/vr/ - Retro Games

Any real old-school Doomers here?

I'm building a 486 rig for shits and kicks from recycled parts, and will likely use it just to play Doom and other DOS games.

I'm using a Socket 2 (Overdrive compat, for both 3.3V and 5V CPUs) Micronics Baby AT motherboard from 1993, currently have 8MB of EDO RAM, but intend to get more, and a 2MB Trident TGUI9400CXi VLB video adapter, and a Sound Blaster AWE32 ISA.

I'm going to try my best to score at the very least an Intel-DX4-100 (or better yet, AMD or Cyrix's 5x86). The Pentium Overdrive up to 83MHz is also available in my socket, but can't find them anywhere.

What is the lowest CPU that would be good for Doom without shrinking the screen size? A 486DX2-66 should be sufficient, right? Would the 33MHz still be playable (although the 386DX at the same clock is hardly playable at all).

I don't really expect good floating-point performance out of any 486 class CPU, but the DX types are still nice to have. Besides, I've seen the AMD 5x86-120, 133, and the Cyrix at 150MHz handle Quake fairly well. at 320x200 anyways.

Also, I recall reading that Boom and MBF ports to DOS actually had better performance than Vanilla Doom executables. Any truth to this?

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Another thing, under DOS, MBF kicks some serious ass. You get near PrBoom levels of compatibility, but its not too heavily modernized like Doom Legacy or ZDOOM, and you can do 640x400 hi res modes. If you lack any good MIDI synthesizers, it has a built in softsynth where you can use either GUS patches or SF2 soundfonts converted to Allegro soundbanks, given you have enough RAM. If you have 24MB of RAM or more, and a Pentium 90MHz or higher, you can use 8mbgmsfx patches from Doomworld, and the music is pretty kick ass with it. Better than GUS, even.