I think the rosy memories of running DOOM on 386 and even 286 machines are from folks who might have been very young when it came out, and who don't really remember their PC's specs. I was a Junior in College when it came out, and my younger high school age brother wanted me to help him set up his machine to play it in early 1994. He had a newish 486SX-25 with 4 MB of Ram and built in SVGA video with 1MB of ram. As I recall, it was only JUST playable.
Kind of like how my dad remembers running Windows 95 on his 286. I like to be charitable and imagine it might have originally been a 286 and then was upgraded to a 386SX or 486SLC maybe using one of those Kingston SLCNow! kits. As it was, a 286 obviously wouldn't have even been able to launch 95 -- it could barely run Windows 3.1 and ironically couldn't run a significant chunk of software intended for Windows 3 either as it all leveraged the 386 in some way or another.
Hell, it was fun. 1998, small post-Soviet town, AM386SX33 "powerhouse" stolen from work by dad. First "big" PC after Radio86 and Spectrum. Even equipped with a Sound Blaster! It was a ton of fun, inclusing, yes, the legendary Doom. Which was running quite well on this config... As long as the image was matchbox sized... But this was also not a problem, thanks to the old lens from Soviet KVN TV, which was able to "unfold" it back to decent size:) Great times, really.
I can't even describe how I felt (as a 10 year old) when I first saw Doom running on my best friend's PC (I didn't have a PC at the time). It felt as if I had just discovered fire. 🙂It's a feeling that I will always remember (just like I will always remember how my jaw dropped when seeing Quake / Quake 2 running on a Voodoo 2 card, using the Glide API). Great video and looking forward to seeing others soon (more frequently, if possible 😛).
@@necro_ware, don't worry, I was joking! 😀 Anyway, quality over quantity... always! Also, I'm the one to talk... I have a small retro youtube channel myself, but haven't been able to upload anything since April (because... well... I'm a workaholic). 😞
The memory of booting up Doom for the first time is also something that I'll probably never forget. I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing. It totally blew my mind that something so graphically impressive could be run on my family's little Compaq. That was nearly 30 years ago yet I remember better than things that just happened last week.
A Necroware video on Christmas Eve? What a wonderful Christmas present to the world! I myself often play DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D with a smile on my face. Ty, Necroware! Merry Christmas to you and yours. 🥂
First time I played Doom was on my 486 SX 33 with an ISA VGA card, needless to say, I had to play on low with a reduced window size. A common trick back then was to reduce the window size then adjust the monitor to essentially zoom in. 15FPS was about what most people considered playable back then but you also need to bare in mind that the shareware version was typically all we had so only the first episode.
Great comparison, really pleased to see FastDoom on it (I'm the main developer 😅)! The 486 processors are much faster compared to 386 cpu's, not only because of the internal CPU cache, but also because most x86 instructions can be executed on the 486 in a single cycle, compared to 3/4 cycles a 386 needs to execute instructions. But I think the major difference is the VLB bus, it makes Doom really shine on the 486, as it uses lot's of bandwidth to transfer data between RAM and VRAM. The funny thing is that Heretic/Hexen used the base code of Doom, and Raven Software did optimize even further the rendering code, that's why on some systems Heretic/Hexen run smoother compared to Doom/Doom II.
486 was also able to access any part of memory in just 1 cycle, something extremely important for, well just about everything. it's mostly like necro said, placebo effect. ppl remember games being a lot better than they actually were. i find that to be true even with much older games, especially with die-hard amiga funs. but i don;t blame anyone, it's the same for me too. the games that we grow up playing, were perfect in our mind...
@@briangoldberg4439 I think the testing has been done with FastDoom 0.9.1, my 386DX-40 (fullscreen, potato detail) went from 27.632 fps to 33.860 fps in the latest release. We're getting close to those 35 fps on a 386 😁
Believe it or not, you can measure bandwidth difference between PCI and AGP graphics using Doom. With a fast enough processor it becomes limited by the framebuffer copy speed. So I can totally relate to your ISA vs VLB findings. Speaking of rosy memories, I have some of my own. Playing Quake on my 100MHz DX4 with ISA graphics. I somehow recall having fun.
"I somehow recall having fun." applies to my case of an even slower 486DX/33 where the sound broke up half the time. In hindsight, I have no idea why I found it enjoyable, but somehow I did.
I must have had a later release of quake. I had just got a 486 pc after upgrading from a commodore 128d and a xt pc, was around 1999. Anyway when i tried to load quake (the sole reason for begging dad for a "windows 95 computer" it would just come up with "this program requires a pentium processor" or similar error message. I end up getting a pentium 166 mmx with 32mb ram and a 1m sis graphics card the next year and then i could finally play quake... and havent stopped since haha
Good video, as I explore some of my old hardware I've also had to re-calibrate some of my old memories. For Doom, as I remember, a Cyrix 486 DLC-40 was the first computer I had that would be able to properly play it. Technically a 386 platform still, but still a noticeable bump over my friend's 386 DX-40 once I realized I needed the program to enable the tiny but effective 1KB cache. Even with that, though, I recall having to bump the window size down two or three notches from the 'full screen with GUI' level to play comfortably, which was a compromise I was more than willing to make. When I got a 486 DX/2-66, then it was finally full screen time!
This is exactly as I remember it. A friend of mine and myself played DOOM against each other over 28.8 modems. He had the DX2-66, I played on a DX-33. He had the advantage of creaming me at every turn. I also had the game for the PowerMac, for which ran really well on the 6100/60. For anyone saying that this game ran well on a 386, they must have played it with a magnifying glass. It truly needed VLB graphics to be playable.
@Stefano Pavone With Doom 95 you could enjoy the full 35 FPS with a 486DX/33. The DirectDraw API was truly voodoo magic back in the day and it's not a coincidence that it was a hot selling point for Windows 95 and thus heavily marketed by Microsoft.
System requirements in the 90s were often shockingly optimistic. Its as if the publisher asked the developers what min spec was and then ignored everything after “but”. Congratulations on 26k subs keep up the great work and merry christmas!
Absolutely this. The required specs were literally just what minimum system could technically launch the software. Recommended specs were what would run it well. I usually had something closer to the second, but not always exactly. ;-) We all did what we must.
Yeah I played so many games in 512x at first because 640x was too expensive. If I see any picture like that these days it's more how the hell did I get kills with a 320 ping when it's a snowstorm
@@salaciouscreations4323 Ahaha... that that reminds me, I used to play Counter-Strike at 800x600 on dialup with about 330ms ping around 2002 or so. I preferred "HPB" (high ping bastard) servers 😆
yeah i often looked at recommended first and totally ignored the minimum because chances we're the game would sure run at minimum but would be far from enjoyable
Amusingly, the system requirements have gone the other way in recent years. Look at Quake on Steam: Minimum Spec (1080p/60 HZ) Win 10 64-bit version Intel Core i5-3570 @3.4 GHz or AMD Ryzen 3 1300X @3.5 GHz NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 TI (2GB) or AMD HD 7750 (1GB) 8GB System RAM Minimum 2GB free space on hard drive (additional space required for add-on downloads) Suuuurrrrreeeee... About the only part that looks remotely accurate to me is the disk space, and that's just from needing to download a few ISOs for the music in the base game and its expansions.
Your 386SX footage reminds me of how I "played" Quake on a 486DX/33 back in the day. It was so slow that the sound broke up half the time. 8MB of RAM was just barely enough to run it, and required a boot disk to leave out everything except STACKER. No mouse, and no CD drivers either (and I didn't have a CD, anyway).
Congratulations on hitting 25K! Great video. I still remember playing Doom on the DX2/66 VLB system my family bought back in 1994. I didn't really understand the difference between VLB and ISA graphics back then, but I was always surprised how poorly the game ran on systems my friends had (even 486s). They'd usually play with a smaller window size to keep the game running smoother. I don't have many ISA graphics cards, but none have really provided what I'd consider an enjoyable experience in Doom. VLB was a huge step up, that's for sure!
It's also worth testing some of the 386, 486 hybrid chips like the Cyrix cx486DLC , mine is decent enough to play on low details ... with some bios tweaks, but then again it's very subjective like you mentioned
I had NO CLUE that 286 systems were just 16-bit!! I learn something new in EVERY SINGLE VIDEO you make!! You are just a bundle of knowledge!! Thank you for doing everything you do! MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!
My own memories from when I started to play Doom (II) on a 386DX 33 with 64k cache is that it ran but it ran poorly. My best friend back then had a 486DX2 66 with PCI graphics and that handled it much much better. We still had lots of fun playing it in multiplayer, with me watching a slide show some (most) of the time.
