Just a small correction... first Intel 486DX2 came in late 1992, AMD even later in 1993. Pentium 133 in late 1995.

DOOM is pretty demanding even for a 386DX-40 so I can't see the Bridgeboard with 386SX-20 run it anywhere at playable speed. I think there are Amiga DOOM ports that should run better on your A4000.

While DOOM technically runs on a 386SX, it's not playable. Stuff like Wolfenstein 3D or Wing Commander 1+2 are the most complex games you can play on that. The 386SX is limited by its 16-bit bus and an ISA VGA card doesn't help either. RAM is also quite slow with an SX.

No idea about the Acer Travelmate 517TE, but the specs are good for late DOS games. However, it has a 1024x768 screen, which will most likely only do integer scaling by 2 or non-integer scaling without caring about the aspect ratio. If that's the case, it's almost unusable for DOS games, since you can't get proper full-screen display. I have a Toshiba notebook with very similar specs and such a screen. Ended up turning it into a Windows 2000 workstation, as DOS gaming just isn't fun on it.

in the early 90s... the 15-20fps was "good", but many people played with 5-10fps.

i did many benchmarks to compare the generations:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eXksI … dit?usp=sharing

for doom:
4,68 FPS AMD 386DX 40 Dataexpert Opti-495SLC 3/486WB Cache rev 1.2 Trident 8900CL-C 1M ISA
20,63 FPS Intel 486DX2 66 Dataexpert Opti-495SLC 3/486WB Cache rev 1.2 S3 86C805-P 1M VLB
28,03 FPS Intel 486DX2 66 Asus VL/I-486SVGOX4 rev 1.2 Cirrus Logic CL-GD5429 2M VLB
37,40 FPS Intel DX4 100 WB Asus VL/I-486SV2GX4 rev 2.1 Genoa Phantom 64 2M VLB

so with late chipset and videocard can be ok a dx2-66. i also wanted to build one, but finally i stepped to the dx4.
pentium needed for the "smooth" (now popular 60fps) play.

Stuff like Wolfenstein 3D

Blake Stone: Planet Strike.

Tbh, with an Amiga A4000, I'd stick to playing Amiga games. Its Motorola CPU and the supporting Amiga chipset are far more powerful than the somewhat castrated 386SX on the bridegeboard. Yes, you can run some old games on it, but you're very limited. And that SB16 is wasted - chances are the CPU wouldn't run any of the SB16 titles, leaving you with only SB 2.0 features (and no SBPro because the SB16 isn't backwards compatible with the Pro).

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Stuff like Wolfenstein 3D

Blake Stone: Planet Strike.

On a 386SX-20? No way. That game is sluggish even on my 486DX4-100. It requires quite a bit more juice than Wolfenstein 3D, as the engine is greatly enhanced but at the same time not very optimized.

Amiga4000.... Sweet machine, though not really what I would go for, when dealing with Dos. The 386sx CPU that you have on the bridgeboard, might be enough for stuff like Dynablaster and Civ1. You can easily run Monkey Island, loom and Indiana Jones 3 on that machine. Those three titles can even run on a 8mhz 286 with EGA. Yet the Amiga versions are better. Unless you get a Roland MT32 as well, and then you can still find MT32 Amiga titles.

And keep an eye out for possible A4K versions of the Vampire V4, when it gets released. Or perhaps source a good and fast PPC card. I think some of them might run Doom. Like a 604e 200mhz PPC board.

derSammler wrote:

While DOOM technically runs on a 386SX, it's not playable. Stuff like Wolfenstein 3D or Wing Commander 1+2 are the most complex games you can play on that. The 386SX is limited by its 16-bit bus and an ISA VGA card doesn't help either. RAM is also quite slow with an SX.

No idea about the Acer Travelmate 517TE, but the specs are good for late DOS games. However, it has a 1024x768 screen, which will most likely only do integer scaling by 2 or non-integer scaling without caring about the aspect ratio. If that's the case, it's almost unusable for DOS games, since you can't get proper full-screen display. I have a Toshiba notebook with very similar specs and such a screen. Ended up turning it into a Windows 2000 workstation, as DOS gaming just isn't fun on it.

