Best Pentium for 88-95 DOS? \ VOGONS

Best Pentium for 88-95 DOS?

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First post, by appiah4

Posted on 2017-10-30, 06:25

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I'm kind of about to give up on the 486 board I have, so I'm looking at my backup plan of using a Pentium Socket 5 or Socket 7 CPU for my DOS machine.. I'm planning to play mostly 91-95 games, but some 88-91 games that I originally played on an Amiga (Ultima V/VI, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Early King's/Police/Space Quest games, etc.) or some games I never got to play on an Amiga (Ultima VII Pt1/2/VIII, Wasteland, Wing Commander I/II, Darklands, etc.) are also on my list of things to try on a PC (Wow, I never realized I played or wanted to play so many Origin games!). So I'm thinking I shouldn't go too fast, but how slow is too slow without making games like DOOM or Duke3D unplayable? I currently have a P75, P100, P166MMX and a P233MMX. I'm not sure what to go with.

I also happen to own a Socket 7 board with a cache enable jumper, I'm considering connecting that to the Turbo button to enable/disable the cache on demand. Is this a genious idea or a terrible one? What would happen if I disabled or enabled the cache while the system was turned on? I guess I could alternatively use the Turbo jumper on an FSB setting jumper to change the multiplier?

Last edited by appiah4 on 2017-10-30, 06:54. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 1 of 6, by Jo22

Posted on 2017-10-30, 06:48

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Hmm.. That's hard to say. By the turn of the century, my DOS/Win9x/3.1 rig was a Pentium 75 w/ 16MiB (or was it 24MiB ?) and ~500MB HDD.
Later, I had got Pentium 133 to 166MMX PCs. The Pentium MMX was my most powerful machine at the time.
I was so happy it could run Windows XP with a heavy 64MiB of RAM. I remember, it was the first time I
was able to run SNES9x and play Tiny Toons (SNES9x didn't work for me on 9x). ^^

Anyway, back to the topic - All of the systems you mentioned are fine, I think.
If you want to play games in SuperVGA resolution, stick to the 166MMX, I'd say.
For very late DOS games or games with full-motion videos, like Toonstruck, the 233 isn't bad either.

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Reply 2 of 6, by oeuvre

Posted on 2017-10-30, 12:49

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Any MMX will do fine but what you really want is an i9 7900X for DOS games

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Reply 3 of 6, by appiah4

Posted on 2017-10-30, 12:54

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oeuvre wrote:
Any MMX will do fine but what you really want is an i9 7900X for DOS games

..?

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Reply 4 of 6, by Cyberdyne

Posted on 2017-10-30, 12:57

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Best bet is a Socket 7 motherboards, with jumpers to change FSB and X. Then just use most powerful Intel cpu you have.. And put switches in a front panel, and then you can change the speed to anything, i have run a Pentium MMX 200@75MHz.

I am aroused about any X86 motherboard that has full functional ISA slot. I think i have problem. Not really into that original (Turbo) XT,286,386 and CGA/EGA stuff. So just a DOS nut.
PS. If I upload RAR, it is a 16-bit DOS RAR Version 2.50.

Reply 5 of 6, by appiah4

Posted on 2017-10-30, 13:10

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Cyberdyne wrote:
Best bet is a Socket 7 motherboards, with jumpers to change FSB and X. Then just use most powerful Intel cpu you have.. And put switches in a front panel, and then you can change the speed to anything, i have run a Pentium MMX 200@75MHz.

I have a board I can use for this, multiplier setting is done by jumpers, and I can use the Turbo button header to toggle between 100 and 166MHz for an MMX CPU, I think I will go for this..

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Reply 6 of 6, by bjwil1991

Posted on 2017-10-30, 15:30

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Using a turbo button for the CPU speed is a great idea. I have an Abit AB-TX5 that has the CPU speed in the BIOS (jumper-less), which is nice, but if I can make a program in DOS to lower the speed and change the FSB without going into BIOS (temporary), that'll be amazing, as well as disabling the L1 cache, L2 cache, or both for speed sensitive games, but I have a Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus that's running on a 486 DX2-66 (plans are to get a DX4-100 OverDrive or DX4-100 with the voltage regulator since my system only supports 5V processors), and I have cache control programs that I built via the debug MS-DOS program that turns the cache off for 386 and slower games, and back on for 486 games.

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