• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Questions about Doom and Duke Nukem 3D

Ruud

Ruud

Veteran Member
Joined
Nov 30, 2009
Messages
1,752
Location
Heerlen, NL
So far I played Doom on an emulator but I'm busy to fire up some older machines. My first question: what is the minimum requirement for playing Doom and for DN 3D? I have machines ranging from 386SX-25 and up. I know a Pentium-133 will certainly work but the older, the better. Just for originality. IIRC I started with a 486-33, but I don't have that one anymore.
The second question: I want sound of course. But I remember that I had to put a line into the AUTOEXEC.BAT so Doom knew what sound card I was using. After twenty years I have no idea at all anymore. For the rest it is just a matter of running SETUP, I hope
Any pointers to some manuals for dummies are welcome!

Thank you very much in advance!
 
DOOM 1 runs fine on a 486DX 33 MHz, DOOM 2 needs some more power due to more complex levels, so a DX2/66 is recommended. DOOM 1 also runs ok on a fast 386 if you enable low-res mode and if there's external cache.

D3D needs a DX2/66 at least for acceptable speed in 320x200. A Pentium is highly recommended.

For sound, you are probably looking for SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 [...]. Can't give you the exact line without knowing your sound card.
 
Duke pushed us to upgrade to fast 486s and early Pentiums.

For recreating those days, I use a P100 platform today. Don't have reason to rebuild a 486 33 or 66 or 100 because I constantly upgraded those until I got to Pentium 100 back in the day. You might want a nice and fast graphics card that has good output, so going for PCI vs VLB platform is also a bonus in my book.

Sound, like Timo says you can set hw specs in the BLASTER variable but some cards expect to be initialized first. And the games support multiple sound standards.
 
Zare said:
Duke pushed us to upgrade to fast 486s and early Pentiums.

For recreating those days, I use a P100 platform today. Don't have reason to rebuild a 486 33 or 66 or 100 because I constantly upgraded those until I got to Pentium 100 back in the day. You might want a nice and fast graphics card that has good output, so going for PCI vs VLB platform is also a bonus in my book.

Sound, like Timo says you can set hw specs in the BLASTER variable but some cards expect to be initialized first. And the games support multiple sound standards.
Click to expand...

When did the first game-based "Benchmarks" come out and spin off the entire custom gamer build for PCs?
 
Good question. I'm not sure, but I presume with the advent of low cost 3D accelerators paired with cheaper CPUs like K6 or Celeron.
 
Thank you all for the info!

I just had some luck today. I have a Tulip 486/66 and I couldn't get it to accept cf cards, even when using the Universal BIOS. So I decided to hook up a CD-ROM. But I had not don this in over twenty years en had no idea how to do it. Then I remembered I had saved an AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS from the old days. It told me how to do it and it worked!
But much better, the AUTOEXEC.BAT contained the line that I mentioned in the OP and more. It mentioned the settings for the ALS-120 sound card and according my database I still have two of them!

It seems I'm going to have a lot of fun again :)
 
doshea said:
It also says you can play it on a 386, but if you do that you'd probably need to set it to low detail and make the window much smaller.
Click to expand...
It's playable at full resolution on my 386DX/40 system w/256KB cache, but only just. Video card also makes a difference; not that there's any acceleration going on, but lower-end VGAs can definitely bottleneck performance (I'm assuming wait states on the bus, but I dunno.)
 
You want a Pentium to go with Duke if you want sound effects enabled or play at a larger resolution than 320x200, this was especially true of later Build engine games.
A reasonably fast hard drive also helps. I had a German laptop with a 486DX4/100MHz and with sound turned on (at a sampling rate of around 22kHz) Duke turned into a slideshow - surprisingly, the HDD turned out to be the bottleneck, I guess it was buffering sound samples all the time. I didn't check if it were stuck in a PIO mode or something, but replacing the thing made it playable. Otherwise I had to go with no sound, or just listening to the "farts" of an Ad Lib OPL2.

