I played DOOM on many different computers and you could almost always tell how fast it was going to be just by the amount of time that "refresh daemon" step took
that was pretty much me too. i386 dx-40, maybe 4mb ram and a slow ass vga card. had to press F5 to lower the resolution quite a lot. with doom 2 I had to reduce the window size too. was still blown away by the experience. those were good gaming firsts to live through.
Just to be pedantic, it wouldn't have been an i386 at 40mhz, as the "i" was for Intel and Intel never made a 40mhz 386 because they knew it would compete well with the new 486 range they were trying to launch (at 20 and 25 mhz). It was AMD that put out a 40mhz version, possibly also Cyrix, not totally sure on that. Superb chip though, the 40mhz 386 DX.
@@TheAmazingAdventuresOfMilesThere were quite a few Intel 80386DX-33 processors, built in Malaysia in 1989. But only AMD and Cyrix were released at 40 MHz.
FastDoom is able to crunch a little bit more, but not that much (about 2 FPS, unless you turn on some options that will affect rendering). This mean game was indeed very well optimized.
@the hevy but the switch has a extremely underpowered cpu and gpu, so the similarities are understandable, and when you see footage of doom on the switch, it looks terrible, like the snes version of doom.
The PC Speaker sound effects somehow take a lot of the teeth out of Doom, lol. But seriously, there is something nostalgic/relaxing about PC Speaker sound effects (most PC Speaker MUSIC on the other hand....yeah, I could do without that)
The need for at least a 486 66Mhz cpu is pretty evident. Not to mention a sound card. Still, this is cool. I love old PC's. I wish I had room to set up several vintage PC's in a man cave. I remember my first PC being a 286 and wishing I could play demanding games like Doom.
I got several classic PC's from AT through 386dx40 to Pentium 166 and K6-166 with period correct CRT monitors. I also got a few Atari's 8-bit and Amiga's. This was the best era in computing!
What is odd is I grew up with a 386 DX-33 with 8mb ram and I remember it running faster than this. Maybe it had a really good SVGA card? But I feel like back then that didnt matter much in most dos games in software rendering at lower resolutions...It was still even competitive to play on it in network doom against a pentium 100, so it was definitely running faster than what we see here.
@@rallyscoot Back in the days we were used to less, so when someone says it doesn't run well on low end 486 it used to puzzle me as I always remember it was pretty smooth. I thought then when I saw it running on a 486DX 33mhz but with good Vesa Local Bus that it was really smooth compared to my 386DX with slow ISA card. It was better but it wasn't like 35fps which was also the limit, but now when I see it again in a low end 486, it might be 20-25fps which is not good by todays standards although very playable for such an old game. It gets a bit better with FastDoom and also a beefier 486.
Btw as everyone misremembers how fast or slow Doom was, I recently tested a timedemo on both commercial Doom and FastDoom on 386DX 40mhz, 8MB RAM and fast Tseng Labs ET4000 ISA with certain BIOS settings for max throughput. High detail fullscreen Doom: 7.03 FDoom: 9.247 Fdoom13h: 10.842 Half detail fullscreen Doom: 12 FDoom: 16.379 Fdoom13h: 15.602 FDoom can help you play fullscreen with half pixel detail at average 15fps which is not high but it's were it stops being so choppy and is kinda playable. FDoom13h is interesting, it's a different exe that doesn't do mode-X but renders in backbuffer and copies. Advantages, 32bit copies from buffer to slower vram, good for high detail (but still 10fps average), but worse for half-detail as mode-x would be used to trick to write two pixels at once. Things are much better on even low end 486 with good Vesa Local Bus card. Playable enough in my opinion. FastDoom improves on this.
Heh. I played DOOM prereleases and shareware on my king ant's portable work IBM PS/2 model P70 (386 10 Mhz) back then. It had no sound card and color. They were slow and choppy. :)
When Doom came out, anyone into gaming already had a Sound Blaster, hearing anyone playing it on the PC Speaker was very rare. I used to play Doom on my 386 DX40. It was alright!
@@TheAmazingAdventuresOfMiles I don't agree with this. In my experience in 1993 sound blaster was rare on pc and it was expensive. Of course this situation would be different in each country.
@@Corsa15DT Well, I'm thinking back to 1994. Many of the more geeky kids at school had PC's at home and I'd say almost all of them had sound cards, mostly Sound Blasters. Some with Gravis or Adlib. I had a Sound Blaster 2.0, still got it actually, it wasn't expensive in 1994, but was only an 8-bit mono card. Great for Doom though! Maybe in my neighborhood we were all just experts it tapping our parents for tech.
This is how most people seen doom for the first time in 1994. Usually shareware version, or first level. 386, and PC speaker. Dreaming about full screen and high details, fluently.
Hey you know, there is a new doom port called FastDoom for DOS, which is a version optimized for 386 and 486 processors. If you still have your 386 around, maybe you could try again with that port.
it's like a 30% speed improvement on the same hardware. I ran FastDoom on my Mister and it's quite visible. ID could have done a better job with optimization 😉 and people would have been happy to have it because of how expensive PC hardware was - regular people in 1993 are not going to buy a Pentium just to play doom.
@@johnsimon8457 For the time, Doom was pretty well optimized for what it was doing, and when it came out in 1993, 386 processors were on the edge of irrelevancy...hell in just a few years the Pentium would be the standard. There's also the fact that people have had decades to pore over the source code for the game, picking it apart and experimenting, a luxury they didn't have at the time.