Hi, I tried Doom on my DX33 and then saw how different it felt and look on my friend brand new DX2 66. I just couldn't enjoy it on my system. Happy holidays and thanks for all the great content!
I.. don't know. I had an 40 MHz 386 system with 4 megs of ram. Not sure but something rings in my mind I had a math co processor. Then low quality , and 1 notch down on screen size made it run well enough to be playd over till the end.
All those subscribers are 100% deserved, congratulations! My first PC was a 386DX-25 (a friend literally forced me NOT to buy an SX, now I know why!). But my motherboard did not come with cache and I only had 2MB of RAM. I think I was able to play DOOM but performance was poor. In contrast, a friend had a 386DX-33 but with cache (and also 4MB of RAM) and his PC was massively faster than mine in everything! :) I believe you are right, we had different benchmarks back in the day. Those 15fps were probably "WOW" while today it would be considered unacceptable. Thanks for the nice video and Merry Christmas!
yes, I remember, many people was used to much lower framerates, and accepted it, cause game could be played "somehow". I think, that level was 15 fps, what people considered still playable. They were used that games used to be choppy.
I ran Doom on my 386 for a long time as I could not afford a 486. By the time I did get a 486 I had a PCI graphics card which helps a ton. To run on a 386 I would bounce between high detail and a small window to low detail and a slightly smaller window. In today's standards that would not be acceptable, but back in the day when this was all we had I loved it. Even today it is still one of my favorite games to play. Thank you for the video, this I hope, helps put tech back then in to perspective. It might have helped a bit more to discuss the price of hardware at that time as well. It was not cheap.
nicely done. i already had a 486 dx2/66 when i met the doom wad for the first time, and it ran well enough to play it, i do not recall if i ever finished it. and now today my 11900k with a 3080 ti going 100% fan when i play it with ray tracing is kinda humorous, but playable
So, I'm pretty sure that the howl sound effect from the very beginning of the video is pitched down and used at the beginning of "Nightcall" by Kavinsky. Did anybody else notice this? (There are two howles layered on top of each other. It is the lower one.)
Thank you! When DOOM came out, I only had a 386SX20 with 6Mb of RAM. And I could, with some tweaking, get it to run, but it was pretty much unplayable. Ran OK on a friend's DX2/66 but best on a 486DX4/100 or Pentium for sure! So my memories on this are fairly sound after all.
Ran good on my 486DX/33 8 MB with ISA graphics card. High detail was possible with slightly reduced screensize (maybe three steps from fullscreen), low details was possible with HUD shown. Some fanmade maps stuffed a few enemies too much onto the screen so it started to lag, but the official maps from the first three episodes were running good.
Our first family PC in 97 which was a Am5x86 P75 still struggled a bit to run Doom. I think the frame rate was ~25 but there was always frequent pausing and loading with the little blue diskette icon appearing. Contrast that to my neighbor who had a Gateway with the latest Pentium II running Doom II silky smooth on Icon of Sin.
Doom was playable on a AMD 386DX 40mhz but only with low quality and if you shrink the screen 2-4 notches. I had a good friend that had such a machine when Doom was released. I had a 486 DX2 66mhz and Doom ran extremely well on that machine! Linking our machines together via a null modem cable was one of the first deathmatch experiences I had using a PC. Doom was the catalyst of PC multiplayer games that drove my friends and I to setup our own 10 mbit coax network. My best friend lived in the house next door and we had a coax cable that ran from the basement of my house to the basement of his house. Our first 4x4 matches in games like Quake, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Rise of the Triad, Duke 3d and Warcraft 2 were all done via that coax network and over IPX. Those were good times!!!
You can speed it up on your 386-SX by lowering your viewable resolution. It was a pretty standard thing people did to run the game on slower machines. We got Wolfenstein running on a 286 that way. One or two sizes lower with sound disabled was still perfectly playable on a low end machine.
I am keenly aware of Doom's system requirements because I was stuck on an 8 MHz 286 when it came out, and was not able to play it at home as a result. Instead, my first Doom experiences were on computers at my dad's office, where I sometimes played LAN co-op with my brother on weekends. We later got a used 386DX-33 and then built a 486DX4-120, so those were the two machines I played Doom on at home in the 1990s. My memory is that the 386 was fairly playable - but only in low-detail mode, and maybe down a notch or two in viewport size (which I was used to having to do to make Wolfenstein 3-D playable on the 286).
Back in the days when I was in 10th grade we had 386DX-40 in our computer lab and I remember that doom was only smooth running when shrinking the screen. You needed at least one step better two shrink steps for good framerates. At home iplayed it on my DX4-100 System silky smooth. Wish you and all your viewers Merry christmas and a good year 2023!
@Paul Frederick Yesterday i grabbed my DX4-100 rebuild and tested a Cirrus Logic ISA 1MB Card against Trident CXi9400 and S3 928 based VLB Cards. The ISA Card topped out at ca.20frames. The Trident 31 frames and the S3 reached the 35 frames limit. So I don´t know what was wrong with your system.
Concur. Any 386 needed a smaller screen size and it helped drastically. My 386DX/33 died and so I played mostly on a 386SX/25. It wasn't smooth or anything, but wasn't (in most areas) a slideshow either. I was young and just glad to be able to play it at all.
We had a 486 25mhz sx and it was a slide show (packard bell legend). But we upgraded with one of those 586 Kingston drop in chips and it ran like a dream after that. We also upgraded the ram to 16 mb and put in a sb 16. Even with an Isa graphics card, the 586 drop in made it run smooth as a pentium. I wish I still had that ol rig.
My very first look at doom was way back when i was at school. My best friends older borther (also a pupil) used to come into the school IT classroom and force the pc's into dos and put in a floppy disk and run doom. All the while the teachers were at lunch, and we would have got in trouble for running any games. It was a great time i remember to this day. Years went by and i ended up playing and completing the whole doom selection on my playstation. Today i have a small collection of retro systems which i play doom on, p2 armada laptop, a k6-2 233, pentium 133 and a 486dx 50, all towers, love them all :)
First and foremost, you say you have 25,000 subscribers? Wrong. You have 25,001 subscribers because I'm signing up. This content is absolutely excellent and it's bringing back so many memories of my very first PC build (486DX2@66MHz). One thing I will say...no one was playing Doom on a 286. I have never seen a 386 run Doom properly before for that matter. If I remember correctly it was 386 were Wolfenstein 3D machines and 486's were for Doom. That Diamond graphics card was the stuff dreams were made of back in 1994. I would have thought it would have helped your 386SX machine push Doom to its 24FPS standard. For reference- My 486DX2@66MHz ran Doom without issue but I remember having some issues with Doom 2 but I can't remember what. It was Xcom that gave me the most issues overall.. Addendum- Doom was designed to run at 24FPS if I remember correctly. ;) I didn't know the 386SX was really a 286! Wow, you learn something everyday!
I had a Zenith Data System PC with an OG Pentium running Windows 3.11 when Doom came out. I can't remember what GPU it had in it but it ran Doom better than any of my friends' PCs at the time. The ZDS was actually my 2nd PC, my first( that I had set up in my room because the ZDS was set up in a shared family space) was a Tandy 1000 RLX that my Dad gave me for Christmas when I was around 8 or 9 years old. I'd give just about anything to have those two machines back.
SPEA Video7! Yay! My dad had the Mercury in his 486. I think these cards had the same S3 chip, I guess one of them had slightly faster RAM, but I don't remember which one.
I do remember the first version of doom I played was the shareware version (I think 1994) and although quite new Pentiums were pretty common by then. I think it was also more common that you had to build your own machine to keep the costs down. I remember it took a while to save the money, £1500 to build my first Pentium tower (approx £3000 equivalent today). So I suspect that most people were running Doom above the minimum specs back in the day, it was at the point I was switching over from an Atari ST to PC gaming.
It ran smoothy on my old AMD 485-DX 40 as far as i remember, Had 8MB RAM and ran Windows 95 and ran a much newer Trident SVGA card it was built with the older board and alot of much newer componets I peaced togather from garage sales and trades and that was around 96/97. As a side note, if im not mistaken the DX40 was essentialy a cacheless 486SXL core with a 386DX 20MHz FSB meant for budget performance laptops.
