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Comment by hunterjrj | Hacker News Reader

If I recall correctly, you had to shrink the view port on lower-end 486s for playable framerates. Also, the status bar shrank the area to be rendered to some extent.

Your point still stands, just pointing out that the target area for rendering was often smaller than 320x240.

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I remember playing multiplayer Doom over a modem back in the days. I had to shrink the view port down to the size of a postage stamp to maintain reasonable performance; I felt like a T-Rex playing like that (if you didn't move, I probably wouldn't notice you [especially if you were indigo]).

I remember it was very playable on the 33mhz, 8mb 486DX machines I had at my high school. A friend had a 50mhz 12mb 486SX-2 which was wonderful for Doom. I sadly only had a 16mhz 386sx with 2mb of RAM. I amazingly did get Doom to "run" on this machine through some virtual memory program for Win 3.1. I had to shrink the screen size down to the smallest size for it to run at about 1fps.

I also remember a couple of other people that had "486" upgrades for their 386 based systems and Doom was perfectly playable on those systems as well. RAM was the big limiting factor that I remember.

Why'd you run it through Windows? I had a 33Mhz 386 and 2 (4?) MB of ram. I made a boot disk, and it worked fine.

I also done that on a friends' 386SX 25MHz machine that had only 2MB of ram. Doom required at least 4MB (sounds ridiculous as I am typing) and although it used the DOS4GW dos extender that was capable of swapping, it never worked.

On the other side, Win 3.1 was also capable of swapping and ran Doom. It was absolutely unplayable though :)

You know, I still have that 386 in my mom's attic. I'm tempted to break it out and see what it can do.

Ultima VII required a 33MHz 386DX w/ 4Mb of ram, and my computer ran it fine with a boot disk. If memory serves (and I was 7 at the time, so it probably doesn't), a DOS 6.22 bootdisk contained fields for page size, which leads me to believe it had support for virtual memory. That said, I do remember the massive stink that was made about virtual memory when Windows 95 came out, so I could be wrong.

I'm highly tempted to break out that old box and play around with it. This conversation tickles my nostalgia bone.

Doom needed 4mb of free memory. If you had 4mb total, you had to create a boot disk. 8mb machines worked fine without a boot disk.

I also, amazingly, remember running some early version of Pagemaker on that machine. When I went to link text, I would click the mouse to start the process, go get a sandwich, watch some TV and come back 10 minutes later when it finished.

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