@@yellowblanka6058 In the 80's, home users weren't buying IBM PCs for gaming. Gaming is a secondary thing to whatever productivity software that a business would be using. Also, they're pretty expensive, 20x the cost of an NES in 80's dollars. There's a reason why Wolf 3D runs on a 286 with PC speaker sound or commander keen runs on an 8086 with CGA graphics. This is all a long winded way of saying, people Really held onto old hardware. In any case (unless you're rich) you're not going to roll out to buy a Pentium in 1993. Regarding optimization; getting more frames out of 386/486. I don't think it's "decades of knowledge" - usually it's one or two really dedicated guys like Kaze Emanuar (check out his work with Mario 64) and making sure the code made the best use of CPU pipelines and instruction caches. C compilers were also 'good enough' but not producing the optimized code we have today. On the other hand, Carmack was also inventing/researching the engine while he's developing the game so in the whole list of priorities 1. Get it working 2. get it working right 3. get it working fast - optimization wasn't as much of a priority.
thank your. i'm looking for a second hand DX4 100 MHz. but my father don't want to buy it only for games. :( i'll show him the new autocad for windows 95 and maybe he will change his mind.
This is a nice job. Shows what potential was in the OCS chipset. And what will the effects be on the Amiga 600 ECS with 4mb FAST RAM? Doom on 386DX 40Mhz didn't work too fast.
I had a 386DX40 back in the day, and it ran Doom pretty slow like this one but I put in a much better graphics card and it actually made a huge difference. Literally doubled the FPS, proving the 386 DX40 was ample for Doom. For giggles I also tried it on my 386 SX40, same graphics card, and it was awful. Literally unplayable at times.
This is how I played doom...my neighbor got a 100mhz pc, some Pentium Acer thingy from best buy...he could play his off CD, man I was jealous...I did like to push the button and go down to 20 mhz for slow mo...I wish I knew about multiplayer deathmatch.
I didnt recall DOOM being so slow in a 386DX/40. Maybe most of us had cheap VGA cards which were simply slow framebuffers. I remember Trident8900/9000, OTI, Realtek, those were popular, cheap and low quality chips. With some ATI or Tseng this was playable I guess?
It looks about right to me. Fast ISA card would help, but I've had the best Tseng Labs ISA measured in benchmarks, even set up certain BIOS ISA bus speed options to improve things, in my OP 386DX 40mhz with 8MB. And I know in full res it's very choppy. And I play in half res and it's about that speed. Okayish playable but not perfect. Same as in the video, half res and a bit of window drop. It was THAT slow even in beefy 386DX. FastDoom helps a bit but still only good on half-res detail.
@@indiocolifa Yes I have that one, I also have the ET6000 but on PCI for later systems. I also try to collect few ISA tseng labs as I know they have the best speed for a retro 386. I am testing things right now. I don't think I had this card back in the 90s though.
I remember back to the day playing DooM shareware on a AMD 386 DX 40 with 4MiB and some OAK SVGA card and a Sound Galaxy sound card. I think that I had bit better experience that you (faster SVGA card? and/or that driving the PC Speaker requires more cpu power that sending samples to the sound card ? )
0WS, FIFO and fast local memory (60ns) can speed up ISA VGA up to 30% on DX40 Typical card, that support this are Trident 8900CL or CL542x with 0WS enabled
@ch282 Yes it did matter more than I thought it would at the time. I ran Doom on my 386DX40, using a very old hat graphics card. I put in a newer one with faster video memory and it made a big difference. There was no need to have a reduced screen size, it was fine in full-size, except occasionally when there were just crazy amounts of mobs, then it needed notching down a bit to keep it fluid. Looking at this video, I would say it was more like it was on my original slow 80's era VGA card.
I completely deleted the experience of gaming doom with pc speaker sound from my mind. this is basically the same configuration of my first computer, bought in 1993. Seeing how slow this game runs in this machine I can understand why I never was able to reach level 4 episode 1.
Yep. On my AMD 386DX/40 mhz w/8 mb RAM and Soundblaster Pro, this is exactly how Doom ran--barely. Doom II was unplayable. On that PC, I played Doom: Episode 1 on Ultra-Violence full-screen w/status bar on "low detail" (F5) which yielded about 5-6 fps, like at 3:05. During a lull in the action, I could press F5, switching to "high detail," and briefly admire the "intended" way Doom was meant to be played--all at 2-3 fps like at 3:17. Good luck playing on Ultra-Violence like that. Doom was really intended for 486s, like a 486SX/25mhz or a 486DX/33mhz. On those, you could play full-screen on high detail, but you were still playing at 5-6 fps. That's why the monsters move so slowly. In the mid-'90s, 386s were still viable while 486s were considerably more expensive. A Pentium cost several thousand dollars. You needed a pretty high-end, and expensive, PC to play Doom decently back in the day. Yet on my 386DX, Doom's predecessor, Wolfenstein 3D, ran like a champ. Corridor 7 (1994) used an enhanced Wolf3D engine with variable light. That made for a dark and scary world much like Doom and without floor and ceiling textures. The Corridor 7 demo ran decently on my 386. It made me wonder why Doom didn't use that upgraded Wolf3D engine and be able to run on more PCs and better on all of them. Doom is really Wolfenstein 3D with more weapons and ammo and a very fancy graphics engine. As one of my favorite video games, Doom is overrated. Much of its gameplay could've been retained in an enhanced Corridor 7-type Wolf3D engine with diminished light sourcing and no floor or ceiling textures. In between Wolf3D and Doom, Id Software actually made an enhanced Wolf3D engine with floor and ceiling textures for Shadowcaster. But the view window was small and view distance was short with objects "popping" into view, one of Carmack's peeves.