Yeah it ran silky smooth on a 386 if you set the Graphics mode to Low and put the screen down to it's smallest size. I played it on my first PC, a Tandy 1000 RSX a 386SX CPU and Had 6MB of memory. It was still choppy AF unless you shrink the screen down and turn off the High Graphics mode.
I remember playing DOOM on the family 386SX-16 and it was slideshow mode, maybe 8fps with nothing going on and the viewport reduced. Still played it for hours but it was nothing like playing it on a fast 486 in CompUSA. I also seem to recall it ran a LOT better with a 387 installed.
I was working on fixing a 386 sx16 for playing 386 titles. Guess I'll be fixing it as a 286 equivalent & running one of my Socket 7 boards severely cut down for 386 / 486 performance.
I used to play on a 25Mhz 486 and I think even I used at least one level of border. One thing I remembered was the plasma gun only fired about 2 shots a second because it was so slow.
Nice video, my first PC was a 386DX40, I put the motherboard in the trash about 20 years ago and wish I hadn't now. I had a Tseng ET4000 too, that must have got sold as some point as I upgraded over the years.
My original DOOM PC was a 486DX2-66 with VLB... had to set DOOM's turbo to 110% to make it playable. Nowadays I play DOOM on a P4-3.2GHz .... and even that struggles with some of today's huge maps. Merry Xmas!
I recall people with 386\40 CPUs playing the game with around two nudges below full screen with the toolbar (so some green background)... it wasn't as good as on a 486DX2 66, but it kind of worked. Also, machines that had less than 8MB of RAM had issues with the last boos (not sure what the number was, but this was reported to me back then).
We used to have a 486 DX with 4 megs of RAM; to play Doom 2, we had to bypass the drivers and Windows when the line "Starting MS-DOS" came up on the screen.
First time I played Doom was on my MMX200 back in the day which was a blast. But knowing older hardware as well (we came from a C64 to the 286 and later 386 which my dad upgraded up until it was probably an OverDrive 200), I can imagine the struggle to get this game to run smoothly.
Brings back memories of playing on my dx40 as a teen. I did have 256K of the fastest cache I could find tho to help the frame rates. I usually stopped down the screen size a bit.
I had a 486SX 25 that I paired with a Cirrus Logic 5428 card. I overclocked the 486 to 40mhz and since my gfx card was VLB powered; it made the game super decent.
I played Wolfenstein 3D on a Harris 286 20 with 4MB of memory. While it was more memory than was typical, we picked it up when SIPP memory being phased out. King's Quest VI which also came out in 1992 claimed it needed a 386 (but ran on my 286), which prompted my upgrade to an AMD 486DX 40. I'm probably the only person to replace a 286 with a 486, and not get more memory at the same time. That ran Doom great, but shortly after Quake came out the motherboard failed. I got a Pentium 60 to replace it, and the 486 CPU and BIOS went in a friends computer after a lightning strike. When she retired the 486 I got it back, and it still works.
Christmas is a magical time for kids, but playing on our Amiga 500, and playing Doom on our Cyrix 5x86, seeing Quake on my mates p100, or Quake II on a 3dfx, buying Duke3D on release day, these were just as magical long after not believing in Santa. One friend had a 486dx4 100, which I badly wanted, but my other mate had a p100 and that was like grease lightning.
I remember playing Descent on 66MHz 486DX PCs in my school's computer lab - and I remember it was playable for the most part, with slowdowns when lots of enemies shot at you. Since then I've installed Descent on several 66 and 100MHz 486 machines, and it always runs a lot slower then I remember. One factor is all the PCs I installed the game on have sound, where the ones in the school did not. Anyway, I agree, if you want to build a dedicated DOS PC for most of these 90's games, a pentium 133 is far more suitable for the early stuff, and a pentium 233 or faster is preferred for the later DOS games. Speed sensitive games are a different story tough.
Somehow I completed Doom 1.2 on a 25MHz am386 with 2MB RAM and integrated Paradise graphics. Pretty sure the window was small. Our tolerances were definitely higher back then!
there is a port of Wolf 3D floating around that will let you "run" it as low as 8086/8088 processor. i've had it going on an NEC V20 at ~9Mhz and it works but i wouldn't call it playable. i've also played commander keen 4 on a tandy 1400LT with xtide but you have to find the CGA port of it as stock executable is VGA only. it is very playable once the graphics are sorted.
I remember running Doom on an old 360 system back in the day. Really finicky settings, sound issues, and the controls sure took getting used to but my siblings and I still had a blast seeing what all the fuss was about. Yep, sure miss that old Xbox sometimes. (Alright couldn't resist, I'll see myself out haha)
My first PC was a 286-16, with 1MB of RAM. When I got around to opening it up, years later--I found out that inside, it had an AMD 286-12 processor. Also overclocked. :-) It ran just fine though! The RAM was not in SIMMs unfortunately, but in 36 individual chips directly on the motherboard, but I was able to add an expansion card with another 72 RAM chips for a total of 3 MB. I'm pretty sure I never ran DOOM on it. I needed to run Wolfenstein in a pretty small window to get an acceptable framerate. I was jealous of my friend's 386 because he could run Wolfenstein almost full-screen! Ah, the memories...
I remember playing Doom on my 386 with 2MB of RAM. I had to use some DOS4GW command to trick game to run and recognize 4 MB of RAM. Additional 2 MB was swapped from HDD. Performance was even lower that in you charts so propably less then 1fps. I was happy anyways.
I was maybe 5 when dad brought home second laptop from his coworker so that we can coop Doom over laplink. But even then I realized he took one for the team by plating on the 386.
New sub. Loved the video. I had a 286 and then a 486 and have great memories of them. But indeed my memory thinks they could do more than they could. Would love to see with Duke3D line of games. I've got a Pentium 166. So I can play all the olden dos games. Maybe tomorrow do some dosember content. Thank you for the gret content. I hope to see a lot more.
Do you have any idea what the performance was like on a 486 Overdrive? My Dad installed one in our family computer shortly after my parents bought it. I imagine it cost him a lot of money. I remember that computer being able to play most video games relatively well; I doubt it could hit Doom's full 35 fps, but I was able to complete the game multiple times over even as a child. I also distinctly remember playing the game in full screen with the status bar and in high detail mode. Unfortunately, I don't remember the clockspeed of the Overdrive; only that it had very large embossed heat sink(?) ask opposed to a perfectly smooth one that the low end Overdrives had. I still have the thing all these years, but it's still in my parent's house!
In '94 I had a reclaimed 386 SX 16MHz in my university dorm and with the PC speaker (it was basically a bunch of thrown away parts from the I.T. department that I put together. Pretty sure it had 4MB (it was a while ago), no co-pro and a Trident VGA ISA card. I installed Netware 3.12 on it mostly for my studies on it (I passed CNE in ;96) but for productivity I also had DOS/WIN3.1 and...it ran doom. It was in a tiny window and almost certainly low detail, but you just pressed a button (was it -?) and the window got smaller and smaller until it worked.. For sure it was a poor experience, but it was playable. When you don't have money you make things 'work' even if they aren't the best time.
I ran original doom happily on my IBM ps/2 P70 Luggable. A Microchannel based suitcase with a small plasma screen packing a 386dx20 and 8mb of Ram. I reckon it got some 15-20 fps. I remember Mums 386DX40 machine struggled. It was a normal PC Clone, so I suspect architecture may have had a hand in it. Animation at the time was usually about 12fps, broadcast TV and film more 24fps
There's an important detail that you're missing here (or feature of the doom engine should I say?): when you benchmark by playing back a demo, the doom engine will not skip frames (or actually, gametics), so you'll see your "real" fps numbers. But during normal play, the engine will skip frames to try to get as close as possible to the 35 fps "magic number". That means that while a 386 DX will show around 14 fps in low detail setting, actual gameplay is much higher, and pretty close to 30 or 35 (which is how I played it back in the 90s - full screen -1 and low detail). If you run doom -devarm you'll see some dots on the lower left corner of the screen (iirc) which show how far or how close you're to the real 35 fps number, or something like that (1 dot being optimal, 2 dots being 2 gameticks per frame, etc... the actual formula for current fps is 70/(dots+1)).
Yes, doom tries to run the game logic always at 35 iterations per second and if graphics can't keep up, it starts to drop frames. The issue is, that it gets harder to move and aim. With a lot of enemies the frame rate can drop significantly, where the logic continues to run at 35 iterations per second. With other words your enemies see 35 FPS, where you see less, dependent from the hardware you use. In higher levels with more enemies it gets really hard to play. I think nobody will be able to finish doom on a 386dx-40, except he is playing in a post stamp format.
