I'd say fast doom is relatively playable on my 386DX 40mhz with Tseng Labs ET4000 ISA and 8MB of RAM. My preferred way to play is lowres (I don't like the potato mode because I can't even distinguish enemies) and the flat (that is like SNES but still shades by distance, meanwhile the flatter doesn't always show improvement on performance to be worth it). And I open the screen till I see the bar. In some cases it's pretty playable, not the best framerate but not horrible either way.
saw tomb raider working on a gba with it's 16mhz arm cpu and 256kb of ram, i bet it'd be possible to get doom working on something like a 8088, though probably extremely hard to pull off.
Yeah, the GBA port of OpenLara is totally insane. The problem with the 8086/8088/286 is that those are 16-bit processors and Doom is designed for 32-bit processors. It requires a full rewrite of the source code to be able to run Doom on those processors.
Besides GBA having an 32bit ARM processor (and Doom original source code needs the 32bits), also much smaller resolution (it would be small window in FastDoom to compare), an ARM at the same mhz as the old 8088 would be quite quite faster. Some 8088 opcodes might take many many cycles like 10-20 when the ARM will take 1 or 2-3. MULs are very slow, shifts of more than one bit are horrible (and Doom source uses a lot of them). It would like a simple comparison at first (If GBA runs OpenLara that normally needs a Pentium, then extrapolate and you think 8088 should run Doom that needed a 386) but it's not as simple as that. OpenLara needed a Pentium because they optimized it for that. OpenLara is optimized on the GBA with it's much smaller screen for software rendering. Yeah, maybe one could optimize Doom for 8088, but I doubt it will be even possible to even run at 5fps. 8088 is extremely slow. Also, GBA indeed has 256k of ram, but the reality is all these consoles have scary small amount of memory, because they also have the extra memory of the cartidge. I don't think all the data of OpenLara fit in just 256b. A lot of them might be loaded on demand from the cartidge (which is much faster than constantly reading from floppy/HD, that would actually make the game to crawl and kill your HD :)
Nice... How many fps do you get with high details? Generally speaking, how much of a difference does the VLB card make on this 386, with respect to an ISA one?
Between 10 and 13 fps with the VESA 2.0 LFB executable. Pretty much unplayable, the 386 is really struggling without L1 cache and low IPC compared to the 486. With the VLB card it gains 2 or 3 fps, no more. Will do a comparison video.
I have a question . I recently bought an opti-495slc 3406 rev 1.1 motherboard, it looks like yours . I have a problem with this motherboard, I installed a 386dx 40mhz and I can only use games not based on DOS/4GW, i.e. doom1, doom2, heretic, hexen, etc. I can use other older ones, e.g. wolfstein3d. It doesn't matter if I use isa vga or vlb vga . if You have the same motherboard, maybe you could write how to set the bios and jumpers
Very nice work! It's smooth as butter.
I'd say fast doom is relatively playable on my 386DX 40mhz with Tseng Labs ET4000 ISA and 8MB of RAM.
My preferred way to play is lowres (I don't like the potato mode because I can't even distinguish enemies) and the flat (that is like SNES but still shades by distance, meanwhile the flatter doesn't always show improvement on performance to be worth it). And I open the screen till I see the bar. In some cases it's pretty playable, not the best framerate but not horrible either way.
You're doing gods work! Now let's see 486 friendly Quake. :)
Goshhhy is making an excelent job optimizing Quake for the 486, check it out here:
github.com/goshhhy/486quake
Perhaps some modification of GBA Quake might do the job.
Quite smooth!
saw tomb raider working on a gba with it's 16mhz arm cpu and 256kb of ram, i bet it'd be possible to get doom working on something like a 8088, though probably extremely hard to pull off.
Yeah, the GBA port of OpenLara is totally insane. The problem with the 8086/8088/286 is that those are 16-bit processors and Doom is designed for 32-bit processors. It requires a full rewrite of the source code to be able to run Doom on those processors.
Besides GBA having an 32bit ARM processor (and Doom original source code needs the 32bits), also much smaller resolution (it would be small window in FastDoom to compare), an ARM at the same mhz as the old 8088 would be quite quite faster. Some 8088 opcodes might take many many cycles like 10-20 when the ARM will take 1 or 2-3. MULs are very slow, shifts of more than one bit are horrible (and Doom source uses a lot of them). It would like a simple comparison at first (If GBA runs OpenLara that normally needs a Pentium, then extrapolate and you think 8088 should run Doom that needed a 386) but it's not as simple as that. OpenLara needed a Pentium because they optimized it for that. OpenLara is optimized on the GBA with it's much smaller screen for software rendering. Yeah, maybe one could optimize Doom for 8088, but I doubt it will be even possible to even run at 5fps. 8088 is extremely slow.
Also, GBA indeed has 256k of ram, but the reality is all these consoles have scary small amount of memory, because they also have the extra memory of the cartidge. I don't think all the data of OpenLara fit in just 256b. A lot of them might be loaded on demand from the cartidge (which is much faster than constantly reading from floppy/HD, that would actually make the game to crawl and kill your HD :)
Not even Randy Linden can help with the 8088 potatoness.
@@Optimus6128 Tomb Raider actually runs pretty good on a fast 486 with a 3DFX Voodoo card.
Nice... How many fps do you get with high details? Generally speaking, how much of a difference does the VLB card make on this 386, with respect to an ISA one?
Between 10 and 13 fps with the VESA 2.0 LFB executable. Pretty much unplayable, the 386 is really struggling without L1 cache and low IPC compared to the 486. With the VLB card it gains 2 or 3 fps, no more. Will do a comparison video.
@@viti95 thanks!
I have a question . I recently bought an opti-495slc 3406 rev 1.1 motherboard, it looks like yours . I have a problem with this motherboard, I installed a 386dx 40mhz and I can only use games not based on DOS/4GW, i.e. doom1, doom2, heretic, hexen, etc. I can use other older ones, e.g. wolfstein3d. It doesn't matter if I use isa vga or vlb vga . if You have the same motherboard, maybe you could write how to set the bios and jumpers
I think I solved the problem. I uploaded the award bios 09/10/93-OPTI-495SLC-214UEUBD-00 and look ok . The original bios is the same as yours.
Whats that thing you have in the cpu socket, looks modern.
What resolution and refresh rate is it running at?
80x200, the refresh rate is 70hz but the game locks the frame rate to 35 fps
@@viti95 the HUD is very readable by the way...