In the mid 90s only the top of the line Pentiums cost several thousand dollars, unless perhaps you were a tard who bought prebuilt PCs where it was all marked up to high hell. In the early 90s when the Pentium was just new, yeah, these PCs did indeed cost a lot. But by 1994 a fully equipped PREBUILT 486 system cost about 1000 dollars, while a prebuilt Pentium system cost less than 3k. By 1995 even less than that. Note that with Doom you could also use a 486SX with no performance penalty as it didn't use any floating point operations. When the 486SLC was introduced, the 486SX had its price reduced to 119 dollars. That was in 1992, mind you.
Hmm, dunno where you got those 1994 prices for 486s. Maybe they were that cheap in Trollville, but not the real world. A 486SX wouldn't have been much of a performance improvement over a 386DX for Doom anyway. You really needed a 486DX to play Doom semi-decently - that is, at fullscreen in high resolution at 5-6 fps. I saw Doom E1M4 played on a 486DX2/66mhz at a store in Dec. 1994. Doom ran well at that point. The whole PC only cost $3000 - at least. Trollololol
@@BrianBeeby The sauce is LA times for the PC price. And thandor for the benchmarks. Even CPU Galaxy had a 16 MHz 486SX tested on some industrial board and got 11 FPS, which is more than the 386's 8 FPS. And wow, you got ripped off bad with that PC! I hope that's adjusted for inflation! The 486DX2 was last gen stuff by late 1994.
+SouthwesternEagle What I find strange is that there was no option in Doom to disable the floor and ceiling and maybe even wall textures. Would make the game playlable on 386 and maybe even 286 PCs.
There is a guy saying it isn't possible to play Doom on a 386. LOL. Phil's Computer Lab. He's convinced it can't be done. He also doesn't think going from 4 MB to 8 MB of RAM would make a difference.
You have to consider the time. This was actually a better Doom experience on a good 386DX with a secondary floating point / mathco processor and 8 MB of RAM than playing many of the console ports, particularly the 3DO version.
The problem is that even through Phill is a really great old computer stuff reviewer and I am very thankful for his videos, he once stated on vogons that he considers everything below 75 fps "not smooth". He is basically a retrogamer who expects modern high end PC framerates from ancient machines (because even last gen consoles rarely got truly stable 30 fps, many late PS3 titles dropped to 18 fps regularly). Most PSX or N64 games would be "unplayable" for him. That is why he recommends an Athlon XP for games intended for Pentium II, a Pentium III for games intended for a Pentium 1, a Pentium for 486 games etc. Me? I prefer playing games as I remember them, unless they ran REALLY badly. The definition of "playable" always depends on one's wallet, here in Slovakia I know many friends who play games on 300 Euro laptops because the average wage is 600 euro/month and they don't have jobs yet. So they play at 10-20 fps, in 2017, in minimum details, yet when I talk to them about games they seem to get more joy out of them than someone from first world upper middle class who buy a new 2000 USD PC every year and spend more time "tweaking" than actually playing. I respect Phil for his effort to make good videos, but he should really play SNES Doom if he thinks 386 Doom is "unplayable".
@@ramdrivesys1869 Really for 600 euros you can build a PC that will run games at higher than 10 or 20 FPS. Much higher. Witcher 3 runs better on a PC from 2009.
This runs quite well! I saw a video of a 386 overclocked to 50 MHz (ua-cam.com/video/R_Jsdsu7LrY/v-deo.html) but that ran Doom rather poorly. Perhaps it had high detail, and it did run fullscreen (without the frame). But I do wonder: perhaps there is a difference in videocard here? What if you’d pair the fastest ISA videocard to an overclocked 386 with cache and memory maxed out?
That might be ok because 1) he is running full screen full detail 2) he is running the timedemo that doesn't skip frames so everything seems like the time slowed down. I'd like to see an actual playthrough in either full detail or half detail in this machine.
@@Optimus6128 good point about the timedemo, that makes a difference. I don’t know why, but somehow it’s fascinating to see Doom running OK-ish on a 386 class machine 🤓
@@kasimirdenhertog3516 Yeah, it's great to see Doom running okayish on 386. I love to beef my retro PCs too nowadays knowing the best graphics cards and settings in BIOS. It makes a difference especially with FastDoom, 386 wasn't as bad if coders could push performance.
I played it o a 386DX-25 with sound blaster too. It was playable, but not a full screen siz and i cant remember how good it was running. I had a 387 co-cpu mounted. Anybody know if that helped increase the perfomance?
@@lubosjanku8831 Don't agree - I made a little video of my good old 386DX-40 with some Doom gameplay which you can find on my channel - it's not that bad and as you can see, Doom is playable on a 386.
Hi ! I had that machine and it run well on it. i just had 4 giga ram. this is somekind of crap. My machine was 386 dx2 40 with 4 gb ram. And a gameplay was smooth.
I had a bit better performance than this on my 386 DX33, (overclocked 25) I remember being able to run 1 notch from full screen, with low quality. At about 13 fps if i remember. My configuration had 128kb external cache, 0WS memory, 11.1 mhz ISA clock, AWE32, and CL5429 video card 0WS. I also had a 387 co-processor however I do not recall if that had any impact, AFAIK it doesn't, or it is very little if any. Going from the original configuration of 25 mhz DX, with 8mhz ISA clock and Trident 8900 to faster ISA clocks, the faster video card and zero wait states while overclocking literally doubled its performance or more. The overclocking and timing changes I did right away in 1990, but the video card was easily the biggest upgrade my computer got at the time doom came out. Stock it was slower than your computer here by about the same proportion to clock speed.
