Retro PC circa 93/94 help

[Capellan]

2 hours ago, Pegleg said:

I would assume he's talking about the cost of LEDs, not a lack of trustworthiness of LEDs.

 

Which would still be a bad argument, since the burnout rate and energy consumption of incandescent bulbs makes them less cost effective then LEDs over any medium-long term analysis.

[savagegrant]

I can confirm that Doom ran smoothly on my 486SX-33 with 4MB of RAM in DOS back in 1994. :)

[Pegleg]

13 hours ago, Capellan said:

 

Which would still be a bad argument, since the burnout rate and energy consumption of incandescent bulbs makes them less cost effective then LEDs over any medium-long term analysis.

I agree that a LED bulb will generally pay for itself over its lifetime as compared to an incandescent bulb installed in the same location and used in the same manner. This is particularly true now that the prices of LED bulbs have come down. Back when LED bulbs would cost you $40-$60 as compared to $1-$2 for the equivalent incandescent bulb, though, it was much harder for that cost-benefit analysis to work out fiscally.

 

I suspect that is @kb1 means, that, in his/her opinion, SSD's have not matured to the point where their cost is low enough compared to HDD's to make switching over to them make sense. From a quick check of newegg.com, you can get a 1 TB HDD for $40-$50, but a 1 TB SDD will cost you $250-$290. Going larger only makes the difference more noticeable: a 4 TB HDD costs ~$100, while a 4 TB SDD costs well over $1000.

[Linguica]

I haven't used a computer with a magnetic hard drive as the system drive in almost a decade. It baffles me that people are still, in 2018, subjecting themselves to that laggy spinny clicky hell.

[kb1]

On 1/23/2018 at 6:23 PM, Linguica said:

Please don't say you still use incandescents because you don't "trust" LEDs...

It's becoming bitterly obvious to me that I don't seem to be able to communicate very well across text.:

• LEDs - very good - they can last indefinitely as long as their operating current isn't exceeded. Comparable to hard-drives which should perpetually, as long as the surface remains intact (certain imperfections have been known to 'walk' and spread over time for some models)
• Incandescents - sold with a well-known lifespan. Comparable to SSDs, which are known, and even expected to degrade over time.

23 hours ago, Blzut3 said:

I'm not sure you followed what I wrote.  You said that being able to rewrite a row in your preallocated table a "maximum of 4,000" times is unacceptable.  My response is that if you took any modern SSD and hammered the same logical block you'd get several orders of magnitude more than 4,000 writes since you'd actually write to a different physical block each time the row was updated ergo the part of your message that I quoted was blatantly false.  Or do I not follow your point?

I got what you said, and, you're right - in SSD setups, sectors are virtual. Even if a program requests a specific block of the media, the hardware is free to move that block where it sees fit. I forgot that in my original statement. Actually, SSDs *have to* move the data during overwrites, if overwriting would cause a 1 to be changed back into a 0. That's because a cell cannot be changed from a 1 to a 0. A cell *can* be changed from a 0 to a 1, but, to do the reverse requires the hardware to "prepare" the cells for writing. This process leaves the cells in a state that could be read as a 0. I think it is this process that causes wear.

 

Cost is another factor as well. The cost of the SSD drives is falling fast, but cannot compare to the cost of comparable magnetic drives.

 

People, use what you wish. I can only describe the situation as I see it. Hell, maybe it's an OCD thing. I don't want to feel like I'm wearing out my hardware, just because I'm copying files around.

 

By the way, I read a story about a city up north, that replaced the incandescent signal lights with LED versions. This worked well, until the first snow storm. The incandescents would melt the snow, but they had to install heaters in the LED versions :)

 

23 hours ago, savagegrant said:

I can confirm that Doom ran smoothly on my 486SX-33 with 4MB of RAM in DOS back in 1994. :)

We're all pretty spoiled with consistent 35+ frames-per-second these days. I think your specs are right at the edge of 35 FPS 320x200 output, on maps with IWAD-ish complexity. I can remember slight stalls with my 486(DX)-50 with 8MB/local bus video, which should have been a bit faster. Even for a "retro" Doom-dedicated box, I'd have to suggest at least a Pentium with 8+MB, just to ensure a consistent top frame rate, and show vanilla Doom at it's best.
 

[Woolie Wool]

Hard drives absolutely do not operate perpetually! Every machine with moving parts is guaranteed to fail at some point, and in my experience hard drives rarely last more than five years or so. Grit gets in, lubricant breaks  down, parts wear out.

