MarmotaArmy wrote on Yesterday, 18:44:

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I'm taking Unreal tournament and Quake3 out because they need more power to be enjoyable.
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Buh! We quite enjoyed UT on our Pentiums with Voodoo2's. If you want to have a Pentium 1-themed LAN-party, I just don't think 60 FPS is realistic tbh.

That said, your party, your rules. 😁

leonardo wrote on Yesterday, 19:31:

MarmotaArmy wrote on Yesterday, 18:44:

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I'm taking Unreal tournament and Quake3 out because they need more power to be enjoyable.
...

Buh! We quite enjoyed UT on our Pentiums with Voodoo2's. If you want to have a Pentium 1-themed LAN-party, I just don't think 60 FPS is realistic tbh.

That said, your party, your rules. 😁

The thing is hardware acceleration is optional, UT in a 166 MMX in software mode is a slideshow,.... which is period correct 😁

I guess the original AvP might also be out of the question then? I don't remember how low it goes as far as resolution is concerned, but it was hard on a V2 on a P1 at 640x480.

Even a PII is already so much better.

UT in software mode at 320x240? 😉

Half-Life and OG Counter-Strike do run, but again without even a Voodoo or a TNT-class accelerator at least, it's gonna be a very low-res affair.

Yeah for a pentium 1 lanparty you'd definitely have to aim lower than Half-Life mods (which generally eat more mem than just stock HL in a deathmatch - most had fast P2/P3/K6's at the earliest time they were done). Unreal was a CPU eater too

Relevant games I immediately think of that definitely won't choke a Pentium (or 6x86/K5/K6 - people had those too!!!) out, but most won't do 16 players. Also not all FPS because there were only like 3 good multiplayer FPS games in the Pentium era, it was also the time of the tank rush and the FPS/RTS hybrids:

Battlezone
Quake (Quakeworld particularly had 32 player support)
Blood / Duke3D
Descent II
SubSpace
Jedi Knight
GTA
Delta Force
Marathon 2
Age of Empires
Starsiege Tribes
Red Alert
Starcraft
Total Annihilation
Viper Racing
Urban Assault
Star Wars Episode I Racer

More than 16's rare and usually fall into the massive territory then. You've already mentioned Quake2 and that's got some 'support' for massive player counts (theoretically can reach 64), but the scoreboard doesn't support showing that many players. Tribes is guaranteed to support a lot of players, though tolerance for its game flow is another thing (skiing, using the stations) and it has poor OpenGL support that thrashes cards that should be better than a Voodoo2.

For FPSs specifically, Jedi Knight seems like the obvious choice here.

I think via LAN it supports 8 players.

I remember playing it online on The Zone on a Pentium 1 without hardware acceleration. However, I suspect it's not exactly a smooth experience if people have modern sensibilities about frame rates. In replaying it I've always preferred faster CPUs with acceleration.

Starsiege: Tribes on a Pentium 1 without acceleration is practically unplayable as I recall. I know this because it's what motivated me to finally buy a Voodoo card. I mean, the game works, but you won't be able to hit anything at those frame rates.