In high school I spent my hard-earned money upgrading the family computer from a i486SX-33 to an AMD 486DX4-120 to play Descent. Went from being barely playable with the screen size set super small to playing in glorious full screen 320x240, easily hitting 30 fps and higher. Blew my mind. Also bought a Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro flight stick. My brother couldn't watch because it made him motion sick lol. Of course I'd be barrel rolling around corners and doing all sorts of crazy maneuvers. Ahh those were the days. Thanks for posting! Not quite my hobby of choice to maintain classic PCs but it is pretty cool to see them still running these amazing games.
First Family PC when I was a kid was a free old 286 in 1995 with CGA graphics. pc couldnt be used for anything productive, but did have jill of the jungle on it! Second Family PC obtained less than 6 months later really cheap was the slowest 486 ever made at around 20 or 25 mhz. Oh man I remember that PC was so slow for 1995/1996 standards that we ran warcraft 2 on it and when we played it in networking mode, our even newer pc at the time ran smoothly, while the 486's units in game moved slow! it was actually funny to watch. My family's first store bought pc was like 2000-3000$ and was only a 200mhz pentium overdrive, not the MMX but the over drive. That pc was my true first memories of playing and actually enjoying pc games. The first pc game I ever saw excluding on that 286pc was heretic followed by doom 2. However when I think of our 200mhz pentium machine I think of Descent 2! My favorite game of all time from that era. If your 100mhz 486 could run software rendered descent 2 at close to 30fps, then I think the pentium was close to double that.
While I do have fond memories of my childhood playing games on DOS/Windows, I honestly don't miss having to shuffle memory in autoexec.bat and config.sys, issues with IRQ/DMA and "Plug-and-Play" etc etc. - I'm perfectly content loading games up in DOSBox and giving them everything they need, though it is cool that there are people keeping this old hardware alive.
Much appreciated and also totally understand. Running old games on old metal can be a huge PITA. I did lots of off camera swearing at this machine. Wasn't the first and won't be the last.
I love Descent. I recently picked up an AST P166 which had 8mb ram and onboard sound/vid. Had an enjoyable journey with upgrading parts and gaining a few FPS at every step. I think I started with 26fps in Q1, which seemed decent, then added another 8mb (fpm), then changed to 16mb EDO, 256kb lvl2 cache, Matrox Millennium 4mb PCI and an ISA sb16. Each part added fps bit by bit and ended up at 38fps I think it was. Really enjoyed the video.
I am looking forward to see more of these videos about your 486. Also, I am going to upgrade my DX2 66 to a DX4 100 and I have already received my early 90’s era CRT monitor and it feels like it’s rockin the desktop . 🎉😂
Hey thanks for the reminder on that tool. I tried to run it but it would lock up the computer. Wasn't a hard lock, the cursor would blink at the top of a blank screen. But I was having some instability issues till I found that if I changed the VLB wait state to "up to 33Mhz" that instability was resolved. I haven't tried to run the cache check. I think Speedsys does a good job of showing all the cache is there doing it's thing. But I will give it another try.
Have you ever tried Descent with a Mouse + Throttle... I really love this I could forget about the keyboard, just place my hand on the (CH) throttle and have access to most if not all you need to play the game! I purchased it to play Falcon 3.0 but ended up using it with Wing commander, Descent, anything that let me do custom keyboard assignment... Yep we share the "lust" for this stuff hahaha.
Very early on I was using mouse and keyboard with Descent. I was probably using arrow keys since "WASD" hadn't been pioneered by Thresh. He gets the credit AFAIK. Anyway I think I was using arrows or maybe number pad plus mouse. At some point after WASD became common in the Quake days I quickly switched over do that and love it. Left Shift for down, spacebar for up, Q & E for roll, and WASD is forward, back, slide left, right. :D A friend of mine is also hardcore Descent and uses a keyboard. As fast as I am with a mouse, he's very hard to beat.
