The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-12-09, 18:33:
The Sims on 486 might worth a try indeed.
It's something I do intend to give a shot on my current VLB rig - now rigs as I just got a second one this afternoon from a co-worker (+ A super socket 7 system), I'm going to roll back to the initial release though (minus expansion packs and all that) when I try it again. I tried the full package, IIRC, the installer crashed.
The machine I have right now is a VERY fast 486, I'm not saying its the fastest ever, but it's pretty shocking how far this one has gone - FIC 486-PVT Socket 3 board, AMD 486 DX4-100 SV8 with WriteBack, 64MB of RAM on 2 modules out of 4, 512K L2 Cache, S3 805 w/ 2MB on VLB, PTI-255W on VLB, and a SB AWE64. Attached to the PTI-255W is a 5.25" mobile rack and in one caddy I have a IDE to SATA connector - Kingwin ADP-06, and currently a 160GB SATA HDD attached to it. Windows 2000 SP4 boots in less than a minute on that setup IIRC. On that machine.....
- Quake runs nicely, 95 and DOS
- Doom screams, it ate my NEC Ready 9522's lunch during a network game, and that's a 100MHz Pentium with similar specs
- Duke Nukem 3D runs perfectly
- Postal runs with the screen size reduced more than well enough to be fun
- Diablo runs great, I do get a little performance loss if the action gets heavy, but surprisingly great for something the manual specifically told me not to install Diablo on
I've considered hacking the startup of Beachhead 2000 to skip CPU Detection and try running that too 😁
Probably the craziest thing I ever ran was in Win2K SP4 I ran some late (within the last 10-15 years) version of Firefox that still worked with Win2K, and while it was slow as Molasses in January, it did load on the 486 and it did run and surfed the web. Once Firefox was up it ran more like RetroZilla TBH. Runners up were running Firefox - the last version that ran on Windows 2000 SP4, which ran like a slug on valium and a bottle of Jack Daniels but it worked, and managing to buffer up a NIrvana Documentary in Opera in Windows For Workgroups 3.11 by copying over the flash plugins from WIndows 7 for Firefox (back when Secure HTTP was not required and YouTube was still flash - I miss those days).
That said, not to spark a debate, I have to wonder a bit about AMD vs. Intel, or if L1 Cache makes that much of a difference because my NEC Versa M/75, despite being 25MHz slower on bus and CPU, and half the VRAM on the 65545 Local Bus graphics, 256K L2 cache on-board, and a hard disk controller that leaves me scratching my head (and is incredibly picky), gets rather close to the desktop rig in performance.
The *new* one I just got is another AMD DX4-100, not sure what spec though.