DOOM is like an style exercise for my 386sx, game i like to play are like that: DuneII, Alone in the dark, UltimaVII, X-Wing, wing commander, syndicate, bullfrog games, command and conquer, warcraft2... that are too heavy for my 386?

I never imagine that DOS stretch the screen making a terrible distortion... every notebook is not good for DOS gaming?

dionb wrote:

And that SB16 is wasted - chances are the CPU wouldn't run any of the SB16 titles, leaving you with only SB 2.0 features (and no SBPro because the SB16 isn't backwards compatible with the Pro).

please explain better this think... in my 486DX2 i had a Sound Blaster PRO and every game i remember use it in a wornderfoul way. SB16 is not an upgrade of that card??? Why i can't use? I have a 16bit ISA in my 386sx20

brostenen wrote:

Amiga4000.... Sweet machine, though not really what I would go for, when dealing with Dos. The 386sx CPU that you have on the bridgeboard, might be enough for stuff like Dynablaster and Civ1. You can easily run Monkey Island, loom and Indiana Jones 3 on that machine. Those three titles can even run on a 8mhz 286 with EGA. Yet the Amiga versions are better. Unless you get a Roland MT32 as well, and then you can still find MT32 Amiga titles.

And keep an eye out for possible A4K versions of the Vampire V4, when it gets released. Or perhaps source a good and fast PPC card. I think some of them might run Doom. Like a 604e 200mhz PPC board.

I have a Cyberstorm PPC 200mhz in that A4000, having 68060, PPC, 386 in the same machine make me crazy, having a ONLY ONE machine for the best games title of the '90->'95 in my goal for this A4000, it can't??? I'n not really interested in the late '97->XX games.

AlessandroB wrote:

ONLY ONE machine for the best games title of the '90->'95

Forget anything past Doom on that bridgeboard. You might be able to run the Amiga version of Doom, released in some 2001/02/03, using the PPC board you have. The bad part, is that native music sounds like crap on Amiga-Doom. That is why so many youtube clips of that game, have music turned all the way down. Even a 060 can run Doom fluid. Regarding music and Doom on Amiga. Then I have no clue, if the Amiga version are compatible with midi devices. The Adlib emulation is just awefull, and sounds like Adlib emulation on a SB-Live.

If you really care for Dos games, released from Doom and later. Then get something like a Pentium-166 to 233. Games between 1993 and 1996 will run perfectly on a Pentium. As for the 386 bridgeboard. Go no later than 1992 games on that. Perhaps the limit will be 1990 or 1991 games. If the bridgeboard has no cache or anything like that, then you will probably have something that can not run games after 1988/89. I have seen bridgeboards before, that did not deliver. Especially those on an Amiga500 and Amiga2000. Even on the Mac, there were bad bridgeboards. One board, was an Amiga bridgeboard, that in theory, should make an Macintosh into an Amiga. They never managed to make it run more than some 75 percent of the Amiga's speed. And the compatibility was kind of crappy as well.

please explain better this think... in my 486DX2 i had a Sound Blaster PRO and every game i remember use it in a wornderfoul way. SB16 is not an upgrade of that card??? Why i can't use? I have a 16bit ISA in my 386sx20

SB16 is better than the Sound Blaster Pro. It just isn't compatible with all of the Pro's features. Some games (particularly, the old ones you could run on your bridge board) won't support stereo on the Sound Blaster 16.

Error 0x7CF wrote:

please explain better this think... in my 486DX2 i had a Sound Blaster PRO and every game i remember use it in a wornderfoul way. SB16 is not an upgrade of that card??? Why i can't use? I have a 16bit ISA in my 386sx20

SB16 is better than the Sound Blaster Pro. It just isn't compatible with all of the Pro's features. Some games (particularly, the old ones you could run on your bridge board) won't support stereo on the Sound Blaster 16.

