Interesting findings with simcity classic \ VOGONS

Interesting findings with simcity classic

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First post, by luckybob

Posted on 2011-04-17, 23:56

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For those that dont know I recentmy finished an "ultimate" 386 build. Almost identical in setup to: 386DX40 build

I was flipping through the manual to simcity classic during the install and noticed this little tidbit in the troubleshooting section; "if you have done all of the above and it still wont run, and you have a math coprocessor, try disabling the coprocessor by typing SET NO87=DISABLE on the DOS command line, then hitting RETURN before running SimCity."

O RLY?

I finally put this to the test today. I built a city that filled a good part of the map, turned off disasters and turned on auto budget. And saved the city at January 2100. I left all other settings on the default. meaning, animations and sound were on. etc.

With a stopwatch, I resumed the city to max speed and waited 15 minutes and noted the stop date. I did this 3 times with a Cyrix math-co equipped and 3 times without. The results were rather startling!

With co-processor:
1: March 2207 (1287 months)
2: May 2207 (1289 months)
3: April 2207 (1288 months)

No co-processor:
1: December 2171 (863 months)
2: April 2172 (867 months)
3: February 2172 (875 months)

That's an almost 50% improvement if you have a math-co. 😲

So, when people ask if there are games that use a math-co. It would appear that Simcity classic does. Now if you excuse me, I'm going to re-install my math-co.

Last edited by luckybob on 2011-04-19, 12:20. Edited 1 time in total.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 1 of 9, by Tetrium

Posted on 2011-04-18, 09:10

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Good find! Maybe theres more (undocumented?) stuff like this for us to find out 😉

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Reply 2 of 9, by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman

Posted on 2011-04-19, 11:36

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...and I thought Falcon 3.0 was first game that takes advantage of math co.

Reply 3 of 9, by keropi

Posted on 2011-04-19, 11:56

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wow, amazing discovery!

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Reply 4 of 9, by leileilol

Posted on 2011-04-19, 13:23

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Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:
...and I thought Falcon 3.0 was first game that takes advantage of math co.

Simcity Classic could be referring to the 1993 W3x rerelease but i'm not sure so myself. Wonder if the same happens to the cheesy interplay cd rom version too

Reply 5 of 9, by luckybob

Posted on 2011-04-19, 13:49

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It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 6 of 9, by Malik

Posted on 2011-04-19, 14:30

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Very Interesting! I wonder how many more games are "silently" affected by the math co-processors.

And I wonder if we can harvest this find to adapt or make use of the presence of the math-co-processors to our advantage in games which were not designed to make use of them.

SB Dos Drivers

Reply 7 of 9, by Jorpho

Posted on 2011-04-19, 15:58

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Malik wrote:
And I wonder if we can harvest this find to adapt or make use of the presence of the math-co-processors to our advantage in games which were not designed to make use of them.

Uh... Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but wouldn't it be a lot easier just to run the games in question on a CPU sufficiently fast as to make the absence of a co-processor irrelevant?

Reply 8 of 9, by Malik

Posted on 2011-04-20, 05:57

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Jorpho wrote:
Malik wrote:
And I wonder if we can harvest this find to adapt or make use of the presence of the math-co-processors to our advantage in games which were not designed to make use of them.
Uh... Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but wouldn't it be a lot easier just to run the games in question on a CPU sufficiently fast as to make the absence of a co-processor irrelevant?

I get what you mean.

I was thinking of more subtle matters like background calculations, patching classic games to make use of these co-processors, and basically things that make background work faster. Something like making patches to make games, especially those turn-based strategy games where you have to "wait" when the "cpu is thinking" moments. including chess games, warlord series, card based games, wargames, etc.

Again, the aim is to make patches in old dos games and when running them in a 386 or 486 with co-processors.

SB Dos Drivers

Reply 9 of 9, by luckybob

Posted on 2011-04-20, 07:44

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well the big thing is, as far as I've been told, is that "simple" math is done in the processor normally, and the math-co only comes into play with things like trig and percentages.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

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