Vanilla Doom startup issue on Win98

[Guiddqd]

Hello, I dusted off my old win98 machine I had for compet-n and started Doom again.

There is a huge delay when the screen is changing resolution after launching the .bat, ~3 seconds pass before the game appears.

For speedrunning thats quite a problem. I cant fast start, I even loose time... .

Anybody has encountered such a thing?

[Linguica]

 https://flaterco.com/kb/DOOM/VanillaDOOM.html#OS

 

Quote

For Vanilla DOOM, a full installation of Windows 98 SE instead of plain DOS usually does more harm than good.

 

Pros:

• With ISA Sound Blaster AWE cards that have enough RAM and with some configurations of PCI Sound Blaster Live! cards, you can load arbitrary .SF2 sound fonts and use them through General MIDI.
• You can use those PCI sound cards whose drivers provide working legacy audio inside the Windows environment but not in DOS.
• You can sometimes get a softsynth to work.

Cons:

• Glitchy audio is common.
• Completely broken legacy audio is common.
• W98SE has problems with more than 512 MiB of RAM.
• Video drivers often have problems modesetting for DOOM.

[Linguica]

Since I'm the admin I am allowed to double post, so for more thoughts, it's also likely that your monitor really doesn't like the idea of switching to 320x200 (or 640x400, which is what DOS Doom actually uses, I think?) and so takes a long time. From doing some research, VOGONS et al have had success using a device like the Sewell Hammerhead to convert the VGA signal to HDMI.

 

 

A commenter says that a cheap converter like this won't convert 70hz signal to 60hz, though, so maybe that wouldn't work - although the video shows Wolf3D playing, which runs at 70hz, so I don't know?

[Guiddqd]

Thanks for the info.

I'll try the converter if nothing else works.

The game is running at 720x400 so at the moment Im trying to set Windows to that resolution aswell. Tried with powerstrip but it doesnt want to add it?!

Its recognized within the software though:

[Bashe]

Cons:

Glitchy audio is common.

 

This is actually a surprise to me. I was wondering why Doom would sometimes have weird blips and anomalies with the sound when I played it on my machine running 98SE. You can really hear the glitchiness with the audio in this video (timestamped). Now I'm wondering if I should use original 98 or even 95 instead.

[Guiddqd]

The audio doesn't bother me actually. I tried again and I still prefer the feeling of the win98 pc rather than dosbox.

The issue hasn't been resolved though...