ishadow wrote:

I played Descent 1 briefly back then on 486DX2 66 MHz and it was running very good. On the other hand PSX had only 4 MB of RAM in total and very slow CD drive compared to PC HDD from early 90s.
We are comparing game with full 3D environment with polygonal robots with 2D game made in 16-colors faithful to NES limitation.

Playstation versions of DOS games are not 1:1. They tend to be ported with some form of 4bit ADPCM audio and a lot of textures swizzled down to unique 16 color palettes. It can stick more content in RAM than a typical DOS game would do, not to mention less CPU requiring since all the rendering is done on specialized hardware.

also i remember my experience of descent on a 66mhz being very very choppy that low detail couldn't help.

ishadow wrote:

I played Descent 1 briefly back then on 486DX2 66 MHz and it was running very good. On the other hand PSX had only 4 MB of RAM in total and very slow CD drive compared to PC HDD from early 90s.
We are comparing game with full 3D environment with polygonal robots with 2D game made in 16-colors faithful to NES limitation.

There's a lot of games I've played "briefly" on underpowered hardware without immediate issues. MechWarrior 2 is a game which requires 8 MB of RAM minimum, but I got the demo version when I had access to a 4 MB system. I tried it anyways and for the first couple minutes the framerate was OK and everything worked. However, before too long, everything started glitching out and the framerate died and error messages started popping up, though the game kept going despite all of that. Yup, it ran out of RAM and was somehow managing to keep going in an extremely broken state. :P

The initial levels in Descent are small and don't have a lot of wide open areas, and the ones which do have wide open areas aren't very complex. Once you get past level 7 (the end of the shareware version) the levels start to get a LOT bigger, a lot more complex, with MASSIVE open areas... trust me, a 486 with only 4 MB of RAM is going to chug in those sections. :P

And comparing with the PlayStation, you have to keep in mind that it has hardware accelerated graphics, so a lot of the 3D things which happen in games on the PS1 are handled off of the CPU on the GPU, leaving the CPU free to do a lot more. This is also a part of the reason why the smaller amount of RAM is able to do more, though the other part is that there's optimizations in place for storing more textures in less memory at the cost of graphical fidelity which normally wouldn't be noticeable on a TV screen of the time.

ishadow wrote:

And these games had full 256 color graphics not 2bit tiles. Keep in mind, that screen tiles don't change all at once, but are changed when scrolling it allow to copy sprites from main ram to vram over slow ISA and retain playable speeds. Why not simply load tiles on the fly from HDD? It was simply way easier to made this game working on 486 + 4 MB of RAM instead of pushing it to 286 1 MB.

*facepalm*

OK, so firstly, if memory serves, HD access in the days of DOS was roughly TEN TIMES slower than RAM access. As a programmer, you wanted to avoid disk caching as much as humanly possible mid-gameplay.

Secondly, you never constantly streamed from RAM to VRAM because yeah, that wasn't a very practical thing to do. Instead, you would either store all active graphics in VRAM when loading, or, use main RAM for graphics and use VRAM to do advanced tricks like page flipping to not only speed things up (since page flipping is faster than double buffering) or to prep things for drawing from the main RAM.

However, VRAM is very limited. As a programmer, you could only rely on a VGA card having 256 KB of RAM, so often that extra space was merely used for page flipping because of how little you could store in there.

Thirdly, it doesn't matter how much you compress your graphics, when you go to render, you have to unpack them into the format that the screen is running in. With VGA, this is likely going to be 320x200 8-bit. Hardware accelerated GPUs often have command sets for doing texture decompression on the fly so that much more stuff can be stored in VRAM, but that doesn't apply to VGA. :P

ishadow wrote:

Why load random vehicles, pedestrians etc. game code could check for available tile memory, load new when necessary, or reuse those already loaded when low on RAM. Open world games use this all the times.

Part of the reason open world games nowadays are able to get away with it is because of multi-threading. You can stream content in a secondary thread as you expect to need that content and unload things the game doesn't expect to get back to. However, this process is code-heavy since it needs to be able to anticipate and do things in an intelligent way. If the player does something the game isn't expecting, this streaming needs to play catch-up and will either do so by causing so much loading that the framerate drops momentarily, or will allow elements to show up without their assets being loaded, thus placeholder stuff is shown instead, if anything.

