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invictius

What's the performance overhead for running vanilla in windows?

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I noticed that final doom's requirements are a 486/66 for doom95 compared to dos but not sure about dos vanilla in a 9x command prompt.

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invictius said:

I noticed that final doom's requirements are a 486/66 for doom95 compared to dos but not sure about dos vanilla in a 9x command prompt.


Off the top of my head, the requirements were 8M if you wanted to run under Windows, 4M otherwise. my Doom 2 box just says "4M", I think it was Final Doom that added the 8M for under Windows thing.

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Jon said:

Off the top of my head, the requirements were 8M if you wanted to run under Windows, 4M otherwise. my Doom 2 box just says "4M", I think it was Final Doom that added the 8M for under Windows thing.


Is ther anything about Windows behaviour that would make it noticeably slower than within true dos?

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Doom95 has a higher resolution and thus a few vanilla limits increased, which naturally would require a more powerful computer. If your graphics driver can handle 320x200 and Doom95 runs at full screen at that resolution, the performance should be very similar to the DOS version. But why bother, you could just run the DOS version on Windows 9x.

And of course, since Windows is multi tasking, you can take a look at the task manager to see how much CPU time Doom really utilizes.

I wouldn't recommend Doom II on DOS with only 4 MB anyway. I tried it back in the days, and it worked okay for Doom I, but some of the more detailed Doom II maps were unplayable when loading textures from the hard drive all the time. I didn't try "Thy Flesh Consumed" or Final Doom with only 4 MB, but I suspect that those would run similarly sluggish.

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As others have said, the very least you'd have to add Windows 95's own overheads to Doom's, the very least RAM-wise. Then you'd have various drivers and services stealing CPU time and possibly interacting in undesirable ways with video, audio, disk I/O etc.

Depending on how marginal your system was (specs-wise) to begin with, you might not notice any differences in performance, to being unable to even start the game, and everything in between. In general, running DOS games straight from within Windows was a hit-and-miss affair. It was generally a waste of CPU power and a needless exposure to all kinds of incompatibilities under Windows 3.1x, and even under Windows 95 it was still not really a transparent process. The only exception were those late DOS games that were designed to run even with Windows 95 present and got tested under these circumstances. Anything before that time however was a crapshoot. The simplest and oldest the DOS game, the easiest it would be to run it under Windows 95. The more "dirty" it was (programming-wise), the hardest it would be.

TL; DR: YMMV

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In my experience running vanilla Doom II in Windows 95 necessitated 16 megs of ram and at least a Pentium 133 to not slow down.

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ReFracture said:

In my experience running vanilla Doom II in Windows 95 necessitated 16 megs of ram and at least a Pentium 133 to not slow down.


Heh, I remember spending $100 on a pci s3 with 4mb ram in 1998 because I thought less vram was the cause of not being able to run doom95 in 640x480... how little I knew. What are the real requirements for 640*480 in doom95?

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At least 4x CPU power for vanilla. Not as hard as it seems, since a Pentium had roughly 2x the power of a 486 at frequency parity, so if you consider a 486DX/66 OK for vanilla, that would boil down to a Pentium 133 for 640x400.

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In DOS, doom2.exe ran just fine on my 486DX/33. I even remember seeing Doom played on a 286, albeit zoomed out so there was a border around the viewport.

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As I discovered years later, a good VGA card was also a factor. Significant enough to make a 486DX/50 "so -so" and a 486DX/33 "good enough". RAM was also a factor, esp. in Doom 2, as all the CPU power in world won't help you if the hard disk is constantly trashing, so we're talking about at least 8 MB here.

Doom can't run on 286s though: it's a 32-bit protected mode program. The minimum CPU is a 386 SX. which really is just as powerful as a 286 at frequency parity.

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I must have remembered wrong and it was a 386. My 486 came with 4 MB, but I later added 16MB, making it 20MG total. There is a good chance that that upgrade was before i played Doom.

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Empyre said:

In DOS, doom2.exe ran just fine on my 486DX/33.


The first system I ran Doom on was just that with 4MB RAM - and some of the Doom 1 IWAD levels already had problems. It was a pretty shitty experience. In mid 1994 I got a 486/66 MHz with 8 GB of RAM as a work computer, this was the first system I could play without lag.

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I remember playing the Wolf3D shareware on my IBM 286 - which had 4 megabytes of RAM, and it only flowed smoothly when you had the smallest possible screen selected. DooM would probably flow a lot worse.

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Olroda said:

I remember playing the Wolf3D shareware on my IBM 286 - which had 4 megabytes of RAM, and it only flowed smoothly when you had the smallest possible screen selected. DooM would probably flow a lot worse.


As Maes, said, it would not run on a 286 at all. I remember running it on a 386, and it you needed to make the viewport a postage stamp to get anything like smooth flow.

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Graf Zahl said:

In mid 1994 I got a 486/66 MHz with 8 GB of RAM as a work computer...


Wait what? The 486 is physically incapable of addressing more than 4GB of memory. Besides, what application or operating system of that day could ever manage that much ram?

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WTF? Sorry, of course I meant MB. It sounds strange today to even think of a computer with only 8 MB...

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Yeah it does. I figured you meant 8mb.

I want to say I remember playing Doom II (vanilla in dos) - Refueling Base and The Living End on my uncle's 486/66 with 8mb and there being a bit of slow down.

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I remember seeing a friend trying to run the original Doom shareware on what must have been a 286. Smallest window size, low quality resolution, and it still ran like crap.

I played both Doom and Doom 2 on a Pentium 90Mhz, but can't recall the RAM, and it ran pretty nicely at max everything.

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Bauul said:

I remember seeing a friend trying to run the original Doom shareware on what must have been a 286.



No, just an old 386SX most likely, with the smaller data bus. As already addressed in this thread Doom is a 32 bit program, and thus cannot run on 286 based computers. I also did most of my early Dooming on a P90, it had 24MB of RAM iirc.

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The only way I could get DOS DOOM running on my 4 megabyte 486SX was using a boot disk. I later got an upgrade to 8, which made my memory problems go away, but the game was not particularly performant, getting a noticeable speed boost using low detail.

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Use3D said:

Wait what? The 486 is physically incapable of addressing more than 4GB of memory. Besides, what application or operating system of that day could ever manage that much ram?


I don't think there was any physical way to get 4 GB of addressable RAM back then, either. The largest 30-pin SIMM was 16 MB a piece, tops (in a day and age where getting 8 MB, aka 8 x 1 MB, was a luxury), 72-pin SIMMs were 128 MB tops (usual sizes were much less) etc. They had to be installed in banks of 4, but still a far cry from anything gigabyte-class.

The "4 GB addressable RAM" was more of a theoretical limit, not something physically supported by any plausible RAM/motherboard combination back in the 90s, at least not on an ordinary, single PC. Maybe on a mainframe, or by using memory expansion cards/bank switching on some weird server, but not on an ordinary consumer-level PC.

Some CPUs (like the butchered 386SX) didn't even have enough physical address lines to go beyond 16 MB to begin with, and there were also butchered 486s that were similarly limited. Even when it eventually became possible, in the mid 2000s other problems popped up (like memory-mapped peripherals imposing a 3 GB upper limit).

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I too played Doom on a 286. I also played F-Zero on a ZX Spectrum by plugging the SNES cartridge into the tape drive. Also I am playing Pokemon Go right now on this phone:

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