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Best Doom 1 & 2 config?

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Reply 20 of 49, by BeginnerGuy

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badmojo wrote:

486SX 33, 4MB RAM, PC speaker. I was in high school, late '93 I'd say. A friend of my older sister showed up one day and plonked himself in front of my PC as he often did, usually to my disgust. But that day he had a stack of disks and started to install something - I'd never heard of it. One of the disks was corrupt, as floppies often were, so he rushed off in his crappy silver Celica to get another copy, which suggested that something significant was afoot. Once he'd returned and installed the shareware version of DOOM successfully, he fired it up and I watched in amazement as the menu screen dropped away and the love of my young nerdy life was revealed to me.

I played on a 486DX 33, 8 MB, SB Pro II. My memories of the experience are grandiose. Of course If I get back on that same PC (which I'm hoping to rebuild, I saw the same case for sale and have the Ram and sound card with me still) I'll probably see how slow it actually ran compared to the buttery smoothness of my later highschool pentium 166

I was lucky in that my dad was big into gaming back then and had Ataris and Vic 20s. I had already played Keen and Wolf3d and we all knew Doom would be the greatest thing in the universe, sure enough it was. Life for the next 5 years after that was pretty much always network Doom deathmatches or Nascar 😎

Sup. I like computers. Are you a computer?

Reply 21 of 49, by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman

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A Pentium 100 is pretty damn fast for Doom.

Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.

Reply 22 of 49, by clueless1

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I've been playing Doom lately on my 486DX2 clocked at 40Mhz and it's way more playable than I expected. Yeah, it's not buttery smooth like on a Pentium, but I don't feel like my gaming performance is being penalized by the lower framerate.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks

Reply 23 of 49, by Scali

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Friend of mine actually had an early Pentium from Escom, don't recall if it was a 60 or 66 MHz model.
And when he came to my house and saw DOOM, he was surprised at how smooth it was.
As it turned out, the early PCI videocard he had, was slowing things down more than my 486 CPU was.
He eventually got a better PCI card, I think it was some Diamond Stealth or such, S3 based probably. And then it finally was as smooth as my 486 VLB machine.

And yea, DOOM was quite a thing. We had only just recovered from the shock that was Wolfenstein 3D, and we had to upgrade our 8088 to a 386SX-16 just to play that.
DOOM followed not that much later. The first time I saw it was at some shop, where they had the demo running on a 486 system. We were totally amazed. At first it was hard to believe that it was an actual game that we were looking at, not just some fancy fake animation. This thing made Wolf3D look ugly and outdated. DOOM was much smoother, much more detailed... but yea, we had to upgrade again.
Then ID did it a third time with Quake, where you had to have that Pentium.

I suppose the last time I felt this way about a game was the original Crysis. I had to upgrade to a GeForce 8800 and Windows Vista just to play that game in DX10 mode, and it was well worth it.
That game also made every other game look outdated. And even today it still doesn't look all that aged. Heck, I can play it in 4k on my current system, and it's still quite impressive that way.

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Reply 24 of 49, by 95DosBox

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Scali wrote:
Friend of mine actually had an early Pentium from Escom, don't recall if it was a 60 or 66 MHz model. And when he came to my hou […]
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Friend of mine actually had an early Pentium from Escom, don't recall if it was a 60 or 66 MHz model.
And when he came to my house and saw DOOM, he was surprised at how smooth it was.
As it turned out, the early PCI videocard he had, was slowing things down more than my 486 CPU was.
He eventually got a better PCI card, I think it was some Diamond Stealth or such, S3 based probably. And then it finally was as smooth as my 486 VLB machine.

And yea, DOOM was quite a thing. We had only just recovered from the shock that was Wolfenstein 3D, and we had to upgrade our 8088 to a 386SX-16 just to play that.
DOOM followed not that much later. The first time I saw it was at some shop, where they had the demo running on a 486 system. We were totally amazed. At first it was hard to believe that it was an actual game that we were looking at, not just some fancy fake animation. This thing made Wolf3D look ugly and outdated. DOOM was much smoother, much more detailed... but yea, we had to upgrade again.
Then ID did it a third time with Quake, where you had to have that Pentium.

