Well I used to play Quake 3 on a Pentium 133 @ 14FPS and I thought that was playable back then, so.....

DamienC wrote:

I remember playing the MW2 demo on my old Packard Bell P100 in the 90s, and I remember it running fairly well at 640x480. I could be remembering completely wrong.

Heh, pretty sure you remember it wrong. Also perceptions of "playable" have changed. Now 60fps is the standard for PC gaming, while 30 was the framelimit and the topgoal back in the days, but in many games the framerate of playable was 15-20.

But S3 Virge *is* a 3D accelerated card, and from what I read on Wikipedia, there was a special VIRGE version of Mechwarrior 2.
Surely it should work faster than software version.
I have no idea if it works in DOS or requires Win95.

Heh, pretty sure you remember it wrong.

Probably. I actually DO remember getting through all of X-Wing on a 386SX-20. I went back and installed it on the same system, and holy hell do I find it unplayable now. 😜

there was a special VIRGE version of Mechwarrior 2

There is, but I'd need to install Windows 95 and find a special S3 Virge copy of the game. I actually have an ATI Rage Pro specific version of the game that I found buried in a pile of CDs. I'm not keen on either hunting down an S3 Virge copy of the game or hunting down a Rage Pro either.

I think I'll just try to get a cheap Pentium 233 and see how that goes.

DamienC wrote:

there was a special VIRGE version of Mechwarrior 2

There is, but I'd need to install Windows 95 and find a special S3 Virge copy of the game. I actually have an ATI Rage Pro specific version of the game that I found buried in a pile of CDs. I'm not keen on either hunting down an S3 Virge copy of the game or hunting down a Rage Pro either.

I think I'll just try to get a cheap Pentium 233 and see how that goes.

If you want to try the ViRGE accel version, patches are available to convert between versions. Look for MW2 under ViRGE on this list here:
3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)

Azarien wrote:

Surely it should work faster than software version.

It won't. ViRGE is notoriously slow, and has the reputation of being a "3d decelerator" for a reason (by 1996 standards even!). It would probably be "faster" if the CPU really sucked for the 640x480 texturing spans, like cacheless Pentiums or late 486s. You're better off keeping the card for 2D (which is okay) and disregarding its "3d" features.

What will help is a Coast module, if you haven't got one in there already. 😀

PowerVR or Glide are the way to go for Mech2.

No PowerVR for a CPU that slow though. 3dfx is okay (and is fastest in theory for this rig in terms of OEM Mech2 non-Titanium) however its image output is something one would have to get used to/learn to love etc.

I had a spare CF card lying around, so I installed Windows 95 on it and used the Virge patch on my copy of the game just to see how bad it was. It seemed to only work in 320x200, and the textures looked awful, even worse than software mode. Think I'll pass on that option.

I'd settle for ~30fps in 640x480 software mode in DOS. Still leaning towards picking up a 266mhz Pentium or K6 CPU.

What will help is a Coast module,

That's cache, right? My board already has 512k cache onboard, and no Coast slot. Just a little confused about that.

Yep, cache. I mentioned that because I assumed it's a coaster, my P5 100 was such.

I noticed the later engine versions of MW2 had really terrible performance in software mode, but the stock retail 31st Century Combat version could run at 1024x768 on a Pentium 2 at 60FPS... But the graphics are comparable to StarFox on the SNES.

OP what you are trying to achieve is nigh impossible on classic Pentium. I've got a K6-III+ 550 which has difficulty running the game at 640x480 fullspeed. When there's a lot going on, it's not uncommon to see the game run at even sub-20FPS. Your best bet for SVGA Mechwarrior 2 is either DOSBox or a really fast Pentium III (if you want to do 1024x768 that is, which is admittedly really nice).

I remember running very well in 640*480 on my PI-150 with 16 megs of RAM with a S3 Trio64 back in the day. Maybe not 60 fps, but very very fast for that time. That PC was awesome for MW2, Tie Fighter CD and the likes.

Unfortunately, made some bad choices with 3d cards when those came about: first a Virge, than a Riva128. The latter is a nice card, but sucks with a slowish CPU. My friends' 3dfx was not so picky, I recall.

Running very well on a Pentium 150? No way. You probably didn't mind constant 15-20 fps 😀. Times definitely do change and the more into it you get, the far pickier you become when it comes to performance and visual quality. I seriously can't stand 20fps or even 30fps anymore and always try my best to get 60fps for a more pleasant experience. As such, most of my systems are complete overkill 🤣 .

I played through the DOS version of MW2 with Ghost Bears Legacy installed and it was fairly nice on a P200 vanilla (non-mmx) with 32MB RAM. I can remember it not being smooth, at least compared to the 3D accelerated version I played later with my Mystique. Perhaps 20-30fps in 640x480. It was definitely playable because it's simple game to control with the LRM's and pulse lazers easy to land with low FPS. It's all about positioning right before combat. But certainly a P100 will have little chance at SVGA. I'd suggest a 166Mhz Pentium minimum.

There were some 233MHz MMX Pentiums on eBay for $10 each so I picked one up. MW2 runs MUCH better. Definitely not 60fps, probably in the ballpark of ~30-40 fps. That's good enough for me. The game is definitely playable at 640x480 now.

I have no desire to do any sort of 3D acceleration with this machine; this is purely a DOS gaming box. I might throw together a Pentium II build with a Voodoo card of some sort in the future for the small stack of 95/98 games I have that are annoying to get running on a XP/7/10 machine.

Yeah, I think our performance perceptions in the moment are much different than in retrospect. I'm playing System Shock in 640x480 right now on a Pentium 120 @ 133Mhz and it can get pretty sluggish. But when I originally played SS1, it was on a 486 DX4 100 and I don't remember 640x480 feeling sluggish at all. Same with Descent, Descent2 and Duke3D. All feel sluggish now on this P133 but back in the day, I played them either on the DX4 100 or a Pentium 133 and I thought they were performing awesomely. 😀

Just tried 1024x768 on a Tualatin 1.4 and I didn't expect it to be this slow. I don't think it ever exceeds 30fps no matter what. I didn't remember it being this slow on a Tualatin 😵 .

DamienC wrote:

There were some 233MHz MMX Pentiums on eBay for $10 each so I picked one up. MW2 runs MUCH better. Definitely not 60fps, probably in the ballpark of ~30-40 fps. That's good enough for me. The game is definitely playable at 640x480 now.

I have no desire to do any sort of 3D acceleration with this machine; this is purely a DOS gaming box. I might throw together a Pentium II build with a Voodoo card of some sort in the future for the small stack of 95/98 games I have that are annoying to get running on a XP/7/10 machine.

Voodoo cards were pretty much the only accelerators (that I know of) which were designed for and worked on DOS games under DOS. Voodoo 2 and later could sometimes be cajoled to work, but Voodoo 1 is natively supported by most if not all 3d accelerated DOS games.

So, you can do 3d acceleration under DOS if you like.