@@glittlehoss lol, Quake is one of the first exceptions of games, that used heavily FPU, and was optimized on Pentium platform. Basicaly 99,9% games before Quake (release date: mid 1996), didnt used FPU. It was obvious, if they would use it, most of gamers didnt have money for it. So they rather programmed it without FPU instructions. So no. It will not speed up games, except some 3D games, particulary Quake. In 1997 and 1998, there were more and more games using heavily FPU. But that was already outside of 386 and 486 area. You don''t need FPU on 386, to play games. It will not help you anyhow. In games, that would help it, you will have like 1 or 2 fps. Whenever you have 1 or 2 or 5 fps, game is still unplayable.
@@glittlehoss Quake is unplayable even with a coprocessor. I also have a coprcessor in one 386, so I know it's there to add to the socket. There is no shift to the front in games.
I played DOOM on many different computers and you could almost always tell how fast it was going to be just by the amount of time that "refresh daemon" step took
8MB RAM - that was hell of the RAM!
For some reason, when I see original Doom like this, I feel like the player is peering through an extradimensional window into a low-res universe.
that was pretty much me too. i386 dx-40, maybe 4mb ram and a slow ass vga card. had to press F5 to lower the resolution quite a lot. with doom 2 I had to reduce the window size too. was still blown away by the experience. those were good gaming firsts to live through.
Just to be pedantic, it wouldn't have been an i386 at 40mhz, as the "i" was for Intel and Intel never made a 40mhz 386 because they knew it would compete well with the new 486 range they were trying to launch (at 20 and 25 mhz). It was AMD that put out a 40mhz version, possibly also Cyrix, not totally sure on that. Superb chip though, the 40mhz 386 DX.
@@TheAmazingAdventuresOfMilesThere were quite a few Intel 80386DX-33 processors, built in Malaysia in 1989. But only AMD and Cyrix were released at 40 MHz.
Its crazy what we had to endure to PC game in the 90s and now we hear clueless brats saying how "slow" their 12th gen i5s now is
This is as clean, old school, nostalgic as it can get. Major props.
It's amazing this could run on such hardware. Really cool programming at work.
edit: Needs SOUNDBLASTER technology haha.
Soundcard is needed for testing, needs only a PC speaker :)
Adallace IIRC this 386 is faster than some 486.
And yeah, it at least needs Tandy Sound or something lmao!!
FastDoom is able to crunch a little bit more, but not that much (about 2 FPS, unless you turn on some options that will affect rendering). This mean game was indeed very well optimized.
Doom (1993) requirements -> Min RAM: 4 MB, Recommended RAM: 8 MB
Doom (2016) requirements -> Min RAM: 4 GB, Recommended RAM: 8 GB
What a coincidence!
imagine a day (most likely not on silicon. if evem possible) of min ram 8tb, Recommend Ram 8tb. haha
Doom(2039) requirements -> Min RAM: 4TB, Recommended RAM: 8TB
now check out the snes version of doom 1994
or the nintendo switch version of doom 2016
What a coincidence!
@the hevy but the switch has a extremely underpowered cpu and gpu, so the similarities are understandable, and when you see footage of doom on the switch, it looks terrible, like the snes version of doom.
The PC Speaker sound effects somehow take a lot of the teeth out of Doom, lol. But seriously, there is something nostalgic/relaxing about PC Speaker sound effects (most PC Speaker MUSIC on the other hand....yeah, I could do without that)
It irritated me that you never got to fight a refresh daemon - it seemed so important at the beginning there.
It is just testing how DOOM go on a 386DX processor :)
I got the joke. xP
This is pretty much exactly how I was introduced to Doom back in the mid 90's. Still play it everyday since :) Cool video
Melhor GAME até hoje GOD XD
The need for at least a 486 66Mhz cpu is pretty evident. Not to mention a sound card. Still, this is cool. I love old PC's. I wish I had room to set up several vintage PC's in a man cave. I remember my first PC being a 286 and wishing I could play demanding games like Doom.
I got several classic PC's from AT through 386dx40 to Pentium 166 and K6-166 with period correct CRT monitors. I also got a few Atari's 8-bit and Amiga's. This was the best era in computing!
What is odd is I grew up with a 386 DX-33 with 8mb ram and I remember it running faster than this. Maybe it had a really good SVGA card? But I feel like back then that didnt matter much in most dos games in software rendering at lower resolutions...It was still even competitive to play on it in network doom against a pentium 100, so it was definitely running faster than what we see here.
Ohhh the memories!! Thx for sharing Bro! :)
This game is the very reason I upgraded from a 386DX-33 to a 486DX2-66 back in the day ;-)
Yeah, 486DX2-66 is ideal minimum for Doom.
You should at least have a 486 DX4 100 Mhz to play much better, but on an AMD P75-133 its runs butter smooth.
Yup. My mom upgraded to 486 in 94 and Doom ran well.
@@rallyscoot Back in the days we were used to less, so when someone says it doesn't run well on low end 486 it used to puzzle me as I always remember it was pretty smooth. I thought then when I saw it running on a 486DX 33mhz but with good Vesa Local Bus that it was really smooth compared to my 386DX with slow ISA card. It was better but it wasn't like 35fps which was also the limit, but now when I see it again in a low end 486, it might be 20-25fps which is not good by todays standards although very playable for such an old game. It gets a bit better with FastDoom and also a beefier 486.
