athlon-power wrote on 2020-05-05, 22:33:

I have no idea where to start, or what to do. All I have been doing is fine-tuning the two Socket 7 machines and getting the 486 running, which was nice, but it's a bit too slow for what I want to do with it, so I probably won't be doing a giant amount with it unless something comes up where it can be useful, as harsh as that sounds.

What do you want to do with it then?

appiah4 wrote on 2020-05-05, 22:37:

What do you want to do with it then?

I don't fuddle around with a lot of very old DOS gaming, so things like DOOM, DOOM 2, Heretic, etc. are usually what I go for, and while the DX2-66 is just fast enough to run the games at decently high settings, it only does so at the sacrifice of noticeable performance, especially in Heretic. DOOM and DOOM 2 allow for the F5 detail toggle, which makes them run smooth as butter, but Heretic's developers apparently wished for users with anything less than a DX4-100 swift death. Tyrian runs just fine on that system, but I also have the P200 anyways, which runs everything at full tilt just fine. I don't think having to reduce it to 128KB of L2 helped much either, but that wasn't my choice at the end of the day. I'll likely up it to 16MB in the very near future and see if that helps, but I doubt it.

Also, just for fun, I tried Quake on this machine- and it runs, in fact, if you turn the settings down enough, it's almost playable, but not quite. What I will likely end up doing with this machine is using the Windows 3.1 installation I put on there for various software made for that era, as this machine is a quite capable Windows 3.1 box. What I'm saying is that this doesn't have quite enough use for me yet to allow me to make it a permanent computer setup with the limited desk space I have. Through Quake, I learned that SmartDrive takes up a whole 2-3MB of your RAM, which is absolutely bonkers, because trying to make room for Quake on 8MB of RAM is about as easy as trying to force DDR to fit in a DDR2 slot (I did this once very early on in my learning process, and destroyed the RAM socket, not fun).

I know how your feeling he says with 13 retro rigs next to me ranging from working/needs rebuilding/needs fixing and many more "future projects" in the garage.
It's easy to feel overwhelmed but remember it's a hobby, none of this matters. What are you in the mood for?

Last week I was in the mood to play Red Alert, so fired up my XP build and did that. First time that PC's been on for months.
This week I'm in the mood to work on a old server that I just pulled from the Garage. Maybe I'll finish maybe I wont, but as long as I'm having fun 😀

heretic is kind of overlooked as a demanding game for its time. i used to think that the p133 i had tried it on was overkill, but it lags significantly later on with the p60 and i imagine it was not a very pleasant experience on the average dx2/66 back when it came out, unless screen size was reduced a lot. in fact there is some footage of it here running on that, it's really not pretty considering this is just the 2nd level or so: https://youtu.be/BoD0KNEdXnY?t=1m39s

compared to doom, i think it mainly comes down to the larger, more complex maps, and tons of enemies on the higher difficulty settings. i'd expect similar issues with doom 2 on the larger city levels later on.

auron wrote on 2020-05-07, 20:42:

heretic is kind of overlooked as a demanding game for its time. i used to think that the p133 i had tried it on was overkill, but it lags significantly later on with the p60 and i imagine it was not a very pleasant experience on the average dx2/66 back when it came out, unless screen size was reduced a lot. in fact there is some footage of it here running on that, it's really not pretty considering this is just the 2nd level or so: https://youtu.be/BoD0KNEdXnY?t=1m39s

compared to doom, i think it mainly comes down to the larger, more complex maps, and tons of enemies on the higher difficulty settings. i'd expect similar issues with doom 2 on the larger city levels later on.

...yeah, that video pretty much sums up my experience. I'm honestly quite surprised that it lags with a Pentium 60 at all- I'd be interested to see what happens when Heretic is thrown at a Pentium 75. Considering Quake is at least somewhat playable on a machine like that, I'd be very surprised if it couldn't do Heretic (though my DX2-66 can run Quake at the lowest resolution at the size of a credit card at 5-10fps, so maybe that's not saying much).