Dosbox brought me here - I had to see it on a real 486 to be sure I was remembering how it played correctly. Out of the box, Dosbox performance in this game is very inconsistent. In my config, I had to set "core=normal" (default is "auto"), and now the game is consistently smooth like I remember. Anyway, this is my 2nd favorite game from the era.. DOOM can't be toppled. I also think the Descent soundtrack was way better on OPL...there's so much detail that are lost on wavetables.
Oops, how did I miss so many comments. Better late than never. I think my particular mobo tops out at 100Mhz but I would have to check. Thanks for the suggestion!
@@c90s_tech Most 5x86s will take "x2" on the board as x4. Granted I'm pretty sure your board won't do the 40MHz FSB without issues, given your current issues, but you should at least be able to run it if you can run 3.3v CPUs.
Haha great question. I did try that with an old copy of Winamp that still works on Windows 95. Sadly it wasn't fast enough. It played OK for a second or so then started stuttering. I tried disabling anything visual to give the CPU as much time to decode the audio but still no good. Maybe in a super highly optimized program that maybe cheated by only playing at 22Hz/Mono or only decoding one of the two stereo tracks (assuming that's even possible) it might be able to do it. But it plays wavetable MIDI and tracked music like a boss. :D Thanks for the comment/question.
Hey thanks so much! Got a follow up to the Voodoo 2 build coming out next weekend, a restoration video after that, then probablyt some gaming and software stuff coming out after that. Cheers!
In high school I spent my hard-earned money upgrading the family computer from a i486SX-33 to an AMD 486DX4-120 to play Descent. Went from being barely playable with the screen size set super small to playing in glorious full screen 320x240, easily hitting 30 fps and higher. Blew my mind. Also bought a Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro flight stick. My brother couldn't watch because it made him motion sick lol. Of course I'd be barrel rolling around corners and doing all sorts of crazy maneuvers. Ahh those were the days.
Thanks for posting! Not quite my hobby of choice to maintain classic PCs but it is pretty cool to see them still running these amazing games.
Really great series ! Love the channel / content and your storytelling. Lovely machine. Also doing a 486dx4 build now. Keep up the great work !
Dude thanks so much. Really like your channel as well! About to go watch your 486 video. Cheers!
CORRECTION: In the video I said this machine had EDO RAM. It is in fact Fast Page Memory aka FPM.
First Family PC when I was a kid was a free old 286 in 1995 with CGA graphics. pc couldnt be used for anything productive, but did have jill of the jungle on it!
Second Family PC obtained less than 6 months later really cheap was the slowest 486 ever made at around 20 or 25 mhz. Oh man I remember that PC was so slow for 1995/1996 standards that we ran warcraft 2 on it and when we played it in networking mode, our even newer pc at the time ran smoothly, while the 486's units in game moved slow! it was actually funny to watch.
My family's first store bought pc was like 2000-3000$ and was only a 200mhz pentium overdrive, not the MMX but the over drive.
That pc was my true first memories of playing and actually enjoying pc games. The first pc game I ever saw excluding on that 286pc was heretic followed by doom 2. However when I think of our 200mhz pentium machine I think of Descent 2! My favorite game of all time from that era.
If your 100mhz 486 could run software rendered descent 2 at close to 30fps, then I think the pentium was close to double that.
While I do have fond memories of my childhood playing games on DOS/Windows, I honestly don't miss having to shuffle memory in autoexec.bat and config.sys, issues with IRQ/DMA and "Plug-and-Play" etc etc. - I'm perfectly content loading games up in DOSBox and giving them everything they need, though it is cool that there are people keeping this old hardware alive.
Much appreciated and also totally understand. Running old games on old metal can be a huge PITA. I did lots of off camera swearing at this machine. Wasn't the first and won't be the last.