8 mb of ram? What a beast! Mine had 2mb and 40mb HDD.
early 90's... Fuck... This machine would cost like 600$
Btw as everyone misremembers how fast or slow Doom was, I recently tested a timedemo on both commercial Doom and FastDoom on 386DX 40mhz, 8MB RAM and fast Tseng Labs ET4000 ISA with certain BIOS settings for max throughput.
High detail fullscreen
Doom: 7.03
FDoom: 9.247
Fdoom13h: 10.842
Half detail fullscreen
Doom: 12
FDoom: 16.379
Fdoom13h: 15.602
FDoom can help you play fullscreen with half pixel detail at average 15fps which is not high but it's were it stops being so choppy and is kinda playable.
FDoom13h is interesting, it's a different exe that doesn't do mode-X but renders in backbuffer and copies. Advantages, 32bit copies from buffer to slower vram, good for high detail (but still 10fps average), but worse for half-detail as mode-x would be used to trick to write two pixels at once.
Things are much better on even low end 486 with good Vesa Local Bus card. Playable enough in my opinion. FastDoom improves on this.
Pro Doom je ideální až 486DX2/66MHz a výkonnější. Na DX/33MHz se to ještě pořád seká. 386DX, i když je uváděna jako minimum, tak je nehratelný.
Know the sound of that Seagate ST-157A stepper IDE well from my 386. Have to try it with a soundblaster.
Heh. I played DOOM prereleases and shareware on my king ant's portable work IBM PS/2 model P70 (386 10 Mhz) back then. It had no sound card and color. They were slow and choppy. :)
Pc Speaker Sound
So PC 80s like
When Doom came out, anyone into gaming already had a Sound Blaster, hearing anyone playing it on the PC Speaker was very rare.
I used to play Doom on my 386 DX40. It was alright!
@@TheAmazingAdventuresOfMiles I don't agree with this. In my experience in 1993 sound blaster was rare on pc and it was expensive. Of course this situation would be different in each country.
@@Corsa15DT Well, I'm thinking back to 1994. Many of the more geeky kids at school had PC's at home and I'd say almost all of them had sound cards, mostly Sound Blasters. Some with Gravis or Adlib. I had a Sound Blaster 2.0, still got it actually, it wasn't expensive in 1994, but was only an 8-bit mono card. Great for Doom though! Maybe in my neighborhood we were all just experts it tapping our parents for tech.
This is how most people seen doom for the first time in 1994. Usually shareware version, or first level. 386, and PC speaker. Dreaming about full screen and high details, fluently.
386 with 4mb of ram was the minimal system requirement
But 486 with 8mb was recommended
My box said 8 MB. It would install on 4, but was a slide show until 8 MB.
Hey you know, there is a new doom port called FastDoom for DOS, which is a version optimized for 386 and 486 processors.
If you still have your 386 around, maybe you could try again with that port.
Hi, thank you for the tip. I try :)
it's like a 30% speed improvement on the same hardware. I ran FastDoom on my Mister and it's quite visible. ID could have done a better job with optimization 😉 and people would have been happy to have it because of how expensive PC hardware was - regular people in 1993 are not going to buy a Pentium just to play doom.
@@johnsimon8457 You're right. They would buy a Pentium to play Quake.
@@johnsimon8457 For the time, Doom was pretty well optimized for what it was doing, and when it came out in 1993, 386 processors were on the edge of irrelevancy...hell in just a few years the Pentium would be the standard. There's also the fact that people have had decades to pore over the source code for the game, picking it apart and experimenting, a luxury they didn't have at the time.
@@yellowblanka6058 In the 80's, home users weren't buying IBM PCs for gaming. Gaming is a secondary thing to whatever productivity software that a business would be using. Also, they're pretty expensive, 20x the cost of an NES in 80's dollars. There's a reason why Wolf 3D runs on a 286 with PC speaker sound or commander keen runs on an 8086 with CGA graphics. This is all a long winded way of saying, people Really held onto old hardware.
In any case (unless you're rich) you're not going to roll out to buy a Pentium in 1993.
Regarding optimization; getting more frames out of 386/486. I don't think it's "decades of knowledge" - usually it's one or two really dedicated guys like Kaze Emanuar (check out his work with Mario 64) and making sure the code made the best use of CPU pipelines and instruction caches. C compilers were also 'good enough' but not producing the optimized code we have today.
On the other hand, Carmack was also inventing/researching the engine while he's developing the game so in the whole list of priorities 1. Get it working 2. get it working right 3. get it working fast - optimization wasn't as much of a priority.
this was all i had as a kid to run doom. I was grateful. Though I ran it on 4 megs ram.
so it seems playable. good! i'll buy it and wait some more time to change my 386. Maybe this Christmas.
rappre It is good gameplay to on a processor 486DX2/66MHz :)
thank your. i'm looking for a second hand DX4 100 MHz. but my father don't want to buy it only for games. :( i'll show him the new autocad for windows 95 and maybe he will change his mind.
rappre You're still a teenager? Buy him yourself, huh? And if nothing else, so perhaps this will help AutoCad. Good luck.
This was how I remember playing it!
Any chance you could upload this running Woldenstein 3D?
This is a nice job. Shows what potential was in the OCS chipset. And what will the effects be on the Amiga 600 ECS with 4mb FAST RAM? Doom on 386DX 40Mhz didn't work too fast.
