA cards, you have to set jumpers to allow for the fastest possible response), as well as programming inefficiencies or limitations imposed by special modes, e.g. Doom uses ModeX and page flipping. Still, it should be more than enough, but then the main bottleneck in that system is the CPU, way before the VGA card reaches its limits. It certainly doesn't hurt to eliminate needless sources of delays like e.g. slow writes, long wait states etc. but those will at best shave off a few %.

There was a thread recently where a bottleneck possibly caused by how ISA/PCI translation is handled under DOS limits the maximum timedemo performance obtainable under vanilla Doom, at least on real hardware.

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fraggle said:

It was basically a cheap knockoff of CP/M that got into a dominant position by being the OS shipped with the original PC.


That was quite the smartest move of Bill Gates at all: To have it bundled with IBM PCs. May have been a risk, its public acceptance was hard to predict; PCs becoming a best seller was the big luck of Microsoft.
_

noshutdown said:

i built a retro rig recently, and doom performance is abysmally slow.
rig spec:
ali m1489 mainboard
cyrix 486dx-25
...


Uh. Cyrix. And only 25 MHz. The 386SX had 40 MHz and we had to shrink the window.

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LigH said:

Uh. Cyrix. And only 25 MHz. The 386SX had 40 MHz and we had to shrink the window.


Why? Cyrix and AMD usually outperformed Intel at frequency (or price ;-) parity. And a 486 was always at least twice as fast as a 386 at frequency parity.

Coincidentally, this vid compares just two such systems.

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