I suppose the last time I felt this way about a game was the original Crysis. I had to upgrade to a GeForce 8800 and Windows Vista just to play that game in DX10 mode, and it was well worth it.
That game also made every other game look outdated. And even today it still doesn't look all that aged. Heck, I can play it in 4k on my current system, and it's still quite impressive that way.

Not to mention the better sound effects and MIDI music that kept you engaged. How about those creature noises lurking in the background... 😲

As for Crysis 1. I wasn't into that game but a friend of mine wanted me to test it on his laptop that had Vista on it. It had some sort of lagging issues so I reinstalled XP, Vista, and Windows 7 on it to do some comparisons for 4GB and 8GB ram total installed.

XP with DX9 on it ran super smooth. But for Vista and 7. Vista SP2 with DX11 outclassed W7 SP1 on 8GB RAM.

After playing the first level over and over and over I got pretty good at Crysis 1's first level. 😀 There is one sequence where I ran the motorboat over a bunch of soldiers. Almost like reenacting a movie scene. I definitely agree that Crysis 1 can get addicting but I only so far played the first level a hundred or so times. I was tweaking a desktop system to use the Intel HD Graphics 3000 to see how it performed on it vs a discrete graphics card.

badmojo wrote:

486SX 33, 4MB RAM, PC speaker. I was in high school, late '93 I'd say. A friend of my older sister showed up one day and plonked himself in front of my PC as he often did, usually to my disgust. But that day he had a stack of disks and started to install something - I'd never heard of it. One of the disks was corrupt, as floppies often were, so he rushed off in his crappy silver Celica to get another copy, which suggested that something significant was afoot. Once he'd returned and installed the shareware version of DOOM successfully, he fired it up and I watched in amazement as the menu screen dropped away and the love of my young nerdy life was revealed to me.

And all this time we were misled that MK1 started it all for your nerdy origins. But still on an internal PC speaker? Doom 1 sounded horrible on that. Guess you missed the Wolfenstein 3D nerdiness that preceded it.

badmojo wrote:

Yep agree that a 486 is more period correct - that's what started my DOOM obsession on - but it only really starts to fly on a 100Mhz + 486, which is just a wanna be Pentium anyway, so you might as well get the real thing !

All I remember is dial up modem to relative.

1v1 death match. Camp out till they teleport in and doing a double shot gun blast them as they are materializing.
🤣

clueless1 wrote:

I've been playing Doom lately on my 486DX2 clocked at 40Mhz and it's way more playable than I expected. Yeah, it's not buttery smooth like on a Pentium, but I don't feel like my gaming performance is being penalized by the lower framerate.

Have you tried playing Doom 1 v1.666 or Doom 2 under DOSBOX?

Reply 25 of 49, by clueless1

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95DosBox wrote:
clueless1 wrote:

I've been playing Doom lately on my 486DX2 clocked at 40Mhz and it's way more playable than I expected. Yeah, it's not buttery smooth like on a Pentium, but I don't feel like my gaming performance is being penalized by the lower framerate.

Have you tried playing Doom 1 v1.666 or Doom 2 under DOSBOX?

Nope, I don't typically use DOSBox. I only use DOSBox if the game can't be made to work under real DOS.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks

Reply 26 of 49, by 95DosBox

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clueless1 wrote:
95DosBox wrote:
clueless1 wrote:

I've been playing Doom lately on my 486DX2 clocked at 40Mhz and it's way more playable than I expected. Yeah, it's not buttery smooth like on a Pentium, but I don't feel like my gaming performance is being penalized by the lower framerate.

Have you tried playing Doom 1 v1.666 or Doom 2 under DOSBOX?

Nope, I don't typically use DOSBox. I only use DOSBox if the game can't be made to work under real DOS.

I'm typically in agreement to use the original DOS version under Pure DOS if I can.

But usually if it doesn't work in real DOS it shouldn't work in DOSBOX I would think?

Was there a game that you know of that didn't work in Pure DOS but in DOSBOX? 😊

Reply 27 of 49, by clueless1

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95DosBox wrote:

But usually if it doesn't work in real DOS it shouldn't work in DOSBOX I would think? Was there a game that you know of that didn't work in Pure DOS but in DOSBOX?

