Playing Doom on a 386 DOS PC
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.พ. 2025
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back in those days twelve frames a second was considered very playable and twenty super smooth
And all the people had fun anyway without whining about performances 😅
@@seamushadronok but it's far from 20 fps. Maybe 10.
All of these videos make me want all of my old computers. They all bring me back to playing games that were fun. We hid Doom on our lab computers at college when I was in a micro-controllers class. We were sure the teacher was going to catch on but he never did. I miss the days of computers like the 386, 486 and the first Pentium, Cyrix, or AMD processors.
+kj197734 The power of nostalgia. We also played it at school :) It was networked, old-school coax network, so playing Doom was a huge blast.
I'm sure your teachers knew all about you hiding Doom on the computers.
What do you think they were doing after you'd gone home at the end of the day ;-)
Now we're playing Doom (QZDoom in this case) with our teachers approving in Comp Sci classes. :)
1:33 Lol "Sorry, your PC is too slow for this secret!"
mario reference
gerald smerea How is this a Mario reference? It only shares a few words with "Sorry, but the princess is in another castle".
"Copyright 1995? This seems like a very late 386 board so probably made as cheaply as possible, because whoever bought a 386 board in 1995 onwards must have wanted the cheapest thing possible, the Pentium was out 3 years by then, Windows 95 ran much better on a DX4, 5x86 or Pentium and the Pentium 2 would release soon after."
-you
Still better frame-rate than my heartbeat while stoned.
That 386 is cutting through frames like knife through butter. Never goes below the smooth 13 frames per second.
SuperCinematic.
Silky smooth, am I right?
@@beetsandboots Back in the 90s the estemeed Cyrix corporation detrmined that illision of smooth motion begins at 13 fps. Altough I prefer 15+.
It is crazy how DOOM can run on the most random devices nowadays but back then it struggled on a 386. Which many people had as their main PC back in the day.
Wow, this video brought back some memories. If the room was quiet, you could hear the 386-40 ring when you opened a program. I was even able to run Win 95 on it. Wish I hung on to all the vintage stuff I had.
I don't think I've ever seem Doom load in the middle of the map.
Kind of crazy to think that now you can play Doom I through 2016 (though 2016 is obviously compromised) on the Switch - a small handheld system.
Doom Eternal also has a Switch port.
The original doom also had SNES and GBA ports.
You should have tried with min detail by pressing F5. By the way, it was epic to watch. I still play Doom today, but watching it played on a 386 really felt different and special. Like seeing Doom for the first time again.
Nice, I remember this experience on our 386DX, however only had PC speaker audio! I would shrink the window size down to the minimum (which was really too small to play) just to experience the smoothness. :)
+spawno Yes we put up with a lot back in the day :D
Thems were the days, when you could crash the school network playing Doom and give the IT department something extra to do fixing over the weekend ready for us to crash it again as soon as we had computer club on the Tuesday evening lol. It was literally a twice a week occurrence now I think back to it.
That soundcard is fantastic!
Give that 386 a break and reduce the screen size by 2 units and set the game to low detail
Odd, my 386sx-16mhz runs at a lower framerate but doesnt hitch NEARLY as much as your dx40. Whats up with that? what are you buffers set to in config.sys and do you have smartdrv running?
The way it was meant to be played.
NVIDA....oh wait INTEL!
Ok boomer
Not to sound rude but why the heck don't you lower the resolution and screen window? It wouldn't be so sluggish if you did.
Look here for benchmarks at ALL sizes and details: th-cam.com/video/qQEHHc1q06c/w-d-xo.html
Ahh the memories of playing this on my 486/33mhz PC with only 4MB ram and PC speaker audio. I remember doom 1 would run fine and doom 2 would lag in some places and one time the only way I could get it to work was through windows but I would get a slideshow of doom. the framerate was horrible. All that changed when I got another 8MB of ram for a whopping 12MB of ram and a sound card. Now I was styling.
I mean, it's more playable than an Amiga 500 playing Wing Commander, and I played the hell out of that. I'm sure plenty of people were more than happy to play it like this back in the day. Personally, my eyes just can't handle these early fake 3D "texture mapped" games. The pixels are just too in your face and give me terrible headaches. Wing Commander 1/2 are exceptions because most of what you see during the combat is space. But I'd never build a DOS PC to play 3D games anyway, nothing worthwhile in the 3D category until Windows 95 in my opinion. In terms of early 3D, give me polygons any day over this stuff. It's playable though, to anyone with patience , and most people back in the day did not play with the best hardware.