I remember I tried to play Redneck Rampage on a 486, but since it defaulted to SVGA modes in SETUP, I had to use 320x200. Moments after, a big red message box appeared, not recommending my choice. It even played a sound sample to go along. "Hold it, what the hell is that sh!t" :)
As a kid, I didn't like the 486 much. M.D.K. would flat out give up on that, and a cracked variant of Prehistorik 2 (the one that started with a HYBRID logo), would immediately exit to DOS when trying to move the main character, unless I went into BIOS and disabled cache.
 
Last edited:
I still have mag with D3D release review. It's not a gamer but PC mag, and reviews were like The Thriller of software. The detailed graphics, the interactions with objects, awesome digitized sound, etc.
Nobody wanted to run it 320x200 with sound off.

Duke is not that demanding, but later Build games are, and I don't see much point in building something that can run Doom2 well, Duke sort of ok, and not much of the rest. Ruud already had a 486 (and set-up!) - it'll serve him well for these two games in VGA mode.

RR is basically unplayable on a P100 with cache with fast RAM and with one of the fastest PCI cards out there in SVGA mode but it does have one custom programmed resolution in between, which my card handles and which plays ... meh. I'd say about 15fps. Games that I trully miss I can't play easily in hires on my Pentium are Descent and Descent 2. Replaying Quake would be nice but isn't too high on my list.

Speaking of Quake I built a PC that can run Quake with sound in 800x600 above 100FPS, so 'vsync' to my 17" CRT that can do that refresh at that pixel rate.
I'm sure it's doable with a lesser processor but this is on 3.2GHz Prescott. To run 800x600 at standard 25-30ish frame rate I believe you need a Pentium 2.

These Build games are a weird territory because you can obviously do 486s for anything up to 1995 and then some of that year's stuff and '96 stuff even then-contemporary hardware can't deal with properly.
 
I have run Doom on a 386 but you need to have the window shrunk pretty small otherwise a 486 was needed. As for Duke3D, any 486 but dx preferably.. Duke3d is more resource intensive. I played ALOT of Duke3D absolutely fine on my 486 dx4 120mhz back in the 90s (that was my main pc) but on say a 50mhz or 66mhz 486 it too would need the screen shrunk down.
 
Last edited:
I used to run Doom (and Doom 2) on a 486SX 25 Mhz with 4 MB of RAM. Both ran pretty good if I recall (which, to be fair, at my age, the memory is a little fuzzy). That's probably the minimum I'd recommend for Doom.

My uncle had a 386, and I can't remember the exact specs, but I do recall it had to have the quality lowered to run at a somewhat acceptable frame rate. Even then, it was not a pleasant experience.

As for Duke... on that old 486 of mine, it was almost a slideshow.
 
I have Doom running now, including sound :) The ALS-120 works fine. The main problem later in the evening: where are my loudspeakers? This morning I solved this problem by finding out that my LG TV has audio input for the VGA mode. Next step: getting DN 3D to run.....
 
I tried Doom on my 386, but it was slow as sludge. Even the so-called Fast Doom runs slowly. Therefore, for my main gaming experience with FPS games I have a nice Win98SE on a Compaq with a Celeron 500 processor. All the games run smoothly on it, including DN3D. The sound card is a AWE64.

DN3D has a few bugs which can cause sudden unexpected exit, especially on the secret rocket level. It's a good idea to save your game often.
 
A little late to the party on this one. I think I've played Doom on just about every PC that I ever owned, mainly my 386/486's. A little while back I thought I was ordering a legacy Doom package and found that it was re-compiled/upgraded to run on a modern Windows 10/11 platforms. It was a 3 part set:

Also, back in 2007 when Crysis was released, you knew your box was ok if you could run it as it was the the litmus test.
 

Attachments

  • Screenshot 2025-01-04 120447.png
    Screenshot 2025-01-04 120447.png
    544.7 KB · Views: 3
On a sideline, what DOS 2D games want a very fast 486 or a Pentium for max performance? I can think of Tyrian.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top