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Re: ZDoom on 486s

Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 12:24 am
by leileilol
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there is some routine that's causing this engine to slow down an unusually great deal and I have no idea why

zdoom 2.2.0 r748 btw.

Re: ZDoom on 486s

Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 12:29 am
by zwouth
hah yes, long live the AMD 5x86 @ 160mhz. You might try 150mhz (50x3), the extra bus speed may help though obviously you lose cpu clock. It's too bad 200mhz never worked (for me anyway) 50x4 would be pretty nice.
I wonder if upgrading from a S3Trio to a ViRGE (DX maybe) would help? Now there's a sentence I'd never thought i'd type.

There used to be some old overclocking utilites for the ViRGE and Trio, but I think all it did was mess with the pixel clock, and it never did anything good to the cards we tried it on. As in I don't even think it's a performance parameter lol, unless you like seeing text melt at a dos prompt (like REAL DOS, not some window)... kinda nasty.

In a dream world you should try and find a Cyrix 5x86 and overclock it. I think that was the fastest socket3 processor (per clock) you could get.
I say that like it would be easy though... good luck finding one, plus i'm not sure how BIOS compatibility was (though if you can run an AMD 5x86 that should be new enough).
Then to top it off I could never find any reports on how overclockable it was. But assuming it is... well it would be the holy grail end all for a 486 system.

note: for those who don't know, the Cyrix 5x86 was basically a 6x86(or M2) crammed into a 486 compatible package. That's a gross simplification, but you get the idea.

Re: ZDoom on 486s

Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 12:42 am
by leileilol
zwouth wrote:You might try 150mhz (50x3)
I might though i'm unaware of the jumper settings on my motherboard (M919) to set bus speed. I know the multiplier one (JP6 sets it from 3x to 4x)

I've tried 32in24-5.wad on the 486, most maps averaged around 8fps, then I fire the plasmagun. BAM 2FPS. The 486 doesn't like vertex processing much

Re: ZDoom on 486s

Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 12:56 am
by zwouth
I'm not sure if this is the same M919, but if it is what is written about "hot jumping" from 133 to 160 sounds very interesting...

http://th2chips.freeservers.com/m919/unoff/m919.html

If this is what's happening... well 20mhz PCI speed really sucks, 40 would be worlds better.
For the fastest PCI bus, boot the VIP at 133 MHz and then switch the jumper to overclock to 160 MHz. I do this routinely to avoid problems with my Sound Blaster on the ISA bus. But then I discovered the computer ran faster in this configuration. The way I figure it the VIP's AMI WinBios must set up shop based on the boot speed. It seems the PCI speed is 20 MHz after a 160 boot and 33 MHz when booted in the 133 mode.

HOT switching to 160 MHz must keep the dividers disabled and you end up with a actual 40 MHz PCI bus speed. Connect a switch (the unused keyboard lock works for me) to the "A" jumper on the CPU clock selector JP7 block. Switch on=133 off=160. My hard drive really perks up when I do this: take a look at the dismal 160/160 boot/operation rates.

NOTE: if you have the 3.x version of the motherboard you will notice that the CPU clock jumpers are labeled differently: JP3 instead of Version 1.x's JP7.

Re: ZDoom on 486s

Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 1:07 am
by leileilol
Well lacking any additional switch than a power button on this case kinda makes that process impossible :P my mb revision is 3.4b.

Re: ZDoom on 486s

Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 1:29 am
by zwouth
awe, not even a turbo switch? i was really wanting to see what performance difference this made too.
you could do like a buddy of mine did and hold a butter knife across the jumper pins on boot =) just don't drop the knife onto the board like he did ;p

edit: I was kinda serious about this. But yeay I manage to "Dead Thread" another topic. d'oh

Re: ZDoom on 486s

Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 10:10 pm
by leileilol
ok it's 150mhz
zdoom is not faster
plus the system sure freezes alot @ 50mhz bus
unreal does run faster though but that crashes more often now
will set back to 40mhz multiplier 4x

Re: ZDoom on 486s

Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2008 8:51 am
by leileilol
Ran the latest SVN as of Sep 5

Oddly setting it to "No sound" seems to process sound but not play it back and it's slow, and setting it to WaveOut doesn't really work and truly uses No sound (and performs rather smoothly without sound)

I miss the detail settings though :(

So yeah fmod is inefficient.

Also 1fps when the microsoft synthesizer is used, but that's pretty much a given.

Re: ZDoom on 486s

Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2008 10:00 am
by Graf Zahl
leileilol wrote: So yeah fmod is inefficient.

No, it's just not meant for such old systems but for modern applications that want to exploit the power today's systems have.

Re: ZDoom on 486s

Posted: Sun Sep 07, 2008 7:35 am
by leileilol
It applies the same to GZDoom too (which runs roughly the same framerate Zdoom does on this machine)

Re: ZDoom on 486s

Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2008 7:53 am
by SyntherAugustus
It's always been like that. Back in the 486 days (I used to have one until about 2002!) Zdoom wouldn't run so well in windows mode but it runned like a charm in dos mode. I preferred legacy because of that back in the day.

Re: ZDoom on 486s

Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2008 9:47 am
by Graf Zahl
Weren't the 486 days long gone when the first ZDoom was released?

Re: ZDoom on 486s

Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2008 4:50 pm
by randi
I was developing it on a 166 MHz K6 initially. That was upgraded to a 350 MHz Pentium II about nine months later. During the year before I started on it, I had only come across two 486s, but there were plenty of 133 and 166 MHz Pentiums floating around.

Re: ZDoom on 486s

Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2008 5:20 pm
by Graf Zahl
That's what I remember, too, from that time period. I dumped my 486 somewhere around mid 1995.

Re: ZDoom on 486s

Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2008 10:30 pm
by leileilol
I dumped Doom around 1996, but you don't see me whining DOOM IS DEAD ITS THE PAST GO PLAY QUAKE ! into everyone's faces either.

I just find it odd to see various Quake ports run better than Doom ports on the same machine .....