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General consensus seems to be that Doom needed a 66Mhz 486 minimum, but one original manual I found for the shareware version just said 'a' 386 and 4MB was needed, and 'a' 486 was recommended. So millions of PC gamers would run this game thinking they were OK with a 386DX-40 or 486SX-25. From personal experience I can say that both these machines ran it OK, but the 486 was much smoother. Perhaps Carmack thought his customers shouldn't have been running it on such 'low spec' PCs, but that's what most people had at the time. The A4000 has bottlenecks for sure, but so did most PCs of the time. I bet Carmack just assumed it would be too slow based on his Nextstation's performance, which probably had its own bottlenecks. He never even tried it on the A4000 so how would he know? And even if it only performed about the same as a 386DX-40, why would that be a deal-breaker? The real reason is simple. As you say, the market was too small for him to bother with. |
I distinctly recall playing the shareware Doom just fine on a 486/25 SX in 1993. It wasn't totally fluid, but it was perfectly playable.
The DX2/66 was just what everyone had by the mid 90s it seems, and with Doom 2 and Duke 3D being out by then, I think it's just the Mandela effect. Doom 1 ran perfectly well on a 486 and was also playable on a 386. The DOS version had a number of assembler improvements that I highly doubt the NeXT version had any equivalent for since what wasn't their target market. |
I would suppose that those with a 68030 to have been fairly small comparatively. I had one but I think most wont have considering the price and a stock Amiga doing just fine with most games. Having Doom though would have helped growth there of course but by how much and so I guess that's why it was never a thing
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People paid £99 for A501s to play Dungeon Master, and that was a conversion from the ST with only slightly better graphics and sound. If they didn't get one then, they did when Beholder and Monkey did - and if those games weren't your thing, you got one for Alien Breed. Accelerators cost more than RAM upgrades, but with the right game to inspire the purchase, maybe people would have done. Plenty of pre-AGA games were improved by a faster processor and/or hard drive too, from Red Baron to Links to most adventures.
As for Grind, it's phenomenal so far. More than fast enough, and lots of detail. Only the floor and ceiling give any clue that it's on an A500 rather than an AGA 020 with fast RAM. |
Put a fork in this thread, because it's done.
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My uncle had an amazing 486, the case of his pc had a turbo button that somehow slowed everything down when you turned it on.
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didnt even think to search for that, no idea it was a common thing, at the time he just thought something was wrong with his machine and kinda just ignored it after seeing his doom/outpost games slow to a crawl :D nice find, good read. |
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PC has a large "gaming PC" install base with 4 million Doom 1 and Doom 2 PC sales and another IDsoftware estimated 15 million "floating" copies. Other Doom official ports have platform vendor's subsidies. Prove A2000/A3000 030 RTG has a 1 million install base. Doom in 1997 would have passed ROI requirements and the revenue focus is on Quake. |
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AMD and Intel are selling motherboard chipsets for the PC clone market. AMD's X670E has two X670 chips for double $$$. In 1992, AMD has $1.6 billion USD revenues which is larger than Commodore's $1 billion peak. |
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