For example, some DOS games from GOG do not have the ISO or the necessary files to just copy over to your DOS PC. Or sometimes the way they have it structured, is the game is completely decompressed in the GOG folder, and works as long as you have enough disk space. So games like Quest for Glory 4, Space Quest 6, or The Last Express might not fit on a 500MB or 2GB partition, depending on your system's BIOS.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks

Reply 28 of 49, by 95DosBox

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clueless1 wrote:
95DosBox wrote:

But usually if it doesn't work in real DOS it shouldn't work in DOSBOX I would think? Was there a game that you know of that didn't work in Pure DOS but in DOSBOX?

For example, some DOS games from GOG do not have the ISO or the necessary files to just copy over to your DOS PC. Or sometimes the way they have it structured, is the game is completely decompressed in the GOG folder, and works as long as you have enough disk space. So games like Quest for Glory 4, Space Quest 6, or The Last Express might not fit on a 500MB or 2GB partition, depending on your system's BIOS.

Got it. Yes another annoyance on GOG they often remove the install/config file so you can't change the sound configuration or video settings in some DOS games. But regarding the space issue you would normally expand the Gog installer and install to your computer then copy the folder and remove any unnecessary GOG installer files then you should have the bare bones DOS files hopefully that will be much smaller than the 500GB. But if it is a CD based DOS Game I would probably try it in DOSBOX instead but for QFG4 and SQ6 those two should be smaller than 50MB going from memory fully installed and expanded. The Last Express which was a CD based game and I own it but don't have it in front of me but I'm wondering if the actual ISO is a simple copy and paste to the hard drive and runnable without some CD check or needs some patch to work in DOS without CD drive as long as you have enough space to store the entire CD. But most of these CD based games that didn't use MIDI for sound output but had actual CD audio tracks I would just use DOSBOX to play as it would be easier on a modern system and could be stored on a Ramdrive as an ISO for faster performance say under XP.

Reply 30 of 49, by clueless1

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@95DosBox and koverhbarc

You are welcome to report any successes with your suggestions here:
Digital DOS games (GOG, Steam...) Retro PC Compatibility Sheet: We need your input!

QFG4 and SQ6 are both around 500-600MB, I believe due to full speech. I either of you know of a way to "reverse engineer" the files back to CD, please report how to in the link above.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks

Reply 31 of 49, by 95DosBox

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clueless1 wrote:
@95DosBox and koverhbarc […]
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@95DosBox and koverhbarc

You are welcome to report any successes with your suggestions here:
Digital DOS games (GOG, Steam...) Retro PC Compatibility Sheet: We need your input!

QFG4 and SQ6 are both around 500-600MB, I believe due to full speech. I either of you know of a way to "reverse engineer" the files back to CD, please report how to in the link above.

Were they that large? I thought there was an original Floppy version of each that I had maybe I was mistaken?

Come to think of it I'm not sure if I actually played SQ6 or not. I do remember SQ4. As for QFG4 I never quite got into those games but I believe QFG1 and 2 were floppy based. Not sure about 3 and 4.

Given if these were only CD releases I would probably use an ISO image and mount it with Daemon Tools as a letter and perhaps you can mount that drive letter inside DOSBOX and see it as an actual CD.

But if these decompress into your hard drive then there's no need to do this. I would just create a Ramdrive and use the GOG installer and point to the Ramdrive we will called drive Z:.
Then the game will be installed on Drive Z:
When you run the game it be running off your Ramdrive instead of your hard drive.

I just downloaded the SQ6 from GOG. It turns out this came from the newly released Space Quest Collection they reissued that used DOSBOX. I found the earlier variant of SQ6 and I was correct it was much smaller. I think the entire bloat came from the speech pack. The original SQ6 I found is 108MB in size. It is more barren and compact. Personally from playing SQ1-3 and I believe 4 I don't recall Roger Wilco ever speaking. It would be quite jarring to hear what his actor's voice sounds like and might ruin my nostalgia. Also they had done a VGA version of SQ1 but I don't think even that version added a speech pack.

I dug around and found QFG4 floppies ended up being 15MB total. I guess these were both the earlier Speech Free versions. I'm not sure what inflated QFG4 if it was all the speech?

