any pentium 1 would be great

So what you say is that the speed + cache size doesn't matter? 😕 doesn't make sense to me...

Pentium/MMX 166MHz-200MHz is about good for almost everything. It pretty much was the standard bar in 1996 until the Pentium II 233 arrived.

A MMX-less pentium (100mhz/150mhz) is good too (nearly the speed of the 166MHz in Quake) though in most 16-bit console emulators and some sound systems it would be quite slow.'

I've heard compatibility nightmares about the Pentium Pro so I never seriously considered buying one then.

ultima 7 doesn't have a builtin speed control I recall. So the only way to get the characters move at the right speed is to have a slow pentium. pentium 75 maybe although i that might even be too fast allready

I *think* Ultima 7 played kind of ok on my Pentium 100 back then (or maybe it was 90) since this was the first machine I played U7 on. Btw. only affects Ultima 7 Part I, Part II Serpent Isle did have speed control.

My Pentium MMX 200 was "good for almost everything" (like leileilol wrote).

Dominus wrote:

I *think* Ultima 7 played kind of ok on my Pentium 100 back then (or maybe it was 90) since this was the first machine I played U7 on. Btw. only affects Ultima 7 Part I, Part II Serpent Isle did have speed control.

My Pentium MMX 200 was "good for almost everything" (like leileilol wrote).

mmm...the Pentium I only has 8kb primary cache and 16kb secondary cache....any my P Pro has 256kb cache or even 512kb..not sure..

I have a spare 200 and a 233mhz P1 mmx I will use then, thx for the advice guys 😀

Pentium (P5, P54) has 16KB L1 cache. It's a split L1 cache, 8KB for instructions and 8KB for data. Pentium MMX (P55C) has 32KB, split in the same way. This is where most of Pentium MMX's performance improvement came from; double-size L1 cache.

Pentium Pro has 16KB L1, and 256KB to 1MB L2 in the other package cavity next to the CPU die.

Pentium II gets the 32KB L1 cache like Pentium MMX, but it loses the fast cache memory. Luckily they doubled the L2 size though (compared to the popular 256KB PPRO). And MMX. This makes it much better for gaming than PPro, IMO.

PPro is actually going to be at somewhat of a disadvantage to PMMX in some games. MMX is used occasionally. Unreal won't let you have high quality audio without it, for example. Unreal's software renderer is heavily optimized for MMX, too. I've messed a lot with a PPRO 1MB in the past couple years. I actually have one or two PPRO 1MB CPUs that will overclock to 233 MHz.

Any of these CPUs is fine for DOS though. A 200MHz Pentium is probably more than adequate for just about any DOS game. Pentium MMX 233 MHz (the top) is probably the sweet spot, or something, 🤣.

swaaye wrote:

Pentium Pro has 16KB L1, and 256KB to 1MB L2 in the other package cavity next to the CPU die.

Pentium II gets the 32KB L1 cache like Pentium MMX, but it loses the fast cache memory. Luckily they doubled the L2 size though (compared to the popular 256KB PPRO). And MMX. This makes it much better for gaming than PPro, IMO.

My candidate Intel CPU would be the upgrade for any system running a Socket 8 PPro 256kiB/512kiB system - the Intel Pentium II Overdrive Processor. This Intel CPU ran at either 300MHz or 333MHz depending on the motherboard FSB speed selection of 60/66MHz.

This upgrade Pentium II Overdrive CPU was offered in a 300/333MHz version, had an integrated cooling fan, 32Kib L1 on-die cache, 512Kib on-card full-speed L2 cache RAM, support for the MMX instruction set and was drop-in replaceable for the Pentium Pro in any Socket 8 based system - single or dual CPU configuration. It had an advantage over the normal Intel Pentium II processor in that its L2 cache was twice as fast as it was 'full-speed' where as most Pentium IIs had 512Kib of on-socket L2 cache that operated at 'half-speed'. Plus the Pentium II core now executed 16-bit code as fast as 32-bit code.

CPU benchmarks shown that the Intel Pentium II Overdrive 333MHz upgrade processor comes very close to the performance of a 'regular' Slot 1 Intel Pentium II 350MHz. The Pentium II Overdrive was really a mini-Socket 8 version of the Slot 2 Pentium II Xeon server processor. The other advantage the Pentium II Overdrive processor over the Slot 1 Pentium II (and the original Pentium Pro) is that the maximum main memory cache limit of the 82440FX "Natoma" chipset of 1,024MB can now be reached since the L2 cacheability limit of the Pentium II Overdrive processor is 4,096MB RAM due to its Pentium II Xeon roots. The normal Slot 1 Pentium II and the original Pentium Pro have an L2 cacheability limit of 512MB RAM.

Works well with 'newer' protected-mode DOS titles such as SYSTEM SHOCK...

dvwjr

Dominus wrote:

Btw. only affects Ultima 7 Part I, Part II Serpent Isle did have speed control.

I played Ultima 7 Part I: The Black Gate on my old Pentium 100, and Moslo worked fine. I think Moslo should be able to slow down the game on Pentium 180 as well.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Dominus wrote:

Btw. only affects Ultima 7 Part I, Part II Serpent Isle did have speed control.

I played Ultima 7 Part I: The Black Gate on my old Pentium 100, and Moslo worked fine. I think Moslo should be able to slow down the game on Pentium 180 as well.

Thanks, gonna give moslo a go 😀

Amigaz wrote:

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Dominus wrote:

Btw. only affects Ultima 7 Part I, Part II Serpent Isle did have speed control.

I played Ultima 7 Part I: The Black Gate on my old Pentium 100, and Moslo worked fine. I think Moslo should be able to slow down the game on Pentium 180 as well.

Thanks, gonna give moslo a go 😀

Otherwise, you can play Ultima VII on newer machine with DOSBox. 😉 Or you can use Exult. Nonetheless, let us know the result, would ya?

Yeah dvwjr I forgot that PPro has a lot of trouble with 16- and 8-bit code. I know that in Duke Nukem 3D, for example, a Pentium MMX is a good bit faster at the same clock rate. Apparently Build engine uses a lot of such code.

PPro can really beat up a Pentium in floating-point heavy games though, such as Quake. Those really are pretty rare situations though. Most DOS games that use the FPU weren't built to need that kind of FPU performance....

Those PPRO overdrive chips are very nice, but also very hard to find and often quite expensive because of their rarity.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Amigaz wrote:

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

I played Ultima 7 Part I: The Black Gate on my old Pentium 100, and Moslo worked fine. I think Moslo should be able to slow down the game on Pentium 180 as well.

Thanks, gonna give moslo a go 😀

Otherwise, you can play Ultima VII on newer machine with DOSBox. 😉 Or you can use Exult. Nonetheless, let us know the result, would ya?

I'm a sucker for real hardware and emulators are againt my religion so there's no chance I'm touching DOSBox 😁

I'll let you guys know the results 😉

Since it wasn't mentioned so far, did you try to disable the caches on your Pentium Pro machine?

5u3 wrote:

Since it wasn't mentioned so far, did you try to disable the caches on your Pentium Pro machine?

Nope, gonna check if I can disable the on die cache