The other more important part of the reason though is that DOS is a very different beast from a modern system and disk access in DOS is simply not fast and can't be done concurrently to game code in a multi-threaded way, not to mention can't be done in a buffered way like with every operating system from Windows 95 onwards. Combined with the slower CPUs of the time compared to nowadays and any attempt to stream content from the HD is likely going to hurt your framerate significantly. If you're streaming content constantly, your framerate is going to be jittery and players just won't tolerate it. :P

ishadow wrote:

RAM aside. Why this game requires a 486? No parallax scrolling, no software MOD music. There's hardly any reason for it to require something faster that average 286, even with 7-10 sprites on screen. However It looks like that this game is drawing every frame with the CPU instead of using VGA hardware scrolling. That would explain a lot.

Already talked about VGA limitations, but the only reason the game actually needs a 486 is because it's doing some floating point stuff. If that stuff was re-optimized for fixed point math the game would probably work on a 386, (and indeed, this game WILL run on a 386 if a 387 co-processor is present), but the 386 CPU is seriously underpowered compared to a 486 and the framerate would just be plain old BAD. A 286 would be so bad it would be virtually unplayable.

I should also remind you that virtually nothing made for a 286 ran at 60 FPS. (Exceptions: Anything where only tiny amounts of movement happened per frame with like, a couple or three sprites at most, plus the scene itself is stationary.)

ishadow wrote:

It's a great thing that DOS gets that much of attention, but people prefer other vintage computers to work with.

I know... that's a part of the reason why I focus on DOS stuff with my show. Since so few people do anymore, SOMEONE has to! ;D

ishadow wrote:

For me RCR is like another demoscene entry and in this terms it's just don't shine. It lacks a few weeks of polish, adding Adlib or TANDY support, and optimize game to work on 286. It would be actually awesome if this game could be playable on 286 even with 4 MB of RAM. On 486 you could even emulate NES with full or nearly full speed, since 486 ranged from 25MHz to 120 MHz.

And again, if this was something meant to sell back in the 90s, the author would've definitely done that. :P

People only have so much time on their hands. Brian likely set himself specific goals for his DOS port so that he wouldn't spend forever working on it so he could continue with other projects and that's the healthy thing to do. Trying to make the DOS port of RCR "perfect" would simply be completely impractical in terms of time and money. Oh sure, it's very possible, but it would just take longer and the end result financially would be the same so... why bother? :P

(Admittedly, the money mentality is why we've had so many rushed/broken games released over the stretch of time, but for something not intended to be sold on its own (even the boxed copy of RCR486 comes with a Steam Key for the full game), there's no reason whatsoever to need to make this thing perfect.)

I don't care about the reduced graphics or the features missing. What annoys me the most with the DOS port is that there is only PC speaker support! I'd kill for proper OPL3 music. What might sound even more awesome for this title was special support for the MOS chip on the Innovation 2001 card.

He could release another "sound pack" upgrade. Many games had that back in the days, like Strike Commander who had the "speech pack" as an extra.

vetz wrote:

I don't care about the reduced graphics or the features missing. What annoys me the most with the DOS port is that there is only PC speaker support! I'd kill for proper OPL3 music. What might sound even more awesome for this title was special support for the MOS chip on the Innovation 2001 card.

He could release another "sound pack" upgrade. Many games had that back in the days, like Strike Commander who had the "speech pack" as an extra.

Personally, I think someone who REALLY wants that in this game should get in touch with Brian and ask to do all the music themselves. That way, all Brian has to do is write a little bit of code... then he could release a "patch" just like in the old days and not have to worry if the end result exceeds the size of the floppy disk! :D

The music for this game was made in impulse tracker or some other MOD tracker. Later it was imported to fami tracker for NES prototype. Anyway this should be easy enough to import MODs to Adlib Tracker and change instruments.

Gemini000 wrote:

OK, so firstly, if memory serves, HD access in the days of DOS was roughly TEN TIMES slower than RAM access. As a programmer, you wanted to avoid disk caching as much as humanly possible mid-gameplay.

Only 10 times:) Today it's much wider gap. HDD used in home computers have 200 MB/s linear read speed at most, but it get's lower when closer to disc center. SSD are way faster and don't suffer from random seek times. Consoles rely on way worse optical drives, although games cache their data to internal HDD for speed.

Gemini000 wrote:

Secondly, you never constantly streamed from RAM to VRAM because yeah, that wasn't a very practical thing to do. Instead, you would either store all active graphics in VRAM when loading, or, use main RAM for graphics and use VRAM to do advanced tricks like page flipping to not only speed things up (since page flipping is faster than double buffering) or to prep things for drawing from the main RAM.However, VRAM is very limited. As a programmer, you could only rely on a VGA card having 256 KB of RAM, so often that extra space was merely used for page flipping because of how little you could store in there.