Not care if sound mono, is important if it WORKS! I remember that with my SBPRO EVERY Games work.

derSammler wrote:

No idea about the Acer Travelmate 517TE, but the specs are good for late DOS games. However, it has a 1024x768 screen, which will most likely only do integer scaling by 2 or non-integer scaling without caring about the aspect ratio. If that's the case, it's almost unusable for DOS games, since you can't get proper full-screen display. I have a Toshiba notebook with very similar specs and such a screen. Ended up turning it into a Windows 2000 workstation, as DOS gaming just isn't fun on it.

And if i connect to the external monitor, same i did on a desktop computer? I ovecome this problem... when i am on a mobility i have some troble (but work) on my home connecting to the crt made this nice and clear or not?

what you think about the soundcard compatibility? and the excessive CPU Speed?

AlessandroB wrote:

Error 0x7CF wrote:

please explain better this think... in my 486DX2 i had a Sound Blaster PRO and every game i remember use it in a wornderfoul way. SB16 is not an upgrade of that card??? Why i can't use? I have a 16bit ISA in my 386sx20

SB16 is better than the Sound Blaster Pro. It just isn't compatible with all of the Pro's features. Some games (particularly, the old ones you could run on your bridge board) won't support stereo on the Sound Blaster 16.

Not care if sound mono, is important if it WORKS! I remember that with my SBPRO EVERY Games work.

Correct. That is why an SBPro is a great idea. An SB16... less so.

The SB16 is NOT compatible with the SBPro. It is compatible with the old (mono) SB 2.0. It adds new stuff on top of that - but that new stuff is only supported by games that are too new to run on your 386SX. So with stuff that does run on the 386SX it will behave like an old SB 2.0, so will be worse than an SBPro.

Skip them both. 😉 Neither SB Pro nor SB16 do faithfully replicate the sound of the original Sound Blasters (SB 1.x-2.0).

Error 0x7CF wrote:

please explain better this think... in my 486DX2 i had a Sound Blaster PRO and every game i remember use it in a wornderfoul way. SB16 is not an upgrade of that card??? Why i can't use? I have a 16bit ISA in my 386sx20

SB16 is better than the Sound Blaster Pro. It just isn't compatible with all of the Pro's features. Some games (particularly, the old ones you could run on your bridge board) won't support stereo on the Sound Blaster 16.

Technically yes, but i prefer more the sbpro opl3 implementation, and the strong filtered low qualty digital sound from the old games are also nicer to my ears.

Well, the 486 should serve you well for most things DOS/Windows 3.x/9x. That's been my experience for over 20 years.

Skimming the thread

1.) The 486 DX2 should be pretty capable of covering anything DOS From the mid-80's on up to maybe 1997-1998 at the latest. If it has a Turbo Switch, it may improve your capabilities just starting out even more. The DX2 was a very popular chip and worked. Doom 1 will run on a 486, and so will Doom 2 or Ultimate Doom. I have the DOOM collection on my DX4-100 next to me, and it was running that great as a DX2-66 over a year or so ago. Typically where I find the 486 starts to falter is just very slight on Diablo if you are running something older 486 or with a slower chipset, or the original Postal. Your main problem will be getting older titles to run slow enough conveniently. Some people do things like disable caches, add wait states, or use slowdown programs like moslo on their machines. I find though, there's not much on a 486 that runs too fast to be fun unless it's some old early-mid 1980's DOS Title designed to run on an 8088 and has no speed throttling. About the only title that runs too fast on a DX2 from near it's time period is Test Drive III (which for some reason is supposed to run like crap, but IF ind it quite fun on a DX2 or faster.....reminds me of some 70's movie I saw lat at night with 2 itailian dude driving a Ferrarri ungodly fast by virtue of sped up camera footage, 🤣).

The Amiga 4000, I'm not an Amiga person - well, not yet at least - was actually a whole other animal. The Amiga systems originally had their own O/S,platform, archetecture, totally different animal from the PC. Sounds like you have some kind of PC emulator card in there. While a lot of DOS Software SHOULD work in that kind of scenario, there is always the odd straggler here and there that does not. And driver support for any specific features can be tricky because it's not a genuine PC, but rather an interposter built into an Amiga 4000. Of course, I could be totally wrong and it's just a Commodore branded 386....not sure, someone else on Amiga can chime in, if they have not already.