Assuming 86Box produces realistic results, I've gotten Doom running pretty smooth (low details, default screen size) on a simulated Am386 DX40 with 4 MB of RAM. The biggest improvement came from setting the machine to 0 wait states. A good video card gave a little more on top.
Is this with 4 megs of RAM? I recall my 386DX40 periodically swapping to disk when it had 4 megs, but it completely went away once it was upgraded to 8. Made the gameplay a lot more enjoyable.
Yea a few have mentioned this. Might be time to re-visit this topic?
There was also an hack to use more memory, replace Dos4GW with other dos extender - www.sid6581.net/pmodew/. Using this I was able to run Hexen witn 4 MB of ram (5 MB was minimum) and it is faster too.
"Can you play Doom on it?"
Barely
I believe I played Doom on a 386 all the time but it was more enjoyable in Low Res mode...at least more playable!
Try with FastDoom my friend
My first PC was a 486DX33, and it was better than this, but certainly not what I would call smooth. I was getting maybe 15-20 FPS.
on my 386DX-40 it was a little bit faster if I can remember it correctly
How well would this run on a 486SX? I've seen a video of a 486SX running Doom II fairly smoothly, I just wanted to make sure.
Not well IMO. I like playing it on a Pentium 100.
hmm...I guess ill try to get a Pentium, that is if its compatible. If not I'll instead try to get my hands on a 486DX2. My system is an IBM PS/1 Model ?53 Type 2133.
You have right, so one on yt made the benchmark and avg fps for
486sx25 is about 15,but for 386dx40 about 9.so it is big difference.
SNES version now doesn't feel that bad
I had a old 386 server box we used to use for DOOM multiplayer. It had 16 mb of ram which was ridiculous at the time! It was choppy like that but it never showed the disc icon :)
jonah2047 16 Megs? Damn, that was a beast back in the days :) I'm pretty sure now that it has to load sounds because the machine "only" has 4 Megs of RAM.
40 Mhz is actually still fucking fast logically speaking.
But not surprising it needs a lot to render pure logical entry into a graphical interface.
Why it laggin' so much? 386 DX with 40 MHz really so laggish? Feels like 10 fps
PS. Hmm.. I have a 386 DX 40 MHz and I wanna to build another time machine and now I doubt that 386 for dos games 90-95 years will be enough. Think I need a 486
***** Yes it really struggles. I've got another video project in the works, so don't rush out and buy anything yet :) It might be the perfect machine for you.
***** For '90-'95 games, you may even want to consider a Pentium. One of my favorite games is a 1994 platformer called Jazz Jackrabbit, which is perfectly playable on a 486, but just ever so slightly smoother on a Pentium.
Tragic. But informative.
The reason the floppy loading icon keeps showing up is that this is being run on 4MB of RAM! It's having to load from the HDD rather than cache the game. DOOM is definitely best played with 8MB+ of RAM.
Agreed, but most 386 didn't have that much RAM.
@@philscomputerlab Yes they had. I had 8 megs of RAM in my 386.
I love this game a lot. I would defiantly play this on a 386. Even though the frame rate would be pretty slow. Theres just something about the 386 that makes it fascinating. XD thats just me .
Hi Phil, did you do any tuning, 'cause on my 386 DX40 it's running much slower.
Vulturius RetroGamer Hi! I loaded BIOS defaults, no tuning. But it is a very good board with 256 KB Cache and a fast Cirrus Logic ISA graphics card. Check if you turbo button is not engaged. You can go to my website and under benchmarks > DOS > 386 benchmark suite you will find a boot floppy image. Boot from that disc, to check the speed of your PC. There is a table with some reference results for you to compare.
If you reduced screen size it would run better, though it doesn’t run that bad for full screen. Very playable
This is the fastest 386DX40 I've ever seen. Fired mine up to compare and it's nowhere even close. Most noticeable with the menu wipe effect, and the score counter at level end. Same VGA I think (WD90C31 is it Phil?)
