DOOM on a 486?

[geekmarine]

Ok I know this isn't directly related to DOOM, but here it goes:
I just got an old 486 SX computer, and I want to play DOOM on it. The problem is that DOOM is a little jerky, and I don't like to play on low detail. I have Windows 3.1 installed on it, and I noticed that there is almost no speed difference running it from Windows or DOS. Since generally Windows is slower than DOS, I was wondering could there be something that is making DOS slow which I could change in order to get a better framerate on DOOM?

[fodders]

Try sticking a better vid card in, my old 486 ran doom at around 30fps with a matrox millenium 2 meg card in

[stphrz]

You didn't say how much ram you have. If it's less than 8mb then there is probably not much you can do to improve things.

You also didn't say how fast your 486 was. If it's only a 33mhz or something, Doom will run a bit slow anyway, no matter what you do.

You could try to eliminate all TSRs except the ones you absolutely need to run Doom (ie mouse, and soundcard etc).
You could also try messing about with with your bios settings
to see if you can't improve things on that end.

If you want to run it in high detail you could reduce the screensize a notch too.

[Guest doomgod12345]

fodders said:

Try sticking a better vid card in, my old 486 ran doom at around 30fps with a matrox millenium 2 meg card in

if u want u could probaly over clock some stuff on it, that is if u know how

[Guest spacedog]

Now, that's peculiar. Back in the olden days when i first got my little 486 Doom wouldn't run in windows 3.1, the whole thing just froze.
Try experimenting with some of the source ports, mabye mbf or dos legacy will run faster 'cos there's all sorts of ways you can tweak the graphics

[geekmarine]

Well, I've tried everything I can think of, I guess I'll just leave it at that. I still want to know why DOS isn't any faster than Windows, though. I even tried making a boot disk, but that didn't do anything. It's no biggie, though. That's what you get when you pay more for the game than for the computer to run it on (I bought DOOM II back when it was $45, and I got the computer a couple days ago at a garage sale for $10). Thanks for your help anyways.

[Jon]

Grab SMMU dos from fraggle.alkali.org and use -textmode ... I'm not sure if fraggle implemented the background colour changing but I saw a picture of textmode using background switching which looked almost identical to 320x200 display just uber-fast... surreal.

[Guest ChriS]

Get a faster computer!! :P