@@necro_ware Oh no, I finished Doom 2 in ultraviolence on my old 386dx-40 back then. Yes, I had to sometimes abuse the save feature and I remember specifically one place which was a headache (map 12, the factory, when a million enemies attack you at once). Also making the window smaller helps, but that was for very very specific places. Mostly it was ok just to play in lo detail.
My first PC was a 486 SX25, but I'm pretty sure I started playing Doom after I upgraded to a 486 DX4/100. The DX4/100 couldn't play Quake very well, and I remember trying to play Microprose F1 ver 2 and it was like a slide-show. My next upgrade was to a Pentium 150 - that upgrade was like night & day 🙂
I was a junior in HS when this came out. I played it on an IBM 386sx at 20mhz with two megs of ram in sim slots and 2megs of ram on an ISA intel above board. I used low detail and screensize of a little less than half (so a large postage stamp). I was desperate to play Doom obviously. Totally agree a 486 dx2 66 was the sweet spot. For Wolfenstein I always thought it ran great on a 12mhz 286 but tried it again recently and my memory was definitely incorrect. 386sx 16mhz or faster is optimal. Thanks for the stats!
I had a 386/40 with 4 MB RAM at that time. Because of Doom I first bought a 486/33, but it felt slower under Windows than the 386. So I upgraded to a 486/66 and overclocked it to 80 MHz. Only then you could talk about Doom running smoothly. It ran so smoothly that it cost me my business degree. Never mind, later I became an IT specialist, which suited me much better.
Oh man. For the first time, I had convinced my dad to really splurge on a PC in 93. DX2 66. 8mb of ram. PCI video card. 520mb SCSI2 hard drive. Terrible OEM NEC 3x CDROM. When my friend’s dad brought over the shareware doom disks we were blown away. If only that computer hadn’t been stolen from our basement later in the 90s. It would be a really fun retro build.
Oh, the memories! I first played it on a 386DX-40 with a 512KB Trident SVGA card - it ran just like in the video at ~8 FPS, totally unplayable. Then after 2 years I upgraded to 486DX2-66 with 8MB of RAM. It felt blazing fast. I can't believe it was just around 15 FPS.
I had a 486 DX2 50 with VLB. I remeber the first Doom being silky smooth but by the time Hexen came out if I played it 4 players on Dwango it would be chugging.
Dude, it's been 30 years since I thought about the hardware I was using to play Doom and that was JUST prior to me getting into hardware ... I can't freakin' remember what kind of chip I had. I don't even remember what amount of RAM I had. I do know that it ran bretty gud with two notches down from the screen size you were using in this demo. I can't remember if it was High or Low detail - probably low. It ran fast at that speed with that screen size.
I know I'm a few months late but I remember Doom was slow as crap on my 386dx40 4mb with a Trident 8900 isa card. Funny thing is when I first played(late 1993) it I thought it was fine as I had a C64 before my 386, then I went to my friends house who just got a brand new 486dx2/50 and couldn't believe the gun swayed around. I finally got a 486dx2/66 about a year later with a Diamond Stealth 32 vesa card and it was much more playable. Funny thing is though until I got my amd 5x86-133 in 1996 and clocked it to 150mhz I typically played in low detail to avoid slowdown. These days I just use a k6-2 running at 550 mhz, GUS ace, and some agp card for most of my dos gaming, but I still have a 386 board, a 386/486 combo board, and a 486 vesa board laying around that I should bring into the fleet at some point.
I first played Doom on a 486/25 with 4 MB of RAM (those are the only specs I can remember). It ran pretty well. We later upgraded to a whopping 8 MB of RAM.
While I had played the game earlier, my first machine to run DOOM on was on a Pentium MMX machine in 95 or something like that. I am uncertain about exactly when this was, could be 96. I remember having played the game on the neighbors machine before then, but truly enjoyed it on my own machine as a 7-8 year old kid alone. Terrifying, but amazing. So to me my memories are indeed of a rather fast running DOOM.
doom was the crysis of the time! to run it at 30+ fps in ultra violence in all situations you needed a pentium, which in 1993 was hugely expensive and very few people had. I think doom is not remembered as having extreme hardware requirements because cpu speed was skyrocketing in the 90s and computers from 1995 and later would run it just fine
it's not precise. I saw more complex benchmarks, VLB cards had also range. From like 20 to 30 fps. ISA had even greater range (from 10 fps to 22 fps (slowest-fastest))
Amd 386 SX-40 with Trident 9000 video card - it was not playable on defaults. On Low detail and reduced viewport - somewhat (not a slideshow anymore).Luckily fairly soon had upgrade to Amd DX4-100 and doom was running smooothly ;-)
I could be wrong, but an AMD 386Dx40 was my first machine, 8 meg of ram and I do remember running doom on it (alot) but I was 12/13 at the time, so may have tolerated slow running. Nice video :)
The only time I saw Doom almost playable on a 386 (I owned a Tandy 386sx @25MHz and it was downright unplayable) was on an IBM microchannel 386dx @33MHz PC, setting low detail and shrinking the screen once. Again, I don't know exactly what graphics hardware was in it at the time nor how much cache it had, but it was the only 386 I remember it being 'tolerable' on. From my experience, I'm with you, I only enjoyed it when I got my first 486DX @66MHz Dell PC with an integrated cirrus logic with 72-pin SIMM memory and the video memory ran at 60ns. I really enjoyed playing Doom on that machine. It got even better when Office Depot sold the DX4 overdrive chips for the 486 boards and I got one to upgrade my 66 to a DX4 @133MHz! Quake was somewhat playable on that setup, but I still played it the entire way through on it until I eventually got a Pentium.
The first time I played Doom was on a 386DX/33. To me it was a lot of fun and an insane improvement to Wolfenstein 3D. The reason it was so much fun even though it was running poor(I now remember the gun moving from left to right slowly while walking) is probably the era and age(I think it was 1993 so I was 13). PCs were very scarce and I didnt know of many games with smooth framerates on our Atari ST.And then seeing such a graphic monster like Doom made us enjoy it as much as possible while forgetting about framerates😂
Как всегда - приятно послушать и повникать ) Не знал, что Доом ограничен на 35 FPS! Интересно... У меня с 4МБ Доом не запускался совсем. Правда крутить autoexec мне было лень, да ещё и теневые сектора в памяти были ) Но с 16МБ получал 6,5 FPS на SX40. Цифра грустная, но вживую первые уровни вроде играбельны! А уж back then....
I think the rosy memories of running DOOM on 386 and even 286 machines are from folks who might have been very young when it came out, and who don't really remember their PC's specs. I was a Junior in College when it came out, and my younger high school age brother wanted me to help him set up his machine to play it in early 1994. He had a newish 486SX-25 with 4 MB of Ram and built in SVGA video with 1MB of ram. As I recall, it was only JUST playable.
Maybe a 386 with low details and screen size of a postage stamp.
It won't run on a 286 as is needs protected mode, was a slice show on a 386
Kind of like how my dad remembers running Windows 95 on his 286. I like to be charitable and imagine it might have originally been a 286 and then was upgraded to a 386SX or 486SLC maybe using one of those Kingston SLCNow! kits. As it was, a 286 obviously wouldn't have even been able to launch 95 -- it could barely run Windows 3.1 and ironically couldn't run a significant chunk of software intended for Windows 3 either as it all leveraged the 386 in some way or another.
@@jameshare1848 Yes, we know...
I skipped from an ams 1512 and 1640 ecd to a 486 dx 66 with 16 mb ram, sound blaster and cirrus logic gd 54xx. Doom ran on that
Hell, it was fun. 1998, small post-Soviet town, AM386SX33 "powerhouse" stolen from work by dad. First "big" PC after Radio86 and Spectrum. Even equipped with a Sound Blaster!
It was a ton of fun, inclusing, yes, the legendary Doom. Which was running quite well on this config... As long as the image was matchbox sized...
But this was also not a problem, thanks to the old lens from Soviet KVN TV, which was able to "unfold" it back to decent size:)
Great times, really.
I can't even describe how I felt (as a 10 year old) when I first saw Doom running on my best friend's PC (I didn't have a PC at the time). It felt as if I had just discovered fire. 🙂It's a feeling that I will always remember (just like I will always remember how my jaw dropped when seeing Quake / Quake 2 running on a Voodoo 2 card, using the Glide API).
Great video and looking forward to seeing others soon (more frequently, if possible 😛).
Yeah, I'm trying, but.... hard times, you know. Merry Christmas.
