I'm just curious since I was surprised to see that SimCity 2000 for Windows 3.1 ran fairly slow on my EISA 486/66 system.
It's probably a clock speed issue, but I wonder if going 95 or NT would improve anything.
95 yes
NT4 HELL NO, it's FPU-heavy and will choke the 486 much and won't be any beneficial for Simcity 2000 on the 486 system.
also, 95 won't solve the '486 66mhz isa sluggish svga drawing' problem but it'll most likely have some better display drivers available
I had the mach32 accelerated drivers installed, I thought that might've been enough but I guess SC2k doesn't take advantage.
That or the sim is more complex than I thought.
I need to get my hands on a 5x86 and see how that goes.
Try the DOS version, seems a bit faster for me on a 486 😀
If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.
I hadn't thought of that oddly enough, I guess I liked the novelty of running it under Windows 3.1. 😀
During the Windows 3.1 days, GUI accelerators weren't very useful for games and Windows itself impeded performance significantly. That's why DOS games were prevalent. Towards the end of 3.1's days, Win32s and WinG showed up, but they never became popular and often WinG would be slower or unstable because of poor driver support. Win3.1 drivers tend to blow up a lot anyway.
One of Windows 95's goals was to become a games platform. It didn't happen right away. Early DirectX was poor, and drivers were a total nightmare, but Directdraw did make GUI accelerators less useless in some cases (probably mostly for allowing DOS-like framebuffer performance). Early DirectX actually came with sound and video drivers, which were sometimes unstable, and would hose systems.
I'd say a 486 is at its best in DOS. No nonsense direct hardware access gets you the most performance.
Certainly not. It probably runs as fast as it's going to in 3.1, insofar as extra processes and disk access go.
This is the age old question of 'Should I try to run a piece of software when my system only just meets the minimum specs?', and the answer to that question is usually 'No'. That is the reason why software publishers publish both a minimum and a recommended set of specs. A system that meets only the bare minimum specs will run the software but you probably won't like the performance. Windows 95 on a 486/66 will most likely kill your performance even with a minimum install. DOS/Win 3.1 will be better.
Run the DOS version. The Windows versions (there was a Win16 and Win32 port) tended to be buggy. As for NT4, I have run it on a 486SX/25 with 12MB of RAM. It was actually quicker in day to day use then Windows 95 on the same machine! No idea why, but it worked.
wrote:The Windows versions (there was a Win16 and Win32 port) tended to be buggy.
I never had any problems with the Win16 version. I assume by the Win32 version you're referring to the Network Edition.