The SQ6 Wave folder is the same for the original non speech and the CD version.
The biggest difference is the GOG SQC CD version contains a file called "RESOURCE.AUD" which is 436MB.
This file doesn't exist on the original SQ6 version.

Also if you wanted to get the original version that GOG is using find the "Space Quest Collection" that Vivendi Universal released on CD so it looks like you would get the same version minus some of the GOG installation files.
https://www.amazon.com/Space-Quest-Collection … C/dp/B000AYH89M

If you must play this in pure DOS I think I would go with the original SQ6 Floppy version. I think the original CD version you would have to hunt down on eBay and I don't know if that CD version was geared for DOS or possibly Windows 3.1 or 95?

New update:
Did some more tweaking and modifying tests.

I got the original SQ6 and SQ6 CD GOG version to work properly in DOSBOX but it should work in real DOS as well.

What was the error message you were getting in your DOS system when trying to run the game?

What file did you use to launch the game in DOS?

Also I don't see any need for you to reverse engineer back to a CD. If I'm correct you would simply copy/burn the entire folder onto a CD as is with my patched setup files or if you wanted it could be just the contents of the folder burned to the root of the CD and you could run it directly off a CD but I don't see why you wouldn't prefer to run it off a directory on your hard drive or SSD. It's not protected and it doesn't do a CD check like some others I've seen so you wouldn't need to load a CD-rom driver for the game to run in DOS either.

Here are the non original files on the GOG CD version you can purge from the directory. These files would not have existed on the original CD released and will not affect the functionality of it in PURE DOS.

customer_support.htm
Dosbox Configurator.lnk
dosboxSQ6.conf
dosboxSQ6_single.conf
EULA.txt
GameuxInstallHelper.dll
gog.ico
goggame-1207661463.dll
goggame-1207661463.hashdb
goggame-1207661463.ico
goggame-1207661463.info
Launch Space Quest 6 - Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier.lnk
Support.ico
unins000.dat
unins000.exe
unins000.msg
webcache.zip
17 File(s) 2,436,491 bytes

Reply 32 of 49, by koverhbarc

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Yeah, it's the speech, but since the original versions have it you probably don't want to lose it if you want authenticity. But as for a solution - well all I'm allowed to say is that Google is your friend. If you've paid for the game it's fair use to find the distribution that best suits you.

I have an original SQ6 CD, and it is indeed almost full. The SQ Collection CD basically duplicated this with the much smaller SQ1-5 added.

Reply 33 of 49, by clueless1

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95DosBox wrote:

I got the original SQ6 and SQ6 CD GOG version to work properly in DOSBOX but it should work in real DOS as well.

What was the error message you were getting in your DOS system when trying to run the game?

You shouldn't need to have to get SQ6 GOG working in DOSBox, as the installer sets it up in DOSBox, ready to run, no?

And I never said I had an error message with SQ6. I said that the game can't be made to run off of CD, so you have to use 500-600MB of hdd space if you want to play it on a retro PC. If I'm trying to run this on my 486, which has a 528MB hdd BIOS limitation, then I'm out of luck (and yes, I know about dynamic drive overlays).

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks

Reply 34 of 49, by 95DosBox

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clueless1 wrote:
95DosBox wrote:

I got the original SQ6 and SQ6 CD GOG version to work properly in DOSBOX but it should work in real DOS as well.

What was the error message you were getting in your DOS system when trying to run the game?

You shouldn't need to have to get SQ6 GOG working in DOSBox, as the installer sets it up in DOSBox, ready to run, no?

And I never said I had an error message with SQ6. I said that the game can't be made to run off of CD, so you have to use 500-600MB of hdd space if you want to play it on a retro PC. If I'm trying to run this on my 486, which has a 528MB hdd BIOS limitation, then I'm out of luck (and yes, I know about dynamic drive overlays).

My method removes the DOSBOX way of running it in Windows using GOG and uses the DOS way of running it and it will work on both the Floppy and CD versions in pure DOS.

Well a CD should hold the 650MB. I tallied the total size right now to 645MB total size now and yes this version I have patched should work directly off a CD since it would only read the files as is with the correct configuration.

Now your other problem is a BIOS related limitation which I'm aware of but most of legacy systems that I would have can handle up to 128GB and has an ISA slot and I'm not a huge fan of DDO either but had to use that in the way past to get use of more the capacity of the hard drive.