@@necro_ware, don't worry, I was joking! 😀 Anyway, quality over quantity... always!
Also, I'm the one to talk... I have a small retro youtube channel myself, but haven't been able to upload anything since April (because... well... I'm a workaholic). 😞
The memory of booting up Doom for the first time is also something that I'll probably never forget. I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing. It totally blew my mind that something so graphically impressive could be run on my family's little Compaq. That was nearly 30 years ago yet I remember better than things that just happened last week.
A Necroware video on Christmas Eve? What a wonderful Christmas present to the world! I myself often play DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D with a smile on my face. Ty, Necroware! Merry Christmas to you and yours. 🥂
Thank you very much and merry Christmas :)
@@necro_ware Love your videos, man! Merry Christmas!!
First time I played Doom was on my 486 SX 33 with an ISA VGA card, needless to say, I had to play on low with a reduced window size. A common trick back then was to reduce the window size then adjust the monitor to essentially zoom in. 15FPS was about what most people considered playable back then but you also need to bare in mind that the shareware version was typically all we had so only the first episode.
This was me too, except 486 SX 25.
Great comparison, really pleased to see FastDoom on it (I'm the main developer 😅)! The 486 processors are much faster compared to 386 cpu's, not only because of the internal CPU cache, but also because most x86 instructions can be executed on the 486 in a single cycle, compared to 3/4 cycles a 386 needs to execute instructions. But I think the major difference is the VLB bus, it makes Doom really shine on the 486, as it uses lot's of bandwidth to transfer data between RAM and VRAM. The funny thing is that Heretic/Hexen used the base code of Doom, and Raven Software did optimize even further the rendering code, that's why on some systems Heretic/Hexen run smoother compared to Doom/Doom II.
Thank you for your work! Great project. As a game developer from the 90s I really appreciate your effort.
It is amazing to me that there was any room for optimization. One does not easily write faster code than John Carmack. ;-) You have my respect!
486 was also able to access any part of memory in just 1 cycle, something extremely important for, well just about everything. it's mostly like necro said, placebo effect. ppl remember games being a lot better than they actually were. i find that to be true even with much older games, especially with die-hard amiga funs. but i don;t blame anyone, it's the same for me too. the games that we grow up playing, were perfect in our mind...
i'm curious to know if he used FDOOM 0.9.1 or 0.9.2. seems the results should have been faster with 0.9.2
@@briangoldberg4439 I think the testing has been done with FastDoom 0.9.1, my 386DX-40 (fullscreen, potato detail) went from 27.632 fps to 33.860 fps in the latest release. We're getting close to those 35 fps on a 386 😁
Believe it or not, you can measure bandwidth difference between PCI and AGP graphics using Doom. With a fast enough processor it becomes limited by the framebuffer copy speed. So I can totally relate to your ISA vs VLB findings. Speaking of rosy memories, I have some of my own. Playing Quake on my 100MHz DX4 with ISA graphics. I somehow recall having fun.
"I somehow recall having fun." applies to my case of an even slower 486DX/33 where the sound broke up half the time. In hindsight, I have no idea why I found it enjoyable, but somehow I did.
I must have had a later release of quake. I had just got a 486 pc after upgrading from a commodore 128d and a xt pc, was around 1999. Anyway when i tried to load quake (the sole reason for begging dad for a "windows 95 computer" it would just come up with "this program requires a pentium processor" or similar error message. I end up getting a pentium 166 mmx with 32mb ram and a 1m sis graphics card the next year and then i could finally play quake... and havent stopped since haha
@@Colt45hatchback Quake does run on a 486. It may only get to 8 fps, but it is "playable" for the most part.
Good video, as I explore some of my old hardware I've also had to re-calibrate some of my old memories. For Doom, as I remember, a Cyrix 486 DLC-40 was the first computer I had that would be able to properly play it. Technically a 386 platform still, but still a noticeable bump over my friend's 386 DX-40 once I realized I needed the program to enable the tiny but effective 1KB cache. Even with that, though, I recall having to bump the window size down two or three notches from the 'full screen with GUI' level to play comfortably, which was a compromise I was more than willing to make. When I got a 486 DX/2-66, then it was finally full screen time!
This is exactly as I remember it. A friend of mine and myself played DOOM against each other over 28.8 modems. He had the DX2-66, I played on a DX-33. He had the advantage of creaming me at every turn. I also had the game for the PowerMac, for which ran really well on the 6100/60. For anyone saying that this game ran well on a 386, they must have played it with a magnifying glass. It truly needed VLB graphics to be playable.
I agree and I had a buddy I used to do the same with lol. This video really took me back
@Stefano Pavone With Doom 95 you could enjoy the full 35 FPS with a 486DX/33. The DirectDraw API was truly voodoo magic back in the day and it's not a coincidence that it was a hot selling point for Windows 95 and thus heavily marketed by Microsoft.
System requirements in the 90s were often shockingly optimistic. Its as if the publisher asked the developers what min spec was and then ignored everything after “but”.
Congratulations on 26k subs keep up the great work and merry christmas!
Absolutely this. The required specs were literally just what minimum system could technically launch the software. Recommended specs were what would run it well. I usually had something closer to the second, but not always exactly. ;-) We all did what we must.
Yeah I played so many games in 512x at first because 640x was too expensive. If I see any picture like that these days it's more how the hell did I get kills with a 320 ping when it's a snowstorm
@@salaciouscreations4323 Ahaha... that that reminds me, I used to play Counter-Strike at 800x600 on dialup with about 330ms ping around 2002 or so. I preferred "HPB" (high ping bastard) servers 😆
yeah i often looked at recommended first and totally ignored the minimum because chances we're the game would sure run at minimum but would be far from enjoyable
Amusingly, the system requirements have gone the other way in recent years. Look at Quake on Steam:
Minimum Spec (1080p/60 HZ)
Win 10 64-bit version
Intel Core i5-3570 @3.4 GHz or AMD Ryzen 3 1300X @3.5 GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 TI (2GB) or AMD HD 7750 (1GB)
8GB System RAM
Minimum 2GB free space on hard drive (additional space required for add-on downloads)
Suuuurrrrreeeee...
About the only part that looks remotely accurate to me is the disk space, and that's just from needing to download a few ISOs for the music in the base game and its expansions.
Your 386SX footage reminds me of how I "played" Quake on a 486DX/33 back in the day. It was so slow that the sound broke up half the time. 8MB of RAM was just barely enough to run it, and required a boot disk to leave out everything except STACKER. No mouse, and no CD drivers either (and I didn't have a CD, anyway).
Wait what?? How do you only have 26k subs? This channel is pure gold! Keep up the great work and thanks for all the videos 🙂
Congratulations on hitting 25K! Great video. I still remember playing Doom on the DX2/66 VLB system my family bought back in 1994. I didn't really understand the difference between VLB and ISA graphics back then, but I was always surprised how poorly the game ran on systems my friends had (even 486s). They'd usually play with a smaller window size to keep the game running smoother. I don't have many ISA graphics cards, but none have really provided what I'd consider an enjoyable experience in Doom. VLB was a huge step up, that's for sure!
Congratulationson 26,000 subscribers! I have enjoyed all of your videos so much! Your repair techniques on motherboards are works of art.
Thank you very much!
this is the first video i found from this channel, and knew i had to subscribe.
It's also worth testing some of the 386, 486 hybrid chips like the Cyrix cx486DLC , mine is decent enough to play on low details ... with some bios tweaks, but then again it's very subjective like you mentioned
Thank you for your education and for breaking down everything into layman's terms so that it can be completely understood.
Merry Christmas!!
Merry Christmas and a happy new year. And thank you for all the wonderful videos you've been spoiling us with all year long.
I was so sad as a kid to learn my 386 SX could not run DOOM worth a damn.
I had NO CLUE that 286 systems were just 16-bit!! I learn something new in EVERY SINGLE VIDEO you make!! You are just a bundle of knowledge!! Thank you for doing everything you do! MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!
Yes, 386 was the first 32-bit x86 CPU. Merry Christmas!
Really...?
Amazing video ! My first experience with doom was on a 486 dx 33 😅
Nice back in time moment 🔥
My own memories from when I started to play Doom (II) on a 386DX 33 with 64k cache is that it ran but it ran poorly. My best friend back then had a 486DX2 66 with PCI graphics and that handled it much much better.
We still had lots of fun playing it in multiplayer, with me watching a slide show some (most) of the time.
Hi, I tried Doom on my DX33 and then saw how different it felt and look on my friend brand new DX2 66. I just couldn't enjoy it on my system.
