For an example, I found with Cybermage in SVGA that I needed a 600 MHz P3 Coppermine for total smoothness. Even my 450 MHz Katmai P3 had some chop at times. 😀 Video card was an AGP NVIDIA board with stupid fast VESA VBE.

So forget those Pentiums unless you aren't going to play SVGA games. Crazy as that sounds. People used to put up with 20fps in those games and thought it was fast.

swaaye wrote:

For an example, I found with Cybermage in SVGA that I needed a 600 MHz P3 Coppermine for total smoothness. Even my 450 MHz Katmai P3 had some chop at times. 😀 Video card was an AGP NVIDIA board with stupid fast VESA VBE.

So forget those Pentiums unless you aren't going to play SVGA games. Crazy as that sounds. People used to put up with 20fps in those games and thought it was fast.

Why would they even release a game that required CPU's that didn't exist yet to be playable? That's like when Crysis was first released and no hardware existed yet to run it at the highest resolution with all the settings on max. It was years before you were able to assemble a system that could handle it maxed out with playable framerates. Why not just design a game that the current generation of hardware can handle? You'd sell a lot more of them that way.

Cybermage, like lots of those late DOS games, has various video modes. Most SVGA games ran nowhere near 60fps on Pentium 1 hardware. People didn't really notice or care much back then. I sure didn't.

Crysis and its backlash were just proof that the Internet is too accessible now as an amplified whiner podium. 😁

Yeah look at 1994's Jane's US Navy Fighters for a true example of that. Can a hot-shit expensive 1994-era Pentium 100 handle 1024x768x256 SuperVGA 3D flight simulation with texturing in the sky, on the ground, and on the planes?

NO, and it wasn't until 1.2GHz when that game became playably smooth at that resolution.

though history would've been different had EA hired Abrash to write x86 asm for their texturing routines.....

swaaye wrote:

People didn't really notice or care much back then. I sure didn't.

Me neither. Until recently, like "four years ago when I started playing with DOSBox" recently, I didn't even know Duke Nukem 3D could be played at anything other than 320x240.

I don't think I missed anything, the textures and stuff were pretty low-res back then anyway, it would have been wasted on 640x480 or above.

Mithloraite wrote:

Wiki sais P-100 was released in March 1994.

That's a mystery how this Blackthorne game released in December can be "incompatible" with it.

Or P-90.

Remember that things moved a lot slower back then. In my part of the world 486's were being sold well until the end of 1996.

Intel's flagship product line was always exotic and expensive and the Pentium was no different. Thanks to increased competition from AMD and other companies like Cyrix, IDT etc this is nowhere near as bad as it used to be.

Remember that the 486 was released in 1989 but the 386 was the system of choice for many home users for another 3-4 years purely because it was much better value for money.

So, at the time of the games release, testing on hardware that very few customers had was probably not high on their list of priorities.

Indeed, Rise of the Triad was released in early 1995 and if you minimise the screen all the way down it advises the user to 'get a 486 😀'

swaaye wrote:

Cybermage, like lots of those late DOS games, has various video modes. Most SVGA games ran nowhere near 60fps on Pentium 1 hardware. People didn't really notice or care much back then. I sure didn't.

System Shock 1 was another game like that, it had an SVGA mode but was pretty much unplayable in that mode on my 486 machine, until I upgraded about 4 years later.

the Internet is too accessible now as an amplified whiner podium

never has a truer word been spoken

For people like us that play games long after they are supposed to be forgotten, the unachievable detail and resolution settings from that time are a real treat now.

In my view, these super detail settings were easy to program in 3D games. When there is VESA support, it is just the same to scale that to the maximum of 1600x1200. And extra detail can be added by enlarging the distance at which stuff is rendered.

It is just that game reviewers tended to add a bad comment about how unreasonable these unlimited detail settings were. And some people say "I have the latest and best hardware available at the time of the game's release, and therefore have the RIGHT to run the unlimited detail setting smoothly"

Why would extra options be a bad thing, when the default settings ran fine at that time.

Hehe Bullfrog games used to piss people off, especially Magic Carpet and Dungeon Keeper (software renderer). I can still play games with low FPS, as long as it's steady. I can play a game at 15FPS for example, but not a game that plays at 20-40 fps, the speed hiccups really put me off!

From the Magic Carpet manual:

Magic Carpet has been designed for use on cutting edge technology. In this case, that means Intel 486 (or equivalent) and higher, with 8Mb of memory.
Magic Carpet was also developed with the future in mind. The Hi-res mode only works on machines that are very powerful, and to be playable you will need a Pentium with a PCI video card and 16Mb+ of RAM.