On that particular BIOS limitation I would then say your best option is to use a DOS CD-rom driver and there is are two I'm aware of that would work fine. Since the CD-rom could handle the full capacity > 528MB you should be fine.

Let me see if there is any way to squeeze this program down another 117MB. If it can then you could run it directly off the hard drive on your older 486 with the 528MB partition limit.

Have you tried using 98SE DOS to create a 2GB FAT16 partition on another system that can handle the capacity?
Then format it with sys so it is bootable? Then rehook this IDE hard drive back to the 486 to see if it can boot and see the first partition as 2GB? I'm curious if this might work instead of a DDO and maybe somehow to get around the 528MB over the 650MB size required even if it doesn't fully utilize the entire 2GB.

How large is the hard drive capacity of the IDE drive you have on this 486? Maybe try a 2.1GB IDE Hard Drive or 8.4GB model if you can to do these tests.

Also did you burn the actual GOG folder to a CD-RW? Boot up in Pure DOS which version are you using?
Have the CD-rom drive detected under DOS and can read the files on the CD-rom?

Let me know what is working or isn't with the CD-rom. It should work assuming it fits on the CD-rom.
Give me the steps you did from the Command Prompt you did to run it off the CD-rom and what error it displays when it doesn't run SQ6. And from what you stated I'm not sure how far you got such as could you see the CD-rom and its file could you run the SQ6 title but crashes during the game intro?

As for the Hard drive you are using if you you are limited to 528MB can you format that partition bootable and type the exact digits displaying how much total Bytes capacity it displays and also how many Bytes free capacity on the hard drive? I'll see if I can compress it down to a hard drive install for you if the CD-rom method for some reason won't work.

Reply 35 of 49, by clueless1

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Sorry man, this is not a problem I need fixed. 😀 I was just stating a fact that some DOS games in digital format (GOG/Steam) have challenges in making them run on a real DOS system. If someone is motivated enough to run a particular game, I'm sure they can come up with something. But I'm not really into adventure games myself, I was just listing them off as examples of games with this particular challenge.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks

Reply 36 of 49, by 95DosBox

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clueless1 wrote:

Sorry man, this is not a problem I need fixed. 😀 I was just stating a fact that some DOS games in digital format (GOG/Steam) have challenges in making them run on a real DOS system. If someone is motivated enough to run a particular game, I'm sure they can come up with something. But I'm not really into adventure games myself, I was just listing them off as examples of games with this particular challenge.

The main reason why a lot of the GOG ones are not the best choice to use for pure DOS play is they intentionally removed a lot of the necessary installation/setup files to configure the sound and video options. So any true pure DOS gamer needs to buy the original game box containing the original media unaltered.

I thought I could troubleshoot your 486 system to see if these methods could get around the 528MB issue but since this isn't important anymore. 😊 I usually in the past stuck to non CD-rom based games when it comes to the 486 and lower. The largest game I tested was Warcraft 2 and ripped the entire CD onto my hard drive to not deal with the CD at the time. The CD-rom I had at the time was 1x speed and I think it flaked out half the time. Sometimes you'd read the CD-rom and it would read the files correctly. Other times you'd see garbage characters.

I modified the SQ6 now and it fits on a CD-rom size but also I'm patching it so it can use the MT-32 but I am going to do more testing to see if it also works in Munt unless I have to drag out my real MT-32 and test if I can't to see if the Midi quality sounded better. But regular Sound Blaster works just great and seems to be the only sound option if you're using the GOG CD release. And it turns out this game does require the Speech Pack at least to somewhat enjoy it a bit more so the original floppy version was a bit on the paltry side. The Wilco actor's voice wasn't the best choice. I don't have time to play through the game but just get through the intro for testing only. But from ease of use stand point this game probably is enjoyed best in DOSBOX with Munt.

Reply 38 of 49, by Scali

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Rawit wrote:

Most versions of Doom support Gravis UltraSound natively. Why use MegaEm?

Try it.
The 'native' GUS support in DOOM uses patches supplied by ID. MegaEm uses a patch-set supplied by Gravis (which you can alter if you like).
In my opinion, the MegaEm patches sound better than the ones supplied by ID.

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/