Happy holidays and thanks for all the great content!
I.. don't know. I had an 40 MHz 386 system with 4 megs of ram. Not sure but something rings in my mind I had a math co processor. Then low quality , and 1 notch down on screen size made it run well enough to be playd over till the end.
Love Doom. Thank you for the Video and have a Merry Christmas.
All those subscribers are 100% deserved, congratulations! My first PC was a 386DX-25 (a friend literally forced me NOT to buy an SX, now I know why!). But my motherboard did not come with cache and I only had 2MB of RAM. I think I was able to play DOOM but performance was poor. In contrast, a friend had a 386DX-33 but with cache (and also 4MB of RAM) and his PC was massively faster than mine in everything! :)
I believe you are right, we had different benchmarks back in the day. Those 15fps were probably "WOW" while today it would be considered unacceptable.
Thanks for the nice video and Merry Christmas!
yes, I remember, many people was used to much lower framerates, and accepted it, cause game could be played "somehow". I think, that level was 15 fps, what people considered still playable. They were used that games used to be choppy.
I ran Doom on my 386 for a long time as I could not afford a 486. By the time I did get a 486 I had a PCI graphics card which helps a ton. To run on a 386 I would bounce between high detail and a small window to low detail and a slightly smaller window. In today's standards that would not be acceptable, but back in the day when this was all we had I loved it. Even today it is still one of my favorite games to play. Thank you for the video, this I hope, helps put tech back then in to perspective. It might have helped a bit more to discuss the price of hardware at that time as well. It was not cheap.
Amazing video. My first Doom PC was an 386dx-40 with 4MB ram. Always in Low Detail and a tinyscreen. lol.
nicely done. i already had a 486 dx2/66 when i met the doom wad for the first time, and it ran well enough to play it, i do not recall if i ever finished it. and now today my 11900k with a 3080 ti going 100% fan when i play it with ray tracing is kinda humorous, but playable
So, I'm pretty sure that the howl sound effect from the very beginning of the video is pitched down and used at the beginning of "Nightcall" by Kavinsky. Did anybody else notice this? (There are two howles layered on top of each other. It is the lower one.)
Thank you! When DOOM came out, I only had a 386SX20 with 6Mb of RAM. And I could, with some tweaking, get it to run, but it was pretty much unplayable. Ran OK on a friend's DX2/66 but best on a 486DX4/100 or Pentium for sure! So my memories on this are fairly sound after all.
Ran good on my 486DX/33 8 MB with ISA graphics card. High detail was possible with slightly reduced screensize (maybe three steps from fullscreen), low details was possible with HUD shown. Some fanmade maps stuffed a few enemies too much onto the screen so it started to lag, but the official maps from the first three episodes were running good.
Our first family PC in 97 which was a Am5x86 P75 still struggled a bit to run Doom. I think the frame rate was ~25 but there was always frequent pausing and loading with the little blue diskette icon appearing. Contrast that to my neighbor who had a Gateway with the latest Pentium II running Doom II silky smooth on Icon of Sin.
Doom was playable on a AMD 386DX 40mhz but only with low quality and if you shrink the screen 2-4 notches. I had a good friend that had such a machine when Doom was released. I had a 486 DX2 66mhz and Doom ran extremely well on that machine! Linking our machines together via a null modem cable was one of the first deathmatch experiences I had using a PC.
Doom was the catalyst of PC multiplayer games that drove my friends and I to setup our own 10 mbit coax network. My best friend lived in the house next door and we had a coax cable that ran from the basement of my house to the basement of his house. Our first 4x4 matches in games like Quake, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Rise of the Triad, Duke 3d and Warcraft 2 were all done via that coax network and over IPX. Those were good times!!!
You can speed it up on your 386-SX by lowering your viewable resolution. It was a pretty standard thing people did to run the game on slower machines. We got Wolfenstein running on a 286 that way. One or two sizes lower with sound disabled was still perfectly playable on a low end machine.
I am keenly aware of Doom's system requirements because I was stuck on an 8 MHz 286 when it came out, and was not able to play it at home as a result. Instead, my first Doom experiences were on computers at my dad's office, where I sometimes played LAN co-op with my brother on weekends.
We later got a used 386DX-33 and then built a 486DX4-120, so those were the two machines I played Doom on at home in the 1990s.
My memory is that the 386 was fairly playable - but only in low-detail mode, and maybe down a notch or two in viewport size (which I was used to having to do to make Wolfenstein 3-D playable on the 286).
Back in the days when I was in 10th grade we had 386DX-40 in our computer lab and I remember that doom was only smooth running when shrinking the screen. You needed at least one step better two shrink steps for good framerates. At home iplayed it on my DX4-100 System silky smooth. Wish you and all your viewers Merry christmas and a good year 2023!
My 486 DX-4 100 was a pretty powerful PC and it could play Doom no sweat. I think I had a S3 Virge graphics adapter in it?
@Paul Frederick Yesterday i grabbed my DX4-100 rebuild and tested a Cirrus Logic ISA 1MB Card against Trident CXi9400 and S3 928 based VLB Cards. The ISA Card topped out at ca.20frames. The Trident 31 frames and the S3 reached the 35 frames limit. So I don´t know what was wrong with your system.
@@Stratotank3r I don't know what was wrong with my system either. It seemed fine to me.
Concur. Any 386 needed a smaller screen size and it helped drastically. My 386DX/33 died and so I played mostly on a 386SX/25. It wasn't smooth or anything, but wasn't (in most areas) a slideshow either. I was young and just glad to be able to play it at all.
My first PC was also a 386DX-40 and i remember playing (and enjoying) doom on it. I remember playing with a little shrinking of the screen.
We had a 486 25mhz sx and it was a slide show (packard bell legend). But we upgraded with one of those 586 Kingston drop in chips and it ran like a dream after that. We also upgraded the ram to 16 mb and put in a sb 16. Even with an Isa graphics card, the 586 drop in made it run smooth as a pentium. I wish I still had that ol rig.
My very first look at doom was way back when i was at school. My best friends older borther (also a pupil) used to come into the school IT classroom and force the pc's into dos and put in a floppy disk and run doom. All the while the teachers were at lunch, and we would have got in trouble for running any games. It was a great time i remember to this day. Years went by and i ended up playing and completing the whole doom selection on my playstation. Today i have a small collection of retro systems which i play doom on, p2 armada laptop, a k6-2 233, pentium 133 and a 486dx 50, all towers, love them all :)
First and foremost, you say you have 25,000 subscribers? Wrong. You have 25,001 subscribers because I'm signing up. This content is absolutely excellent and it's bringing back so many memories of my very first PC build (486DX2@66MHz). One thing I will say...no one was playing Doom on a 286. I have never seen a 386 run Doom properly before for that matter. If I remember correctly it was 386 were Wolfenstein 3D machines and 486's were for Doom. That Diamond graphics card was the stuff dreams were made of back in 1994. I would have thought it would have helped your 386SX machine push Doom to its 24FPS standard. For reference- My 486DX2@66MHz ran Doom without issue but I remember having some issues with Doom 2 but I can't remember what. It was Xcom that gave me the most issues overall..
Addendum- Doom was designed to run at 24FPS if I remember correctly. ;)
I didn't know the 386SX was really a 286! Wow, you learn something everyday!
I remember running Doom on a 386. I remember pressing F5 to enable half-resolution mode just so it would run smoother.
I had a Zenith Data System PC with an OG Pentium running Windows 3.11 when Doom came out. I can't remember what GPU it had in it but it ran Doom better than any of my friends' PCs at the time. The ZDS was actually my 2nd PC, my first( that I had set up in my room because the ZDS was set up in a shared family space) was a Tandy 1000 RLX that my Dad gave me for Christmas when I was around 8 or 9 years old. I'd give just about anything to have those two machines back.
doom was out for years before pentium...
@@kbtdadap, Doom released in December of 1993, the original Pentium released in March of 1993.
My old PC with a rare 486DX/25Mhz processor and SPEA V7 Mirage VLB graphics card achieves 14.4FPS
SPEA Video7! Yay! My dad had the Mercury in his 486. I think these cards had the same S3 chip, I guess one of them had slightly faster RAM, but I don't remember which one.
I do remember the first version of doom I played was the shareware version (I think 1994) and although quite new Pentiums were pretty common by then. I think it was also more common that you had to build your own machine to keep the costs down. I remember it took a while to save the money, £1500 to build my first Pentium tower (approx £3000 equivalent today). So I suspect that most people were running Doom above the minimum specs back in the day, it was at the point I was switching over from an Atari ST to PC gaming.