Yea it's a fast one with 256KB Cache and fast graphics card, which all helps a bit.
I am interesting whether the coprocessor 387 would help
I don't think Doom used floating point math.
@@vladimirrodionov5391
Exactly as you wrote. Doom doesn't use the FPU
looking at the frame rate and comparing it to the apple watch series 2, an apple watch ultra will 100% run ms-dos
I was playing doom yesterday on my 2.2ghz core 2 duo laptop with an Nvidia Quadro FX 570M and it had occasional stutters. This is a game that can run on a 386. Why was this happening? I was using gzdoom I think
GZDoom can lag even high end PCs a bit depending on the graphics settings.
Huh. I might have to try other engines then but I was just using default settings
gzdoom only uses the original assets. the engine itself isn't anywhere near as lightweight.
Although, I've had luck using DOSBox and the original game files.
I don’t even have this laptop any more
@@OnlyEpicEmber fair enough.
What are the specs? This is surprisingly playable
Now do a nightmare mode playthrough
doom but its actually the intended hardware
ouch. every new sound and it stutters for half a second.
i though a 40mhz 386 would be a bit better
Did the x87 coprocessor installed?
Leon Frisa Doom doesn't support it.
Lol I prefer 4k60 over 1080p144 but I wonder if my friends back in the day were playing Doom on ultra, 1 frame per game, on their 386 like you are LOL.
And people knock PSX Doom for how it ran and looked. Seems like it ran better than the average PCs of the day!
PSX? That is an outstanding port
On 2.0x speed the screen movement is almost identical.
Bro y u no hit F5?
So obviously my first computer was a 486.
Your 386 has not enough RAM. I played Doom a LOT on a 386 with 4 MB of RAM and it was not loading from disk every 20 seconds.
He also uses 4mb ram. Things in reality are different from what most remember them to be. He even uses compact flash card in place of hard disk which further speeds up things a bit. This is pretty much as fast as it gets on 386 +4mb ram.
@desertrat810 It's the same speed, it's just... You were less demanding and unspoiled by smooth FPS back then :D
You’re so wrong haha. Sounds like you don’t know much about the way computers work.
Yeah 4mb is the recommended for doom
playing Doom with 4 MB had a lagging when it ran out of RAM. would be much more better with 8MB and one or two downsized window.
Can I get this on my printer? Please for the love of god let me do that.
Playing doom on a 386 looks like it's just barely playable. Any lower of a frame rate and you might as well be playing blind.
Well, its plyable, but it will never give you full experience. Not the same thing, at some point its gonna get boring becuase this game must be played fast! xD
Necr0manceR 100% agree with you :)
This is exactly how we played back in the day and it was exciting. Spoiled brats these days.
You forgot to hit f5
Gloom on a 14mhz 68020 Amiga is better than this (which cost half the price of a 386/40 in 1993)
Funny how it's reversed now, Amiga stuff is overpriced, and Doom runs on any PC these days.
@@philscomputerlab Funny thing though, it (Doom) does run much FASTER on a 50MHz 030 Amiga today (with C2P blitter routine), than this 386 :D
Slower than SNES version
yeah but the snes version looks like sh1t
@@kyles8524 mmm but do you know that SNES runs on a WDC 65c816, who is an slightly enhanced MOS 6502 with 16 bits capibilities? i386 were in fact 32 bits processor
@@paburo-san6667 dont get me wrong the SNES version is amazing but it looks a lot worse.I would find it easier to play on this old 386 running slower.I have one of those gameboxes and played doom for the SNES cause I played it as a kid and its hard to even tell what anything is unless its less than 10 feet away from your player
Unplayable....
Playable. It was designed to still be playable at low frame rates. In the sense that you can still run around and that you can still hit enemies.
Well, it's _technically_ playable, but people usually mean "unenjoyable" when they say that.
Everyone is so spoiled these days! I didn't even get 10fps when I first played Hexen and I didn't even have a soundcard. And I enjoyed it. A lot. Barely even 20 in Wolfenstein 3D. Besides, you reduce the viewport size, you enable low resolution mode that drops the horizontal resolution in half, that all helps.
Siana Gearz gtfo
With F5 and shrunken screen size it's playlable.
oof
This isn't even fun to watch...