If it's just a branded 386 though, that system starts to peter out in performance on the later Ultima games (Ultima 7 and 8, from the early 90's), DOOM does not run as well on them, but they are a great center-point for DOS Only stuff (whereas the 486 is a great center-point for everything, with the right tricks a 486 will even boot Windows XP....nuts as it sounds). But I don't want to give any absolutes on the subject because I've never used one of those other platforms with a PC emulator card in it.

3.) The Acer Travelmate could be a good choice for the more complex games, but if you are really into saving space and wanting a good all-arounder that won't give you much issue It might be better to cover the whole gamut. Also, being a PII, it's just new enough to do some modern things well, but just old enough to still talk to all the old stuff, making it a excellent Tweener (assuming it has a CD drive and you are willing to seek out the apropriate cards for a network connection).

And that's my .02 after skimming the thread a bit, sorry if I repeated anything but this is my perspective after doing retro-computing with PC's since the early 2000's.

creepingnet wrote:

Well, the 486 should serve you well for most things DOS/Windows 3.x/9x. That's been my experience for over 20 years. […]
Show full quote

Well, the 486 should serve you well for most things DOS/Windows 3.x/9x. That's been my experience for over 20 years.

Skimming the thread

1.) The 486 DX2 should be pretty capable of covering anything DOS From the mid-80's on up to maybe 1997-1998 at the latest. If it has a Turbo Switch, it may improve your capabilities just starting out even more. The DX2 was a very popular chip and worked. Doom 1 will run on a 486, and so will Doom 2 or Ultimate Doom. I have the DOOM collection on my DX4-100 next to me, and it was running that great as a DX2-66 over a year or so ago. Typically where I find the 486 starts to falter is just very slight on Diablo if you are running something older 486 or with a slower chipset, or the original Postal. Your main problem will be getting older titles to run slow enough conveniently. Some people do things like disable caches, add wait states, or use slowdown programs like moslo on their machines. I find though, there's not much on a 486 that runs too fast to be fun unless it's some old early-mid 1980's DOS Title designed to run on an 8088 and has no speed throttling. About the only title that runs too fast on a DX2 from near it's time period is Test Drive III (which for some reason is supposed to run like crap, but IF ind it quite fun on a DX2 or faster.....reminds me of some 70's movie I saw lat at night with 2 itailian dude driving a Ferrarri ungodly fast by virtue of sped up camera footage, 🤣).

The Amiga 4000, I'm not an Amiga person - well, not yet at least - was actually a whole other animal. The Amiga systems originally had their own O/S,platform, archetecture, totally different animal from the PC. Sounds like you have some kind of PC emulator card in there. While a lot of DOS Software SHOULD work in that kind of scenario, there is always the odd straggler here and there that does not. And driver support for any specific features can be tricky because it's not a genuine PC, but rather an interposter built into an Amiga 4000. Of course, I could be totally wrong and it's just a Commodore branded 386....not sure, someone else on Amiga can chime in, if they have not already.

If it's just a branded 386 though, that system starts to peter out in performance on the later Ultima games (Ultima 7 and 8, from the early 90's), DOOM does not run as well on them, but they are a great center-point for DOS Only stuff (whereas the 486 is a great center-point for everything, with the right tricks a 486 will even boot Windows XP....nuts as it sounds). But I don't want to give any absolutes on the subject because I've never used one of those other platforms with a PC emulator card in it.

3.) The Acer Travelmate could be a good choice for the more complex games, but if you are really into saving space and wanting a good all-arounder that won't give you much issue It might be better to cover the whole gamut. Also, being a PII, it's just new enough to do some modern things well, but just old enough to still talk to all the old stuff, making it a excellent Tweener (assuming it has a CD drive and you are willing to seek out the apropriate cards for a network connection).

And that's my .02 after skimming the thread a bit, sorry if I repeated anything but this is my perspective after doing retro-computing with PC's since the early 2000's.

I had a 486DX2 as a first PC, i remember his extreme power, but i remember that it was necessary to have in second part of 90 years Pentium I and probably II. I not want to store a 486 system, a Pentium System and so on... i prefer a machine that cover game from 1990/91 to 1997 approx.