From what I read, some DOS games rendered frames in main ram and copied them to VRAM using it only for double buffering, but it was probably when VLB gain popularity, VGA was internally fast, but ISA was slow and there was only 64 KB window to write to RAM. 256 KB is a huge amount for 16 color 320x200 mode. 2 frames for page flipping require only 64 KB and there's still 192 KB left for temporary tiles or fonts. Allowing for storing 1536 16x16 tiles! It huge amount for any tiled based 2D game. Also VGA had 4 latches that could copy data inside VRAM giving 4x speed increase.

Gemini000 wrote:

However, VRAM is very limited. As a programmer, you could only rely on a VGA card having 256 KB of RAM, so often that extra space was merely used for page flipping because of how little you could store in there.

Although games stick to 256 KB limit, I've never seen a computer with more than 2 MB of RAM and plain 256 KB VGA. When games started to require 4 MB every computer had at least 512 KB of VRAM, but it was awkward time when every SVGA had it's own way of surpassing VGA capabilities.

Gemini000 wrote:

Part of the reason open world games nowadays are able to get away with it is because of multi-threading.

You know that you always have to do an extra effort to make code multi-threaded? CPU's aren't getting any faster, they just will get more cores in near future. You can do multiple things on one thread and it's even easer and require less CPU power, because you don't have to worry about memory sharing between threads. But when you have 4 or even 8 cores it's better to have slower code that utilize all cores than fast code that only runs on one of them.

Gemini000 wrote:

the only reason the game actually needs a 486 is because it's doing some floating point stuff. If that stuff was re-optimized for fixed point math the game would probably work on a 386, (and indeed, this game WILL run on a 386 if a 387 co-processor is present), but the 386 CPU is seriously underpowered compared to a 486 and the framerate would just be plain old BAD. A 286 would be so bad it would be virtually unplayable.

286 is almost as fast as 386 SX with same clock. 386DX was faster and 40 MHz was as fast as 25 MHz 486DX. There are other factors like newer, faster RAM on 486 boards, VLB, or CPU cache. Last one was very important. I have old 1333 MHz Athlon CPU when you disable cache in BIOS it works as slow as 386 which allow for running DOS games that have "division by 0" on 486 or faster systems.

Gemini000 wrote:

I should also remind you that virtually nothing made for a 286 ran at 60 FPS. (Exceptions: Anything where only tiny amounts of movement happened per frame with like, a couple or three sprites at most, plus the scene itself is stationary.)

Well it''s actually interesting topic. Almost none DOS games prior to fast 486 or Pentium era run in 60 FPS. Most of them were limited to 35 FPS a half of the 70 MHz refresh rate. You can use Riva Tuner under DosBox and see for yourself how low framerate was in most of games. Even Doom has 35 FPS frame limit.

Gemini000 wrote:

People only have so much time on their hands. Brian likely set himself specific goals for his DOS port so that he wouldn't spend forever working on it so he could continue with other projects and that's the healthy thing to do. Trying to make the DOS port of RCR "perfect" would simply be completely impractical in terms of time and money. Oh sure, it's very possible, but it would just take longer and the end result financially would be the same so... why bother? 😜

So, why not release source code then? With custom license for only those who bought the game anyway. It would be more fun just to see how this was made, rather than playing this port. Community could add OPL3, Sound Blaster, Tandy, and others features. Maybe even scale down for older CPUs and less RAM. Someone port a Wolfenstein3D for 80086 CPU it's too slow to play, but it's working, and there's EGA Doom.

Fairly certain RCR exceeds 16 colours, so going with 320x200 4-bit probably wouldn't be a viable option. :P

In terms of multi-threading, it's getting easier to do thanks to libraries and engines supporting it more easily now. Even the Allegro 5 libraries I use for my game coding support easy multi-threading, and given that Allegro is multi-platform, that's pretty impressive! (Mind you, the docs warn that there are some semantic differences trying to get multi-platform multi-threading going.) Also, even if a programmer has no idea how to do multi-threading, graphics drivers have gotten very advanced and are now able to divert rendering into multiple threads. nVidia drivers call this "Threaded Optimization" and when turned on, it increases overall CPU usage, but the CPU-side of all rendering is balanced between all CPU cores, thus allowing single-core-heavy threads to function better. :B

One major difference between the 286 and 386 in terms of performance is protected mode. Yes, 286s have protected mode but it's a huge pain to get working so it went largely unused. In real mode, yes, the two CPUs have similar performance.