[savagegrant]

2 hours ago, kb1 said:

I'd have to suggest at least a Pentium with 8+MB, just to ensure a consistent top frame rate, and show vanilla Doom at it's best.

 

Nobody could afford a Pentium in 1994 though. And when I said Doom, I meant the original release, not Doom II, Ultimate Doom or Final Doom. :)

[mjf6866]

Our family got a Packard Bell with a 486DX4-100mhz with I believe 4MB RAM and a 250MB HDD as our first computer in early 1995.  I remember it running doom very well.  It was right as the Pentium 75 was coming out and was the cheaper option i recall.  Kinda wish i still had it for nostalgia purposes lol

Edited January 25, 2018 by mjf6866

[Pirx]

On 1/18/2018 at 8:36 AM, fraggle said:

Doom will run on a 386 but my experience is that you need a 486 to get decent performance. I used to use a 486SX/33 laptop and it was playable, although it didn't quite reach 35fps. I also had a 486DX2/66 desktop and that gave optimum performance.

 

RAM also matters a lot. Again, it'll run on 4MB but you probably want to install 8MB.

 

SoundBlaster or compatible card is also essential to get the full experience. Most PCs back then still only had a PC speaker and nothing else. IMO Doom was one of the first games that made it truly worth investing in a sound card.

 

this. i played doom and doom2 on a 386dx 40 mhz and a 486 sx 25 mhz. the 386 was ok for doom, but doom2 got unplayable in parts. got to map07 keyboarding happily and savescumming, then this was the horror. a mancubus salvo, screen froze, i'm dead. the 486 ran much better, obviously, but it came with 4 mb ram, and i noticed that when trying to record demos, it seemed to lack memory for what the recording required additionally. i remember it stuttering badly when i thought  that i could record a better demo than romero on map11. then i got a 486 dx2 / 66 with 8 mb and that problem was completely gone. that machine was lightning fast in its day. had a video card by tseng labs. those dots of "init doom refresh daemon" loaded so smooth.  it had a gigantic hdd of 540 mb iirc, and i thought it would be impossible to fill it, ever. but it was the soundblaster that made a world of difference. suddenly like being in a movie rather than guessing what pc speaker squeak  meant what. i didn't feel like playing at all without the soundblaster after having heard one at a friend.

[Opulent]

The first computer I played DOOM on was a 486, IIRC.  Fraggle is right, all you need is a 386.  The real requirement was that your computer had a math co-processor; so a 386DX was needed.  And a soundblaster-compatible card if you wanted sound, IIRC.

That first PC would play DOOM in frame-by-frame in multiplayer and took about 50 seconds to initialize the game.

[kb1]

19 hours ago, Woolie Wool said:

Hard drives absolutely do not operate perpetually! Every machine with moving parts is guaranteed to fail at some point, and in my experience hard drives rarely last more than five years or so. Grit gets in, lubricant breaks  down, parts wear out.

Wow, only 5 years? Maybe I'm just a lucky guy, but I've only had 1 drive partially fail, and it was a dumpster dive PC. Discounting the externals, all of my drives have run for > 5 years, absolutely.

 

The important metric is lifetime of the computer.

 

The drives are vacuum sealed - nothing "gets in". The lubricant is expensive, and designed to handle the workload. With proper care, there are only 2 things which really go wrong with HDDs: Lightning, and microscopic surface pits that can expand overtime. Lightning spikes can fry the hardware, and/or weld the platters. This can be somewhat avoided by running your PC through a good UPS, which can absorb massive levels of current for extremely brief periods of time.

 

You can't do much about the surface pits. These are manufacturing defects. At the factory, they do a write/read pass which finds the untrustable areas of the drive. These areas are marked unusable. This verification process is available, and remains active after the drive leaves the factory. The OS can work with the drive software to continue to mark areas as unusable. Way back in the day, before drives became, essentially, computers themselves, you had to manually input the bad sector list when you got a new drive, and you had to keep this list up-to-date during the life of the drive.

 

Anyway, I have working drives older than SSDs have been around. I hope that no one has problems, regardless of their media. But, I have to go with my experience, which is that HDDs have done their job perfectly for me. I imagine my next computer will come with SSDs as standard, and I'll be sure to put them to the test.