It ran smoothy on my old AMD 485-DX 40 as far as i remember, Had 8MB RAM and ran Windows 95 and ran a much newer Trident SVGA card it was built with the older board and alot of much newer componets I peaced togather from garage sales and trades and that was around 96/97.
As a side note, if im not mistaken the DX40 was essentialy a cacheless 486SXL core with a 386DX 20MHz FSB meant for budget performance laptops.
Yeah it ran silky smooth on a 386 if you set the Graphics mode to Low and put the screen down to it's smallest size. I played it on my first PC, a Tandy 1000 RSX a 386SX CPU and Had 6MB of memory. It was still choppy AF unless you shrink the screen down and turn off the High Graphics mode.
I remember playing DOOM on the family 386SX-16 and it was slideshow mode, maybe 8fps with nothing going on and the viewport reduced. Still played it for hours but it was nothing like playing it on a fast 486 in CompUSA. I also seem to recall it ran a LOT better with a 387 installed.
Still one of my favorite games and one of my first FPS games as well. Great video hope you have a Merry Christmas and God Bless!
Great video, I bought my first 486 purely to play DOOM.
I was working on fixing a 386 sx16 for playing 386 titles. Guess I'll be fixing it as a 286 equivalent & running one of my Socket 7 boards severely cut down for 386 / 486 performance.
I used to play on a 25Mhz 486 and I think even I used at least one level of border. One thing I remembered was the plasma gun only fired about 2 shots a second because it was so slow.
Nice video, my first PC was a 386DX40, I put the motherboard in the trash about 20 years ago and wish I hadn't now. I had a Tseng ET4000 too, that must have got sold as some point as I upgraded over the years.
The video title alone was enough to have youtube not recommend the channel anymore, and the video substance wasn't even related. :(
To understand the joke you have to watch the video with audio turned on 7:52
My original DOOM PC was a 486DX2-66 with VLB... had to set DOOM's turbo to 110% to make it playable. Nowadays I play DOOM on a P4-3.2GHz .... and even that struggles with some of today's huge maps. Merry Xmas!
I recall people with 386\40 CPUs playing the game with around two nudges below full screen with the toolbar (so some green background)... it wasn't as good as on a 486DX2 66, but it kind of worked.
Also, machines that had less than 8MB of RAM had issues with the last boos (not sure what the number was, but this was reported to me back then).
The greatest and most nostalgic freeware I ever came across, endless nights with my siblings pissing ourselves
We used to have a 486 DX with 4 megs of RAM; to play Doom 2, we had to bypass the drivers and Windows when the line "Starting MS-DOS" came up on the screen.
First time I played Doom was on my MMX200 back in the day which was a blast.
But knowing older hardware as well (we came from a C64 to the 286 and later 386 which my dad upgraded up until it was probably an OverDrive 200), I can imagine the struggle to get this game to run smoothly.
Brings back memories of playing on my dx40 as a teen. I did have 256K of the fastest cache I could find tho to help the frame rates. I usually stopped down the screen size a bit.
I had a 486SX 25 that I paired with a Cirrus Logic 5428 card. I overclocked the 486 to 40mhz and since my gfx card was VLB powered; it made the game super decent.
I played Wolfenstein 3D on a Harris 286 20 with 4MB of memory. While it was more memory than was typical, we picked it up when SIPP memory being phased out. King's Quest VI which also came out in 1992 claimed it needed a 386 (but ran on my 286), which prompted my upgrade to an AMD 486DX 40. I'm probably the only person to replace a 286 with a 486, and not get more memory at the same time. That ran Doom great, but shortly after Quake came out the motherboard failed. I got a Pentium 60 to replace it, and the 486 CPU and BIOS went in a friends computer after a lightning strike. When she retired the 486 I got it back, and it still works.
Small nit: the legend on the graph is unreadable when captions are turned on as the captions go overtop the legend.
Christmas is a magical time for kids, but playing on our Amiga 500, and playing Doom on our Cyrix 5x86, seeing Quake on my mates p100, or Quake II on a 3dfx, buying Duke3D on release day, these were just as magical long after not believing in Santa. One friend had a 486dx4 100, which I badly wanted, but my other mate had a p100 and that was like grease lightning.
I remember playing Descent on 66MHz 486DX PCs in my school's computer lab - and I remember it was playable for the most part, with slowdowns when lots of enemies shot at you. Since then I've installed Descent on several 66 and 100MHz 486 machines, and it always runs a lot slower then I remember. One factor is all the PCs I installed the game on have sound, where the ones in the school did not.
Anyway, I agree, if you want to build a dedicated DOS PC for most of these 90's games, a pentium 133 is far more suitable for the early stuff, and a pentium 233 or faster is preferred for the later DOS games. Speed sensitive games are a different story tough.
Somehow I completed Doom 1.2 on a 25MHz am386 with 2MB RAM and integrated Paradise graphics. Pretty sure the window was small. Our tolerances were definitely higher back then!
there is a port of Wolf 3D floating around that will let you "run" it as low as 8086/8088 processor. i've had it going on an NEC V20 at ~9Mhz and it works but i wouldn't call it playable. i've also played commander keen 4 on a tandy 1400LT with xtide but you have to find the CGA port of it as stock executable is VGA only. it is very playable once the graphics are sorted.
I remember running Doom on an old 360 system back in the day. Really finicky settings, sound issues, and the controls sure took getting used to but my siblings and I still had a blast seeing what all the fuss was about. Yep, sure miss that old Xbox sometimes. (Alright couldn't resist, I'll see myself out haha)
Thanks for the great video.. In my opinion there is nothing better than playing a game on the original hardware. So many memories.
My first PC was a 286-16, with 1MB of RAM. When I got around to opening it up, years later--I found out that inside, it had an AMD 286-12 processor. Also overclocked. :-) It ran just fine though! The RAM was not in SIMMs unfortunately, but in 36 individual chips directly on the motherboard, but I was able to add an expansion card with another 72 RAM chips for a total of 3 MB.
I'm pretty sure I never ran DOOM on it. I needed to run Wolfenstein in a pretty small window to get an acceptable framerate. I was jealous of my friend's 386 because he could run Wolfenstein almost full-screen!
Ah, the memories...
I remember playing Doom on my 386 with 2MB of RAM. I had to use some DOS4GW command to trick game to run and recognize 4 MB of RAM. Additional 2 MB was swapped from HDD. Performance was even lower that in you charts so propably less then 1fps. I was happy anyways.
I was maybe 5 when dad brought home second laptop from his coworker so that we can coop Doom over laplink.
But even then I realized he took one for the team by plating on the 386.
Oh my. I played Doom back then on 486SX-33 without dropping quality.... And I really can't understand why I haven't considered it very slow.
New sub. Loved the video. I had a 286 and then a 486 and have great memories of them. But indeed my memory thinks they could do more than they could. Would love to see with Duke3D line of games.
I've got a Pentium 166. So I can play all the olden dos games. Maybe tomorrow do some dosember content. Thank you for the gret content. I hope to see a lot more.
Do you have any idea what the performance was like on a 486 Overdrive? My Dad installed one in our family computer shortly after my parents bought it. I imagine it cost him a lot of money. I remember that computer being able to play most video games relatively well; I doubt it could hit Doom's full 35 fps, but I was able to complete the game multiple times over even as a child. I also distinctly remember playing the game in full screen with the status bar and in high detail mode. Unfortunately, I don't remember the clockspeed of the Overdrive; only that it had very large embossed heat sink(?) ask opposed to a perfectly smooth one that the low end Overdrives had. I still have the thing all these years, but it's still in my parent's house!
In '94 I had a reclaimed 386 SX 16MHz in my university dorm and with the PC speaker (it was basically a bunch of thrown away parts from the I.T. department that I put together. Pretty sure it had 4MB (it was a while ago), no co-pro and a Trident VGA ISA card. I installed Netware 3.12 on it mostly for my studies on it (I passed CNE in ;96) but for productivity I also had DOS/WIN3.1 and...it ran doom. It was in a tiny window and almost certainly low detail, but you just pressed a button (was it -?) and the window got smaller and smaller until it worked.. For sure it was a poor experience, but it was playable. When you don't have money you make things 'work' even if they aren't the best time.
I mean the old CRTs it was played on probably also made it look smoother. I forget the exact reasoning but a CRT just looks more fluid than an LCD.