Knew about Doom's 35 FPS limit and yeah I meant to say 70 FPS not 60 FPS, but I had NES stats in my mind when I wrote that.

I do believe the regular version of RCR is moddable, I don't know much more about it though beyond the capability being there. :P

I can easily see why RCR 486 has no Adlib/Sound Blaster support, they would take up too much space for the platform it was designed to run on. Remember that we're talking about actual MS-DOS PC's (not just DOSBox only) with a maximum limit of 1 to 2 gigs of hard drive space. Even then, most DOS PC's sold at that time (early to mid 90's) had virtually no HDD that could offer that much storage space. And even if there was, such an HDD would cost thousands of dollars.

That said, I appreciate the DOS port for what it was capable of doing. It's far from perfect, but the fact that a game like this could be released for a platform that died out decades ago and run nicely under the given system requirements is nothing short of amazing.

EDIT: The only legacy port more puzzling than the DOS port is the prototype Windows 3.1 port. Now THAT PORT is the existence of something that I would question. Still awesome, nonetheless.

Pretty certain the lack of music is to keep his 'one floppy install' wishes. If there was music, it'd be two disks. That's four 720k's and that's terrible.

Also don't forget people were willing to put up with huge install sizes of Sierra games in the 386/486 era and they're all mostly bigger than RCR486.

leileilol wrote:

Pretty certain the lack of music is to keep his 'one floppy install' wishes. If there was music, it'd be two disks. That's four 720k's and that's terrible.

I know that. That's exactly what I meant in my first sentence.

leileilol wrote:

Also don't forget people were willing to put up with huge install sizes of Sierra games in the 386/486 era and they're all mostly bigger than RCR486.

I know that as well. Otherwise, what's the point of installing games onto HDD's? I'm pretty sure the first CD game I've installed on my DOS PC was the first Need For Speed game. I believe the default required space was 25 MB, while a complete full install was around 90 MB if you ticked every single installation option there was.

Adding Adlib support does not add much in terms of size, but Sound Blaster support can, especially if the samples are not compressed or use high sampling rates.

Gemini:

Do you have a problem with the footfall from the apartment above? Is it cement ceilings or wooden celings you're living with?

mockingbird wrote:

Gemini:

Do you have a problem with the footfall from the apartment above? Is it cement ceilings or wooden celings you're living with?

Nah. The people upstairs just had to coincidentally start doing hammering and drilling minutes after I started recording my latest GVB. I didn't think it would last long but amazingly, this continued intermittently for almost an hour straight. x_x;

It took a lot of prep work to get ready for that video so I checked my waveforms, noticed that most of the noise wasn't making it through to the mic and decided, "screw it, I'll keep recording." It only got noticeably loud in a couple segments and I had actually recorded a rage-section relating to it in case it came through really well, but since it didn't I left it out and just put up a text message instead.

Normally, it's really hard to hear the other apartments in any room except the bathroom. :P

Good to know.

Excellent vid BTW. Liked.

You were completely right about Battletoads. Seeing ads for this game back in the day made me think it wasn't very good, because it was advertising itself based on its fame. This misconception stayed with me up until about a year ago, when I came across some replays on Youtube. Now I am of the opinion that it's an absolutely fantastic game, and they didn't make enough of them.

Well in my case, I was already a fan of Rare before Battletoads came out. My 'meh'ness really started with Battlemaniacs. Didn't care for Diddy Kong or Banjo.

I'll admit, I'm a little bit disappointed that the author didn't go all-out and port the entire game to DOS. It's amazing that he managed to fit so much content onto a floppy disc, but it's not like CDROM drives were uncommon on 486 systems. Hopefully the author releases the source code to the full game so that we can do a better DOS port.

Look what came in the mail today :

Great Hierophant wrote:

Look what came in the mail today

One thing I can't get in it - why PC Speaker and no SB FM, at least.

leileilol wrote:

Pretty certain the lack of music is to keep his 'one floppy install' wishes.

He could place additional "music patch" on his site, anyway. If his religious reasons leaded to "1 floppy format".

switchblade wrote:

I can easily see why RCR 486 has no Adlib/Sound Blaster support, they would take up too much space for the platform it was designed to run on.