Yet a Pentium 3 still drops down dead if you enable all the graphics options 🤣

DonutKing wrote:

Remember that things moved a lot slower back then. In my part of the world 486's were being sold well until the end of 1996. […]
Show full quote

Remember that things moved a lot slower back then. In my part of the world 486's were being sold well until the end of 1996.

Intel's flagship product line was always exotic and expensive and the Pentium was no different. Thanks to increased competition from AMD and other companies like Cyrix, IDT etc this is nowhere near as bad as it used to be.

Remember that the 486 was released in 1989 but the 386 was the system of choice for many home users for another 3-4 years purely because it was much better value for money.

So, at the time of the games release, testing on hardware that very few customers had was probably not high on their list of priorities.

Yes, I really do remember that 😀 Only the reckless, rich or stupid people were getting the first P-60 types for themselves, in 1993. - Hot, buggy, disgustingly expensive.

But is testing by a game company quite the same as people's personal usage. No one of the authors might really use a Pentium and they might not even test Blackthorne on Pentium.
But they might at least make a patch (when the problem got evident).
Or discuss this problem and publish some workaround... Nothing of this kind is found over the net. Was the game immediately forgotten? No it seems.

To the contrary, I have found an obscure advice to restart windows in MS-DOS mode to launch Blackthorne. And there will be no "slow effect".

Unfortunately there was no mentioning was it Win95 or 98.
By any chance might you happen to have such vintage Pentium system? Could you try to launch this game without an emulator?

Mithloraite wrote:

By any chance might you happen to have such vintage Pentium system? Could you try to launch this game without an emulator?

This is Vogons, everyone here at least has two of those.

And starting in MS-DOS mode doesn't help for me

The 486 and Pentium I played it on are both Win98SE systems

I have a P2 450 with 1GB and V5 5500 AGP. It seems to be able to play all the newer stuff and the older games play at a decent speed too. Sometimes I have to use moslo for dos and that will do the trick.

I remember owning a P166 with 32MB EDO back in the mid 90s and it was good for a lot of stuff. Once OpenGL became a standard for most games the PC quickly became useless. I remember Half-Life and Rainbow Six being practically unable to play properly on it.

Maraakate wrote:

I remember owning a P166 with 32MB EDO back in the mid 90s and it was good for a lot of stuff. Once OpenGL became a standard for most games the PC quickly became useless. I remember Half-Life and Rainbow Six being practically unable to play properly on it.

Really? My 166MMX could run Quake 3 Arena playably at 640x480x16bit with a Voodoo1 4MB and the MiniGL driver. The smoke looked horrible though.

It could definitely run Half Life. Don't know about Rainbox Six...

SquallStrife wrote:

It could definitely run Half Life. Don't know about Rainbox Six...

Rainbow Six is playable on 5th gen with a Voodoo2 too, I should know.

Yeah, I only had a Cirrus Logic 2D card. It had 2MB onboard iirc. I'm surprised quake 3 scaled down that well. Is that with dynamic lighting or vertex?

I don't remember, but it would have been the worse of the two for sure. Everything was on minimum.

Vertex for sure

leileilol wrote:

... starting in MS-DOS mode doesn't help for me
The 486 and Pentium I played it on are both Win98SE systems

well I've come over something special about this game. Its manual
has this section:

(pic)

http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/3485/bthorne.png

so instead of making a patch for Pentium available for download, do they
require $15 to perform some black magic rituals over the game disks?

For some reason I don't like this strategy. Sending disks or whatever can't be free either.

P.S.
Just one more possible issue here with Blackthorne.
Some games developed well-known bugs in the past due to uh, third-party modification.

The good installation set of Blackthorne as I believe is: bthorne.i00, bthorne.i01 and install.exe (accompanied with the manual).

I wonder if Pentium tests were made on this kind of installation.

That blurb was meant for something like, taking your DOS Blackthorne back for the Macintosh Blackthorne

leileilol wrote:

That blurb was meant for something like, taking your DOS Blackthorne back for the Macintosh Blackthorne

Yes, making this kind of offer would be reasonable on their part.
Just calling it a "System Upgrage" policy sounds strange to me. That's rather a System Exchange 😄

What is wonderful, I see no trace of a Pentium patch for this game. They were made normally.
But not in this case, for some reason.

Ultrasound files got added to the setup and whatnot, but no help with Pentium.

Very strange.

to add to the madness, a not-so-needed ~Joystick patch~ was made by Blackisle as late as in 2002.
(available here)
http://lionheart.blackisle.com/games/support.php?id=391

Isn't it borderline absurdity, to add a patch for joysticks in 2002, but leave with no solution the problem with Pentiums @__@

Shall I suppose there were little systems left to this moment except Pentiums, which were everywhere ^^

This leads me to think that the "right" original installation+manual check ~should~ work on Pentiums after all.