 

19 minutes ago, Pirx said:

 

this. i played doom and doom2 on a 386dx 40 mhz and a 486 sx 25 mhz. the 386 was ok for doom, but doom2 got unplayable in parts. got to map07 keyboarding happily and savescumming, then this was the horror. a mancubus salvo, screen froze, i'm dead. the 486 ran much better, obviously, but it came with 4 mb ram, and i noticed that when trying to record demos, it seemed to lack memory for what the recording required additionally. i remember it stuttering badly when i thought  that i could record a better demo than romero on map11. then i got a 486 dx2 / 66 with 8 mb and that problem was completely gone. that machine was lightning fast in its day. had a video card by tseng labs. those dots of "init doom refresh daemon" loaded so smooth.  it had a gigantic hdd of 540 mb iirc, and i thought it would be impossible to fill it, ever. but it was the soundblaster that made a world of difference. suddenly like being in a movie rather than guessing what pc speaker squeak  meant what. i didn't feel like playing at all without the soundblaster after having heard one at a friend.

Yeah, 4Mb is cutting it close, especially for Doom II. I can remember when I first *saw* a computer that had >10Mb free space - I thought it was a mistake at first! Good times.

[Woolie Wool]

I doubt any of the hard drive failures I have had were at all related to lightning because the hard drive was the only part that failed in all of those instances. Lightning would fuck the entire system up, especially the PSU.

[kb1]

4 hours ago, Woolie Wool said:

I doubt any of the hard drive failures I have had were at all related to lightning because the hard drive was the only part that failed in all of those instances. Lightning would fuck the entire system up, especially the PSU.

A spike tends to take the path of least resistance, but that doesn't help you to predict what it will do. But I would agree with you - if you're having multiple drives fail within 5 year spans, I would think that something else is happening in your environment. Lots of power brownouts/blackouts? Extreme humidity or temperature?

 

Anyway, it seems that another of my random thoughts has corrupted another thread. Sigh. My beliefs are my beliefs, and I've put in the time to be able to have them.

 

I am interested to hear what other people believe, and, to that end, I offer what I believe. It's really no deeper than that. Best of luck.

[Pegleg]

On 1/24/2018 at 8:32 PM, kb1 said:

By the way, I read a story about a city up north, that replaced the incandescent signal lights with LED versions. This worked well, until the first snow storm. The incandescents would melt the snow, but they had to install heaters in the LED versions :)

That is one type of thing that is sometimes overlooked with LEDs. Not only do they not create a lot of heat (which can be a boon in some situations and a curse in others), they also don't do well in the presence of heat. That's why an LED has to designed to function in an enclosed fixture, for example. As incandescent bulbs heat up, they get brighter. As LEDs get hot, they tend to get dimmer.

 

Since I've now contributed to derailing this thread, I'll get back on board now.

 

On 1/24/2018 at 8:32 PM, kb1 said:

We're all pretty spoiled with consistent 35+ frames-per-second these days. I think your specs are right at the edge of 35 FPS 320x200 output, on maps with IWAD-ish complexity. I can remember slight stalls with my 486(DX)-50 with 8MB/local bus video, which should have been a bit faster. Even for a "retro" Doom-dedicated box, I'd have to suggest at least a Pentium with 8+MB, just to ensure a consistent top frame rate, and show vanilla Doom at it's best.

 

14 hours ago, Opulent said:

The first computer I played DOOM on was a 486, IIRC.  Fraggle is right, all you need is a 386.  The real requirement was that your computer had a math co-processor; so a 386DX was needed.  And a soundblaster-compatible card if you wanted sound, IIRC.

That first PC would play DOOM in frame-by-frame in multiplayer and took about 50 seconds to initialize the game.

I do suppose that is the question. The OP wants to show his friends what it was like to play Doom back in 1993-94, which would imply that he is interested in showing his friends the original iwads, definitely Doom and, probably, Doom 2. Or does he want to push it to early slaughterish work like Punisher (yes, it was released in 1995, but the text file does specify that those using a 486 will have a hard time) or some of the harder levels in Plutonia (yes, 1996, I know) or the like? Although, based on personal experience, the majority of 1995-96 era maps would run just fine on a 486DX-something.

 

It would not have been unreasonable for someone to buy a computer in 1993 that was sufficient then and still be using the same computer 3 or 4 years later. My parents had the same computer (486DX2-66) that I used when I first played Doom (in mid 1994) until the late 90's and I think they still had it well into the early 00's.