Doom on 386 can't be played sensibly, it's a bad choice for the game. The ideal minimum is 486DX2 66MHz.
Amiga never played doom back in the day though
I had a 386DX40 back in the day, and it ran Doom pretty slow like this one but I put in a much better graphics card and it actually made a huge difference. Literally doubled the FPS, proving the 386 DX40 was ample for Doom. For giggles I also tried it on my 386 SX40, same graphics card, and it was awful. Literally unplayable at times.
if you watch the video @ 2x speed it has something that resembles motion!
Wish I still had my old 386 setup =(. Although I still have the 486 upgrade chip for it.
This is how I played doom...my neighbor got a 100mhz pc, some Pentium Acer thingy from best buy...he could play his off CD, man I was jealous...I did like to push the button and go down to 20 mhz for slow mo...I wish I knew about multiplayer deathmatch.
I didn’t even know doom had pc speaker sound
Played Doom the first time on a Pentium 75 with Windows 95, but I remember the 486 and the 386 booting up :)
I didnt recall DOOM being so slow in a 386DX/40. Maybe most of us had cheap VGA cards which were simply slow framebuffers. I remember Trident8900/9000, OTI, Realtek, those were popular, cheap and low quality chips. With some ATI or Tseng this was playable I guess?
It looks about right to me. Fast ISA card would help, but I've had the best Tseng Labs ISA measured in benchmarks, even set up certain BIOS ISA bus speed options to improve things, in my OP 386DX 40mhz with 8MB. And I know in full res it's very choppy. And I play in half res and it's about that speed. Okayish playable but not perfect. Same as in the video, half res and a bit of window drop. It was THAT slow even in beefy 386DX. FastDoom helps a bit but still only good on half-res detail.
@@Optimus6128 Hello, did you have ET4000/W32? Great chip, the later ET6000 was a nice one also (idk if it was available for ISA bus)
@@indiocolifa Yes I have that one, I also have the ET6000 but on PCI for later systems. I also try to collect few ISA tseng labs as I know they have the best speed for a retro 386. I am testing things right now. I don't think I had this card back in the 90s though.
It's crazy that the game takes so long to load.
If you go full screen (no hud) and low detail it will somehow be faster a bit.
Yep. This is how I played Doom in 93 lol
The Crysis of its day haha
2023 "8fps!, This is a unplayable", 1993 "coooooool!!!!!!!!"
I remember back to the day playing DooM shareware on a AMD 386 DX 40 with 4MiB and some OAK SVGA card and a Sound Galaxy sound card. I think that I had bit better experience that you (faster SVGA card? and/or that driving the PC Speaker requires more cpu power that sending samples to the sound card ? )
I still have yet to see a reason to upgrade my computer from a 386. Literally serves no purpose to buy anything newer right now.
I don't think you were supposed to play Doom on a 386 with such a large screen and high details.
The L2 cache is low(32kb). It needs at least 128kb
Norton Commander!!!
John Sfetkos No, it is Dos Navigator ver. 1.51 :)
I always thought that DOOM would run way better on 386DX. Played on SX 33 with performance similar to this. Poor VGA maybe?
0WS, FIFO and fast local memory (60ns) can speed up ISA VGA up to 30% on DX40 Typical card, that support this are Trident 8900CL or CL542x with 0WS enabled
@ch282 Yes it did matter more than I thought it would at the time. I ran Doom on my 386DX40, using a very old hat graphics card. I put in a newer one with faster video memory and it made a big difference. There was no need to have a reduced screen size, it was fine in full-size, except occasionally when there were just crazy amounts of mobs, then it needed notching down a bit to keep it fluid. Looking at this video, I would say it was more like it was on my original slow 80's era VGA card.
No way even in SX which is much more crippling. Even with the fastest gfx card.
I completely deleted the experience of gaming doom with pc speaker sound from my mind. this is basically the same configuration of my first computer, bought in 1993. Seeing how slow this game runs in this machine I can understand why I never was able to reach level 4 episode 1.
nevermind, still many good games could be played on 386. for example wolfenstein 3d. :)
Na vsechno si vzpominam...🤗 to byla doba 😪 zavidel jsem kamaradovi 486, protoze na presne teto triosmine se mi to sekalo uplne stejne 😅
I finished Doom on such a set, it only had 4MB of RAM. Today I read that it was unplayable :D Who then paid attention to such details ?! :D
Doom on pc speaker is just bizzare haha.
Good
I think you should try to run it outside norton commander to free up resources
This is a DOS Navigator, but I think it does not help. Doom is not for computers with processor 386.
Increase the screen size by one unit and set to low detail.
Yep.
On my AMD 386DX/40 mhz w/8 mb RAM and Soundblaster Pro, this is exactly how Doom ran--barely. Doom II was unplayable.
On that PC, I played Doom: Episode 1 on Ultra-Violence full-screen w/status bar on "low detail" (F5) which yielded about 5-6 fps, like at 3:05. During a lull in the action, I could press F5, switching to "high detail," and briefly admire the "intended" way Doom was meant to be played--all at 2-3 fps like at 3:17. Good luck playing on Ultra-Violence like that.
Doom was really intended for 486s, like a 486SX/25mhz or a 486DX/33mhz. On those, you could play full-screen on high detail, but you were still playing at 5-6 fps. That's why the monsters move so slowly. In the mid-'90s, 386s were still viable while 486s were considerably more expensive. A Pentium cost several thousand dollars. You needed a pretty high-end, and expensive, PC to play Doom decently back in the day.