I ran original doom happily on my IBM ps/2 P70 Luggable. A Microchannel based suitcase with a small plasma screen packing a 386dx20 and 8mb of Ram. I reckon it got some 15-20 fps. I remember Mums 386DX40 machine struggled. It was a normal PC Clone, so I suspect architecture may have had a hand in it. Animation at the time was usually about 12fps, broadcast TV and film more 24fps
There's an important detail that you're missing here (or feature of the doom engine should I say?): when you benchmark by playing back a demo, the doom engine will not skip frames (or actually, gametics), so you'll see your "real" fps numbers. But during normal play, the engine will skip frames to try to get as close as possible to the 35 fps "magic number".
That means that while a 386 DX will show around 14 fps in low detail setting, actual gameplay is much higher, and pretty close to 30 or 35 (which is how I played it back in the 90s - full screen -1 and low detail).
If you run doom -devarm you'll see some dots on the lower left corner of the screen (iirc) which show how far or how close you're to the real 35 fps number, or something like that (1 dot being optimal, 2 dots being 2 gameticks per frame, etc... the actual formula for current fps is 70/(dots+1)).
Yes, doom tries to run the game logic always at 35 iterations per second and if graphics can't keep up, it starts to drop frames. The issue is, that it gets harder to move and aim. With a lot of enemies the frame rate can drop significantly, where the logic continues to run at 35 iterations per second. With other words your enemies see 35 FPS, where you see less, dependent from the hardware you use. In higher levels with more enemies it gets really hard to play. I think nobody will be able to finish doom on a 386dx-40, except he is playing in a post stamp format.
@@necro_ware Oh no, I finished Doom 2 in ultraviolence on my old 386dx-40 back then. Yes, I had to sometimes abuse the save feature and I remember specifically one place which was a headache (map 12, the factory, when a million enemies attack you at once). Also making the window smaller helps, but that was for very very specific places. Mostly it was ok just to play in lo detail.
My first PC was a 486 SX25, but I'm pretty sure I started playing Doom after I upgraded to a 486 DX4/100. The DX4/100 couldn't play Quake very well, and I remember trying to play Microprose F1 ver 2 and it was like a slide-show. My next upgrade was to a Pentium 150 - that upgrade was like night & day 🙂
That early photo of id Software members is your typical "would you have invested?" photo.
I was a junior in HS when this came out. I played it on an IBM 386sx at 20mhz with two megs of ram in sim slots and 2megs of ram on an ISA intel above board. I used low detail and screensize of a little less than half (so a large postage stamp). I was desperate to play Doom obviously.
Totally agree a 486 dx2 66 was the sweet spot.
For Wolfenstein I always thought it ran great on a 12mhz 286 but tried it again recently and my memory was definitely incorrect. 386sx 16mhz or faster is optimal.
Thanks for the stats!
It’s possible kids were told they have a “286” by their parents, the parents upgraded to a 386 or 486 and just never told the kids.
I remember when I first saw Doom in a PC game room that was located in a basement. It totally blew my mind.
I had a 386/40 with 4 MB RAM at that time. Because of Doom I first bought a 486/33, but it felt slower under Windows than the 386. So I upgraded to a 486/66 and overclocked it to 80 MHz. Only then you could talk about Doom running smoothly. It ran so smoothly that it cost me my business degree. Never mind, later I became an IT specialist, which suited me much better.
Oh man. For the first time, I had convinced my dad to really splurge on a PC in 93. DX2 66. 8mb of ram. PCI video card. 520mb SCSI2 hard drive. Terrible OEM NEC 3x CDROM. When my friend’s dad brought over the shareware doom disks we were blown away. If only that computer hadn’t been stolen from our basement later in the 90s. It would be a really fun retro build.
Oh, the memories! I first played it on a 386DX-40 with a 512KB Trident SVGA card - it ran just like in the video at ~8 FPS, totally unplayable. Then after 2 years I upgraded to 486DX2-66 with 8MB of RAM. It felt blazing fast. I can't believe it was just around 15 FPS.
something a lot of gamers don't realize about doom was back in the day it was capped at 35 fps, and the engine literally depended on that.
Oh wow, the only correct Wolfenstein pronunciation in a video I have ever heard
I had a 486 DX2 50 with VLB. I remeber the first Doom being silky smooth but by the time Hexen came out if I played it 4 players on Dwango it would be chugging.
Dude, it's been 30 years since I thought about the hardware I was using to play Doom and that was JUST prior to me getting into hardware ... I can't freakin' remember what kind of chip I had. I don't even remember what amount of RAM I had. I do know that it ran bretty gud with two notches down from the screen size you were using in this demo. I can't remember if it was High or Low detail - probably low. It ran fast at that speed with that screen size.
I know I'm a few months late but I remember Doom was slow as crap on my 386dx40 4mb with a Trident 8900 isa card. Funny thing is when I first played(late 1993) it I thought it was fine as I had a C64 before my 386, then I went to my friends house who just got a brand new 486dx2/50 and couldn't believe the gun swayed around. I finally got a 486dx2/66 about a year later with a Diamond Stealth 32 vesa card and it was much more playable. Funny thing is though until I got my amd 5x86-133 in 1996 and clocked it to 150mhz I typically played in low detail to avoid slowdown.
These days I just use a k6-2 running at 550 mhz, GUS ace, and some agp card for most of my dos gaming, but I still have a 386 board, a 386/486 combo board, and a 486 vesa board laying around that I should bring into the fleet at some point.
I first played Doom on a 486/25 with 4 MB of RAM (those are the only specs I can remember). It ran pretty well. We later upgraded to a whopping 8 MB of RAM.
While I had played the game earlier, my first machine to run DOOM on was on a Pentium MMX machine in 95 or something like that. I am uncertain about exactly when this was, could be 96. I remember having played the game on the neighbors machine before then, but truly enjoyed it on my own machine as a 7-8 year old kid alone. Terrifying, but amazing. So to me my memories are indeed of a rather fast running DOOM.
doom was the crysis of the time! to run it at 30+ fps in ultra violence in all situations you needed a pentium, which in 1993 was hugely expensive and very few people had. I think doom is not remembered as having extreme hardware requirements because cpu speed was skyrocketing in the 90s and computers from 1995 and later would run it just fine
It was interesting to see how much of a difference VLB makes.
it's not precise. I saw more complex benchmarks, VLB cards had also range. From like 20 to 30 fps.
ISA had even greater range (from 10 fps to 22 fps (slowest-fastest))
Amd 386 SX-40 with Trident 9000 video card - it was not playable on defaults. On Low detail and reduced viewport - somewhat (not a slideshow anymore).Luckily fairly soon had upgrade to Amd DX4-100 and doom was running smooothly ;-)
I could be wrong, but an AMD 386Dx40 was my first machine, 8 meg of ram and I do remember running doom on it (alot) but I was 12/13 at the time, so may have tolerated slow running. Nice video :)
The only time I saw Doom almost playable on a 386 (I owned a Tandy 386sx @25MHz and it was downright unplayable) was on an IBM microchannel 386dx @33MHz PC, setting low detail and shrinking the screen once. Again, I don't know exactly what graphics hardware was in it at the time nor how much cache it had, but it was the only 386 I remember it being 'tolerable' on. From my experience, I'm with you, I only enjoyed it when I got my first 486DX @66MHz Dell PC with an integrated cirrus logic with 72-pin SIMM memory and the video memory ran at 60ns. I really enjoyed playing Doom on that machine. It got even better when Office Depot sold the DX4 overdrive chips for the 486 boards and I got one to upgrade my 66 to a DX4 @133MHz! Quake was somewhat playable on that setup, but I still played it the entire way through on it until I eventually got a Pentium.
The first time I played Doom was on a 386DX/33. To me it was a lot of fun and an insane improvement to Wolfenstein 3D. The reason it was so much fun even though it was running poor(I now remember the gun moving from left to right slowly while walking) is probably the era and age(I think it was 1993 so I was 13). PCs were very scarce and I didnt know of many games with smooth framerates on our Atari ST.And then seeing such a graphic monster like Doom made us enjoy it as much as possible while forgetting about framerates😂
Как всегда - приятно послушать и повникать ) Не знал, что Доом ограничен на 35 FPS! Интересно... У меня с 4МБ Доом не запускался совсем. Правда крутить autoexec мне было лень, да ещё и теневые сектора в памяти были ) Но с 16МБ получал 6,5 FPS на SX40. Цифра грустная, но вживую первые уровни вроде играбельны! А уж back then....