Sphere0161 wrote on 2023-04-24, 20:46:
Thank you for your answer, I have been reading through all of them, and clearly I cannot use a pentium III at 733Mhx.
Not ideal, but don't get to worried. Some speed-sensitive titles might not work, but they are in the minority and a lot will work. I also like late DOS games and my system for running them has a P3-500. The difference is that I have a separate system for older stuff (a 486SX-33 with turbo function to drop it to XT speeds).
Now, I'm not suggesting you immediately go down the rabbit hole of multiple systems (with multiple sound cards each etc. etc.), but rather a reality check: if you are completely new to doing this 'bare metal' on old hardware, I'd strongly recommend not trying to make the ultimate system that does everything perfectly. It can be done, but massively increases complexity, both in hardware (specific uncommon CPUs, motherboards, sound cards) and software.
If you already have a P3-733, by all means start with seeing what you can do on that. Most late DOS stuff will run perfectly well on it. Only start looking for other hardware if you hit issues.
As most of you have figured it out, most of the DOS games I want to play are pretty much from the 486 times. Perhaps some slightly older than that. I definitely would like to run Screamer smoothly so I should go for something more powerful than 66Mhz 486. If I could get hold of the original recommended requirements of the game that would be great, but I can't find them anywhere.
It seems that using a Pentium or Pentium MMX is much better option than for example, trying to use an AM5x86 at 133Mhz. Isn't it? Also I should avoid anything faster than 200Mhz so anythin larger or equal to Pentium 2 is not a good idea.
For bare metal DOS stuff, the biggest requirement is an ISA slot for an ISA sound card (yes, PCI might be possible, but is a headache). Apart from that, if you are new to the game, go for convenience. 1995-1997 Socket 7 motherboards are relatively common and easy to work with. I wouldn't rule out Am5x86, but 486 boards are more expensive, much more fiddly to configure and Screamer would probably prefer something faster.
Don't focus on that MHz number too much - the 'MHz myth' is a thing. You can only compare CPUs in the same family by MHz, but as soon as the design is different, the numbers become increasingly meaningless. Any Pentium-class CPU has a 64b wide memory bus where a 486 has a 32b wide bus. That goes a long way to explain why an Am5x86-133 is about the same speed as a Pentium 75 in most things. But "most things" doesn't necessarily mean what you want to run. Compared to 486, Pentium has a much stronger FPU (floating point unit) so where Quake is essentially unplayable on any 486 (including 5x86), it will run on an early Pentium - however apart from Quake almost no games of the time used the FPU. The same happens again with P1 vs P2: there the L2 cache moves from bus speed to (near) CPU clock which hugely boosts overall performance and the FPU is once again massively improved, and by 1997 games were (starting) to use it. In general, marketing claims focused on instructions (Pentium, MMX, SSE etc), but as a rule any benefits from them only became relevant years after indroduction. The big performance improvements came from simple things like memory bandwidth and cache size and speed. A Pentium MMX is significantly faster than an identically clocked Pentium non-MMX on the same board. Is it the MMX instructions? No. Chances are nothing that system is running will even use MMX. The difference is mostly due to the doubling of L1 cache from 16kB to 32kB.
Regarding sounds, it seems I shall go for Soundblaster, it is the most compatible one and also I think it is what I got. So it should sound as I remember (Which is probably more important that sounding better).
Very valid last point.
Creative cards, particularly the SB16, are and were a buggy mess (particularly with MIDI, but even without that they all had clicks, hisses or ringing sounds). They are a clear example of marketing trumping actual technical quality. But they are what a lot of people remember from the 'good old days'. If that's what you're after, go for it - indeed, try to find exactly which model you were used to hear so you can look for one with similar behaviour.
Your answers are being very useful! Looks like I need a S3 Virge videocard too.
In an ideal situation: yes. But here as with the CPU: don't go mad in getting the 'perfect' system straight away.
Screamer has a 3D accelerated version for the S3 Virge, but the Virge is famously derided as '3D decelerator' as performance was often better with software rendering. More generally, S3's VESA SVGA implementation was one of the best, but the number of games that a) used SVGA at all and b) had issues with some bad VESA implementations was very small. I never even noticed back in the day. Here I'd also suggest going with whatever you have and only looking for new hardware if you hit specific issues on stuff you are doing.
Note by the way that S3 Virge cards are very common, but a lot of cheaper implementations have extremely poor analog circuitry, leading to fuzzy output and - worse - a washed-out, white-ish image. Vendors like Diamond, ELSA, Miro and Number Nine made extremely good S3 Virge cards, but they can be more sought-after/expensive than the crappy ones. Here again, there are rabbit holes to go down - the performance of the VRAM-based VirgeVX is frequently derided by DOS gaming enthousiasts, and indeed it is lower than the then cheaper Virge DX DRAM cards. But that's a few percent slower, which is peanuts >25 years later. Conversely, VRAM-based cards were more expensive and tend to have better build quality (and analog circuitry) so I actually prefer them.
TLDR: don't try to get the perfect systems straight away. Get an easy system and run with that till you hit its limits.
If you are building from scratch, I'd suggest:
- ATX form factor (AT is fine, but needs harder to find cases, power supplies, keyboards and mice)
- Socket 7 motherboard. Something with Intel i430TX would be rock-solid. Via MVP3 gives more performance options (faster and slower) but can be more fiddly.
- S3 or nVidia TNT video card (for compatibiltiy - but in both cases get a good brand as cheap ones offer poor quality)
- ISA sound card. If you remember Soundblaster 16, go for that. If they are too expensive, check out something with OPTi 929/930 chip > very compatible and much easier to find cheaply
- you *can* mess around with original HDDs, but an IDE-CF adapter and a 4GB CF card is so much easier. Note that >=8GB you might hit BIOS limits with So7 systems, so stick with max 4GB for fewest hassles.