I have been trying to run Descent on a pentium 1 , 233 machine, but every 2 or so seconds it stutters and makes it unplayable. Does this have to be played on a 486? I patched it to 1.4 and also tried the 3dfx patch. Still does the same.
Is there hard drive activity during the stuttering?
i386 16 ⇒ i486 DX4 100 ⇒ Pentium MMX 200 ⇒ Athlon Orion 700 | TB 1000 ⇒ AthlonXP 1700+ ⇒ Opteron 165 ⇒ Dual Opteron 856
Not that im aware of. doest seem to be.
For Descent, the faster the better. It would be dog slow on a 486. We played on all Pentium machines at the time, in the range 75-150 MHz.
The only speed-related bugs I am aware of in Descent are that guided missiles are nearly impossible to dodge at higher framerates, and that some enemy fire rates are also tied to framerate. Other than that, as Ringding said, the faster the better. Out of curiosity, have you tried rebooting to DOS mode? I have noticed better performance at 640x400 on my PIII-550 when running in DOS instead of a Windows 98 DOS window.
It might be helpful if you posted your hardware configuration and driver for the 3dfx card.
A Pentium MMX 233 would be perfectly fine for Descent.
I highly recommend running Descent in DOS without Windows first. Once we know if it works correctly in DOS, then we can move on to why it stutters under Windows.
Depending on your hardware and drivers, sometimes running DOS games from Windows simply doesn't work right.
Slowest machine I could play vanilla Descent onwas 233MHz AMD K62. There are enhanced 3D patches for it now as well. D1X for OpenGL and D13DFX. These will need faster hardware but I can confirm they do look nice. These screenshots are from 3DFX patched Descent on a Voodoo2 and AthlonXP 3200 system.
