The Serpent Rider wrote:

got about 0.1fps in the demo1 in safe mode

Gentlemen, we've officially hit the rock bottom.

I have to admit I didn't wait for the demo to end, I just looked at it with a stopwatch (and tried to avoid blinking to avoid missing the screen being updated, atleast for a couple of frames...)

SSTV2 wrote:

lolo799 wrote:

got about 0.1fps in the demo1 in safe mode[/attachment]

Nice, type into console "r_drawviewmodel 0" and "r_drawentities 0", and rerun the bench, FPS might increase to 0.2 or 0.3 🤣

leileilol wrote:

r_drawflat 1 would be even better 😉

I'll try those for fun!

I don’t think we’ve hit rock bottom till someone with a 386sx-16 w/ 8mb ram tries.

Do you think it will display FPS below 0.1 ?

georgel wrote:

Still interested how it was designed and who were the developers.

Georgel, You seem to be the authority on Q87 (saw your posts on vcfed), It’s a shame the authors seem to have disappeared. In my googling I saw a story about someone emailing Quickware for info but apparently the currently named Quickware company shares no history with the old one, only a common name.

OP, Another thing I noticed while googling which might be worth testing is apparently the DOS game “Screamer”
requires an FPU and wont run on Nexgen cpus. I did read a post where someone tested Q87 and it still didn’t run but Im wondering if it wasn’t a similar situation as here. Maybe they tried an emm386.sys incompatible version.
If it doesn’t rely on fpu as heavily as quake maybe you can get a playable experience.

kixs wrote:

Do you think it will display FPS below 0.1 ?

It might round down to 0.0? 😀

I pulled out my 386SX-33 with Trident vga card - had to change from 4 to 16MB of ram. 8MB would crash Quake for some reason.

Now I'm running the NO_FPU version - I think the view size is MAX as it didn't load so far yet 🤣

I think it might take 24hrs to actually complete it ??

I've gave up... will do it with q87x instead...

Changed the view size to MIN again.

Hmmm... It doesn't run that slow... it's at least 10x faster then NO_FPU version.

Kixs, you are just abusing your hardware now. I wasn’t being serious about going for 0.0fps. I’d be interested to know if you can play Screamer on the sx2-80 with q87, if you want to explore some other scenarios.

BinaryDemon wrote:

georgel wrote:

Still interested how it was designed and who were the developers.

....It’s a shame the authors seem to have disappeared. In my googling I saw a story about someone emailing Quickware for info but apparently the currently named Quickware company shares no history with the old one, only a common name.

Maybe this was a mere sideline for people who were working on real x86/87 processors for a larger company? Thus they had access to debugging tools, internal info on how real coprocessors work iternaly, etc. They might have been using know-how in violation of the rules of their primary company(ies)?..That's maybe why they were like ghosts and disappeared without leaving much info, code, etc

BinaryDemon wrote:

Kixs, you are just abusing your hardware now. I wasn’t being serious about going for 0.0fps. I’d be interested to know if you can play Screamer on the sx2-80 with q87, if you want to explore some other scenarios.

Tested Screamer... it runs on 486SX2/80 with no FPU emulation. If I load Q87X then it won't run at all - just freezes even before DOS4GW.

Maybe there are different versions of Screamer. Here are the exe files:

102. 03. 1996  22:21         1.034.923 STARTH.EXE
202. 03. 1996  22:21         1.034.919 STARTL.EXE

It is too slow to play, maybe 3-5 FPS.

kixs wrote:

Tested Screamer... it runs on 486SX2/80 with no FPU emulation. If I load Q87X then it won't run at all - just freezes even befor […]
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BinaryDemon wrote:

Kixs, you are just abusing your hardware now. I wasn’t being serious about going for 0.0fps. I’d be interested to know if you can play Screamer on the sx2-80 with q87, if you want to explore some other scenarios.

Tested Screamer... it runs on 486SX2/80 with no FPU emulation. If I load Q87X then it won't run at all - just freezes even before DOS4GW.

Maybe there are different versions of Screamer. Here are the exe files:

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102. 03. 1996  22:21         1.034.923 STARTH.EXE
202. 03. 1996  22:21         1.034.919 STARTL.EXE

It is too slow to play, maybe 3-5 FPS.

After all your tests Kixs, I conclude there is a problem between Q87 and DOS4G DOS extender. You may try earlier versions of Q387 I provided here and/or try to run softwre that uses DOS4G with alternative DOS extender. This one seems to fully replace it https://dos32a.narechk.net/index_en.html

Interesting, I wouldnt waste time with further testing if it runs on SX2-80. The incompatibility with NexGen CPUs could be a different issue.

“For people with Computers that has no internal FPU, ie NexGen,forget it. Really! This game makes use of FPU, though to what degree I don't know. So if you don't have FPU, then you're kinda outta luck,unless you have 16 MB of RAM. Then you can run an emulator, but I really don'tknow what the result would be. In other words, stick to Intel Pentium.”

I was going off the FPU info in this FAQ - https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/10285-screamer/faqs/1674

But it must be wrong or some based off some early version.

I've tested Screamer again with DX2/80. It seems it does use FPU but it doesn't require it.

Sceamer is very playable on DX2/80, while on SX2/80 it definitly isn't.

Q87X freezes. Q87 does work with it. I'd guess it runs a bit quicker, but it still isn't playable. Maybe 5-7 FPS now.

PS:
It seemed weird that it wouldn't be playable at 80Mhz as I had played it back then on my 486DX2/80 🤣

BinaryDemon wrote:

I don’t think we’ve hit rock bottom till someone with a 386sx-16 w/ 8mb ram tries.

There was once a "quake on 386!!! 4kb ram" video which was an obvious fake one which is simply a pentium+ recording played back slower and the audio was just the Quake2 soundtrack. I think it's removed now (it had disabled comments/likes too)

leileilol wrote:

...on 386!!! 4kb ram...

Even the Apple2 has 16/48K! You meant 4M of RAM? 1024 times is the difference. Very "informative" message you posted.

Mate, why are you so hostile?

For what it's worth, I think I remember that video leileilol, wasn't the uploader also suggesting that it was running in EGA when in fact it was just some post processing on the video?

All (your) off-topic posts resemble that lying video and dissolve the informative true information.

I tried with Q87X, still in safe mode and with the smallest size screen, the Q87X timed demo period ended before Quake's timedemo, make of that what you will.
I then used the console commands suggested by SSTV2 and leileilol and got a comfy 1.1 fps.

I figured I could go way slower, so I deactivated the cache in the sparse bios, ran the quake nofpu version for a while, stopped it after 1210 seconds, 34 frames (out of the total 969) and a 0.0fps on the counter!

I get 1.1 FPS with default settings and smallest screen size on NexGen P90 and S3 864 VLB card. Haven't tried any "optimizations".

Screamer is totally unplayable with or without Q87.

I found this old thread as I tested one Nx586 VLB system and also got idea to try run Quake there and I tested about four different FPU emulators until I found one that works in pmode with quake - Q87X 4.13. I can confirm the above result 0,9 FPS with normal window on Nx586-P90 and S3 765 VL VGA. I think that PocketQuake would be good approach when back-ported to DOS it could do better FPS. There are also alternative source of QuakeDOS but it use floats heavily too...