Look at typical size of DOS games with SB support in Pentium era (1993-1997). It's not a problem to fit all needed effects and music in several tens MB of a game, wich fited good to those 2 Gb HDDs. FM takes very few, basic digital sounds don't take much also. Even if to take "historical accuracy", a single floppy games relate to 286 era, not Pentium or 486, while there is no "historical accuracy" in supporting PC Speaker only sounds in 486 game.

run nicely under the given system requirements is nothing short of amazing

Runs useless, as noone will prefer so defective port. Practically it's more techno demo, than a full value game.

Tertz wrote:

Runs useless, as noone will prefer so defective port. Practically it's more techno demo, than a full value game.

Over a non-essential lack of music? Someone sure has high standards for one-man recreational ports of indie games. 🙄

This is a trend I'm seeing with some attitudes towards this port, which is part of the reason why I decided to do a video about it in the first place. >_>;

A handful of people just don't get it, even after my explanation. This port wasn't intended to be some historically accurate, super-powerful, feature-perfect DOS version of the game, because there's absolutely no reason whatsoever for someone who's put out a modern, paid, commercial product, to attempt to do this. There's no market for it, thus no reason to go all out. It exists because the developer felt like a challenge to do some coding he'd never done before and to meet certain restrictions, while putting out something a number of fans of the game would enjoy from a collectable perspective in the process so that his efforts weren't completely pointless.

The developer was simply having fun.

Speaking as a developer myself too, you wouldn't believe how incredibly difficult it is to try and live up to everyone's expectations. No matter how skilled you or your dev team is, you're GOING to end up upsetting people. Attempting to make your game perfect just makes it take several times longer... and people are STILL going to criticise it anyways. :P

My secret project goes out to private testers either Monday or Tuesday depending on how long it takes me to finish adding sound to the now 99% complete first game for the project. I'm fully expecting some or all of them to question my sanity when they see what I've put together so far and I fully expect similar responses when I eventually announce the thing. There's doubtlessly going to be people wondering, "Why would you make something like that?", people being like, "That's such a lame thing to do nowadays, it's TOO outdated", or I also expect the nitpicking, "You didn't do this and this which was common for this kind of retro stuff."

Sometimes it's so easy to criticize something that it's difficult to see past one's own critiques and realize the level of fun behind it, either on part of the guy making it, or the people enjoying it. It's part of the reason I don't assign numerical ratings on my reviews: Everyone has different tastes and even if *I* don't like a particular game, it may be done well enough that other people will.

...sorry, got off on a bit of a rant there... but yeah, just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean it has no place in this world. In the case of Retro City Rampage 486, it exists to be a collectable for fans of the game and it exists because the developer wanted to have fun challenging himself in new and interesting ways. It does NOT exist to be an alternative to the normal version of the game. :P

Tertz wrote:

Look at typical size of DOS games with SB support in Pentium era (1993-1997). It's not a problem to fit all needed effects and music in several tens MB of a game, wich fited good to those 2 Gb HDDs. FM takes very few, basic digital sounds don't take much also. Even if to take "historical accuracy", a single floppy games relate to 286 era, not Pentium or 486, while there is no "historical accuracy" in supporting PC Speaker only sounds in 486 game.

What the bloody hell are you on about? The developer's intentions we're to try and fit the entire game into a single floppy disk, and to try and get the game running in MS-DOS under whatever processing power he could muster out of it. It just turned out that the 486 was the best he could get out of the port in terms of performance and playability (not counting the first Pentium in mind). If you try to run the port with anything less than a 486, the game would run like a goddamned slideshow. And I'm pretty certain the reason why there's only PC-Speaker effects is because it was easier to work with, than composing with Adlib music or including digitized sounds in the game, which could easily take more processing power to run on. Not only that, the DOS port is entirely incomplete considering that it's missing a good chunk of features like mini-games, certain cutscenes, and such.

At this point, who the hell cares if the port isn't entirely "historically accurate"? Judging by those standards, I would reckon that this homebrew DOS game released in 1994 doesn't count as historically accurate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqZCT9BbTsU

PS: That homebrew game was coded on a 486 at 25 MHZ, because the dev for that homebrew game wanted to see if he could do smooth parallax scrolling on a mere 486. And guess what? No Adlib or Sound Blaster sounds to be found there!

Runs useless, as noone will prefer so defective port. Practically it's more techno demo, than a full value game.

It's a tech demo designed for a platform that has long since been obsolete with severe limitations in mind, and only aimed at a niche group of people who would only get sentimental enjoyment or praise out of it. It was never meant to be anything more than that. What more could you possibly want out of it? Just because it doesn't have Adlib music, or digital sound effects does not make this port any less amazing.