Yet on my 386DX, Doom's predecessor, Wolfenstein 3D, ran like a champ. Corridor 7 (1994) used an enhanced Wolf3D engine with variable light. That made for a dark and scary world much like Doom and without floor and ceiling textures. The Corridor 7 demo ran decently on my 386. It made me wonder why Doom didn't use that upgraded Wolf3D engine and be able to run on more PCs and better on all of them. Doom is really Wolfenstein 3D with more weapons and ammo and a very fancy graphics engine.
As one of my favorite video games, Doom is overrated. Much of its gameplay could've been retained in an enhanced Corridor 7-type Wolf3D engine with diminished light sourcing and no floor or ceiling textures. In between Wolf3D and Doom, Id Software actually made an enhanced Wolf3D engine with floor and ceiling textures for Shadowcaster. But the view window was small and view distance was short with objects "popping" into view, one of Carmack's peeves.
In the mid 90s only the top of the line Pentiums cost several thousand dollars, unless perhaps you were a tard who bought prebuilt PCs where it was all marked up to high hell. In the early 90s when the Pentium was just new, yeah, these PCs did indeed cost a lot. But by 1994 a fully equipped PREBUILT 486 system cost about 1000 dollars, while a prebuilt Pentium system cost less than 3k. By 1995 even less than that.
Note that with Doom you could also use a 486SX with no performance penalty as it didn't use any floating point operations. When the 486SLC was introduced, the 486SX had its price reduced to 119 dollars. That was in 1992, mind you.
Hmm, dunno where you got those 1994 prices for 486s. Maybe they were that cheap in Trollville, but not the real world. A 486SX wouldn't have been much of a performance improvement over a 386DX for Doom anyway. You really needed a 486DX to play Doom semi-decently - that is, at fullscreen in high resolution at 5-6 fps.
I saw Doom E1M4 played on a 486DX2/66mhz at a store in Dec. 1994. Doom ran well at that point. The whole PC only cost $3000 - at least.
Trollololol
@@BrianBeeby The sauce is LA times for the PC price. And thandor for the benchmarks. Even CPU Galaxy had a 16 MHz 486SX tested on some industrial board and got 11 FPS, which is more than the 386's 8 FPS.
And wow, you got ripped off bad with that PC! I hope that's adjusted for inflation! The 486DX2 was last gen stuff by late 1994.
wow almost playable, at times even is!
...so it IS playable on a 386!
+SouthwesternEagle What I find strange is that there was no option in Doom to disable the floor and ceiling and maybe even wall textures. Would make the game playlable on 386 and maybe even 286 PCs.
Awww, I've played Doom on a 40 MHz machine... had to use Low detail setting all the time and you can probably see why ;)
i love the sounds
I love the sound of your mom
@@CovenantAgentLazarus ur mom makes cuter sounds noises tho :3
@@_________-__________-_______ show the video evidence.
@@_________-__________-_______ your profile picture shows that you are definitely a child groomer
Is the video's sound out of sync or is the 386 falling behind playing the sound?
The poor audio sync is due to the slow processor. On the more powerful platforms is sound right.
Can you try Ultima Underworld?
I'm afraid I can't, I don't have a computer handy.
Better than the 3DO.
There is a guy saying it isn't possible to play Doom on a 386. LOL. Phil's Computer Lab. He's convinced it can't be done. He also doesn't think going from 4 MB to 8 MB of RAM would make a difference.
Is it possible, but it is dreadful :)
You have to consider the time. This was actually a better Doom experience on a good 386DX with a secondary floating point / mathco processor and 8 MB of RAM than playing many of the console ports, particularly the 3DO version.
The problem is that even through Phill is a really great old computer stuff reviewer and I am very thankful for his videos, he once stated on vogons that he considers everything below 75 fps "not smooth". He is basically a retrogamer who expects modern high end PC framerates from ancient machines (because even last gen consoles rarely got truly stable 30 fps, many late PS3 titles dropped to 18 fps regularly). Most PSX or N64 games would be "unplayable" for him. That is why he recommends an Athlon XP for games intended for Pentium II, a Pentium III for games intended for a Pentium 1, a Pentium for 486 games etc. Me? I prefer playing games as I remember them, unless they ran REALLY badly. The definition of "playable" always depends on one's wallet, here in Slovakia I know many friends who play games on 300 Euro laptops because the average wage is 600 euro/month and they don't have jobs yet. So they play at 10-20 fps, in 2017, in minimum details, yet when I talk to them about games they seem to get more joy out of them than someone from first world upper middle class who buy a new 2000 USD PC every year and spend more time "tweaking" than actually playing.
I respect Phil for his effort to make good videos, but he should really play SNES Doom if he thinks 386 Doom is "unplayable".
@@ramdrivesys1869 Really for 600 euros you can build a PC that will run games at higher than 10 or 20 FPS. Much higher. Witcher 3 runs better on a PC from 2009.
This runs quite well! I saw a video of a 386 overclocked to 50 MHz (ua-cam.com/video/R_Jsdsu7LrY/v-deo.html) but that ran Doom rather poorly. Perhaps it had high detail, and it did run fullscreen (without the frame). But I do wonder: perhaps there is a difference in videocard here? What if you’d pair the fastest ISA videocard to an overclocked 386 with cache and memory maxed out?
That might be ok because 1) he is running full screen full detail 2) he is running the timedemo that doesn't skip frames so everything seems like the time slowed down. I'd like to see an actual playthrough in either full detail or half detail in this machine.