I love Descent. I recently picked up an AST P166 which had 8mb ram and onboard sound/vid. Had an enjoyable journey with upgrading parts and gaining a few FPS at every step. I think I started with 26fps in Q1, which seemed decent, then added another 8mb (fpm), then changed to 16mb EDO, 256kb lvl2 cache, Matrox Millennium 4mb PCI and an ISA sb16. Each part added fps bit by bit and ended up at 38fps I think it was. Really enjoyed the video.
I am looking forward to see more of these videos about your 486. Also, I am going to upgrade my DX2 66 to a DX4 100 and I have already received my early 90’s era CRT monitor and it feels like it’s rockin the desktop . 🎉😂
You need to try the CacheCHK utility, it will test the L1, L2 and RAM speed.
Hey thanks for the reminder on that tool. I tried to run it but it would lock up the computer. Wasn't a hard lock, the cursor would blink at the top of a blank screen. But I was having some instability issues till I found that if I changed the VLB wait state to "up to 33Mhz" that instability was resolved. I haven't tried to run the cache check. I think Speedsys does a good job of showing all the cache is there doing it's thing. But I will give it another try.
Have you ever tried Descent with a Mouse + Throttle... I really love this I could forget about the keyboard, just place my hand on the (CH) throttle and have access to most if not all you need to play the game! I purchased it to play Falcon 3.0 but ended up using it with Wing commander, Descent, anything that let me do custom keyboard assignment...
Yep we share the "lust" for this stuff hahaha.
Very early on I was using mouse and keyboard with Descent. I was probably using arrow keys since "WASD" hadn't been pioneered by Thresh. He gets the credit AFAIK. Anyway I think I was using arrows or maybe number pad plus mouse. At some point after WASD became common in the Quake days I quickly switched over do that and love it. Left Shift for down, spacebar for up, Q & E for roll, and WASD is forward, back, slide left, right. :D A friend of mine is also hardcore Descent and uses a keyboard. As fast as I am with a mouse, he's very hard to beat.
gotta love the mouse
I love this vintage computer goodness. Please!!!! Yes show the dos side of the build setup. If you only knew the Power of the Dos Side.
Dosbox brought me here - I had to see it on a real 486 to be sure I was remembering how it played correctly. Out of the box, Dosbox performance in this game is very inconsistent. In my config, I had to set "core=normal" (default is "auto"), and now the game is consistently smooth like I remember. Anyway, this is my 2nd favorite game from the era.. DOOM can't be toppled. I also think the Descent soundtrack was way better on OPL...there's so much detail that are lost on wavetables.
The AMD Am5x86 with 133Mhz@160MHz should give a nice boost. The fastest CPU for the Socket 3.
Oops, how did I miss so many comments. Better late than never. I think my particular mobo tops out at 100Mhz but I would have to check. Thanks for the suggestion!
@@c90s_tech Most 5x86s will take "x2" on the board as x4. Granted I'm pretty sure your board won't do the 40MHz FSB without issues, given your current issues, but you should at least be able to run it if you can run 3.3v CPUs.
EDO=Extended Data Out. That version of RAM is 12-18% faster than FPM(=Fast Page Memory) at the same speed. Why not Windows 98SE?
Can this DX4-100 play mp3?
Haha great question. I did try that with an old copy of Winamp that still works on Windows 95. Sadly it wasn't fast enough. It played OK for a second or so then started stuttering. I tried disabling anything visual to give the CPU as much time to decode the audio but still no good. Maybe in a super highly optimized program that maybe cheated by only playing at 22Hz/Mono or only decoding one of the two stereo tracks (assuming that's even possible) it might be able to do it. But it plays wavetable MIDI and tracked music like a boss. :D Thanks for the comment/question.
@@c90s_tech it _should_ be able to play mp3, at least the mid-bitrate ones
INSTASUB
Hey thanks so much! Got a follow up to the Voodoo 2 build coming out next weekend, a restoration video after that, then probablyt some gaming and software stuff coming out after that. Cheers!
Don’t talk about your laugh on RUclips - they’ll take your video down for bullying
Haha just about.