@@Optimus6128 good point about the timedemo, that makes a difference. I don’t know why, but somehow it’s fascinating to see Doom running OK-ish on a 386 class machine 🤓
@@kasimirdenhertog3516 Yeah, it's great to see Doom running okayish on 386. I love to beef my retro PCs too nowadays knowing the best graphics cards and settings in BIOS. It makes a difference especially with FastDoom, 386 wasn't as bad if coders could push performance.
its impressive how a GBA or a SNES can run this better.
Yes when you consider the SNES uses a Commodore C65 cpu. Probably the gpu helped a lot there.
@@Corsa15DT It's the SuperFX2 chip that did all the oomph. And we're talking about optimized assembly code built from scratch.
Hardware acceleration.
@@TheAmazingAdventuresOfMiles they don’t have any hardware acceleration though. Doom on gba is all software accelerated
Of course it is playable, SNES super fx2 chip was 20mhz, and barely playable.
I play with Doom2... 486SX 25mhz, 4mb EDO RAM...
I played it o a 386DX-25 with sound blaster too. It was playable, but not a full screen siz and i cant remember how good it was running. I had a 387 co-cpu mounted. Anybody know if that helped increase the perfomance?
Doom doesn't use fpu
@@si4632 So they learned the lesson with Quake ah
386DX/40MHz, 8MB RAM and no sound card???? That's a disaster!
It was a test, a sound card is not necessary.
@@lubosjanku8831 how audio data is sent to sound card?
@@obvioustruth If you mean those beeps, they come from the internal speaker, not from a sound card.
@@chrll I know :)
That's why I did put that comment.
Ну Doom на подобном железе уже подтормаживает но все-же ещё можно играть, ну а на i286 я уже молчу.
This was my first PC set up (almost). It helps if you add a math coprocessor.
No, the coprocessor won't help in games. He is good at CAD and other graphics programs.
What display adapter are you using? I have the same setup, but I think my Doom's a bit slower.
This is playable. not in modern times, though.
On 386 it's unplayable at all times.
@@lubosjanku8831 Don't agree - I made a little video of my good old 386DX-40 with some Doom gameplay which you can find on my channel - it's not that bad and as you can see, Doom is playable on a 386.
@@xXDelorXx I don't agree, it's a disaster and unplayable. My video clearly shows this fact.
But ... but ... can it run Crysis ... ?
Crysis can kiss Doom ass.
Doom is the best game on the world :)
yes, you must buy this computer and test your self =)
Easy on Ultra
Shit sounds like galaga
hello Lubos Janku, can I contact you in private?
No, why?
@@lubosjanku8831 no means no
@@lubosjanku8831 can't say unless in private, which you don't want, so...
Hi ! I had that machine and it run well on it. i just had 4 giga ram. this is somekind of crap.
My machine was 386 dx2 40 with 4 gb ram. And a gameplay was smooth.
Video as proof, needs no more comment. And 4GB RAM? Where? And 386DX2 not exist. :D
Sorry.I ment 4 mb of ram...And 386 dx 40.
With coprocessor
Now try Quake. (Hint: use RedHat Linux 4.x)
RIP 386
At least if you don't want to get 0,4 fps
I had a bit better performance than this on my 386 DX33, (overclocked 25) I remember being able to run 1 notch from full screen, with low quality. At about 13 fps if i remember. My configuration had 128kb external cache, 0WS memory, 11.1 mhz ISA clock, AWE32, and CL5429 video card 0WS. I also had a 387 co-processor however I do not recall if that had any impact, AFAIK it doesn't, or it is very little if any.
Going from the original configuration of 25 mhz DX, with 8mhz ISA clock and Trident 8900 to faster ISA clocks, the faster video card and zero wait states while overclocking literally doubled its performance or more. The overclocking and timing changes I did right away in 1990, but the video card was easily the biggest upgrade my computer got at the time doom came out. Stock it was slower than your computer here by about the same proportion to clock speed.
Coprocessor influence on the game does not have, coprocessor to take effect in CAD systems and similar graphics programs.
Recommend for running DOOM needs Pentium processor and 4 MB VRAM
What gpu does it have?
Titan RTX SLI.
Thats a chunky sound card. Doesnt even have music
This is not a sound card, but a PC speaker, and music on the 386 is not for a PC speaker.
Is this with a math co-processor? If not try it again but with a co-processor
it is without co-pro, if you check boot screen. Will not help, doom is not using floating-point calculations.
Without coprocessor. The coprocessor is only good for CAD and the like. It will not be reflected in the games.
ua-cam.com/video/tS8xdKbUm4w/v-deo.html
@@glittlehoss lol, Quake is one of the first exceptions of games, that used heavily FPU, and was optimized on Pentium platform.
Basicaly 99,9% games before Quake (release date: mid 1996), didnt used FPU.
It was obvious, if they would use it, most of gamers didnt have money for it. So they rather programmed it without FPU instructions.
So no. It will not speed up games, except some 3D games, particulary Quake. In 1997 and 1998, there were more and more games using heavily FPU. But that was already outside of 386 and 486 area.
You don''t need FPU on 386, to play games. It will not help you anyhow. In games, that would help it, you will have like 1 or 2 fps. Whenever you have 1 or 2 or 5 fps, game is still unplayable.
@@glittlehoss Quake is unplayable even with a coprocessor. I also have a coprcessor in one 386, so I know it's there to add to the socket. There is no shift to the front in games.
Can it handle GTA V?
yes... but only readme.txt
Kids play pubg men plays cod legends play doom
AMD sucks in the 90's