One Must Fall 2097 works best on a 486.

You can adjust the game speed in the menu to compensate for the overly fast gameplay on a Pentium, but that only works to a certain degree.

Titus the Fox I'm fairly sure I've run on pentiums, with no other issue than the key repeat rate being higher and thus a bit twitchy on the controls, music worked on SBPro 2.0 compatibles. However, many soundcards tend to tweak out on much higher than 10Mhz ISA buses in my experience, so if you're on clock/3 and it works at 25 and not 33, then set to clock/4 in CMOS setup and try that.

Can't think I've come across anything that absolutely demands a 486 period. There's a couple of things I came across back in the day that only ran on Intel CPU, not a Cyrix or late (own design) AMD, but I'm blanking exactly what. Mostly I think it's just a "goldilocks zone" CPU for stuff from the era, not too slow and not too fast.

Titus the Fox worked perfectly for 99% of the time on my 12MHz 286. No way this required a 486!

Blackthorne, but i'm not sure whether that was a CPU problem or a sound card problem anymore. It's slower on every Pentium (and better) i've played it on

I've played Blackthrone on a number of Pentiums and it ran absolutely fine for me.

So far I never seen a game actually specifically needing a 486 CPU.

SetMul has support for the TR12 on Pentium CPUs (P54C and MMX) and with the L1DX parameter it will disable the L1 cache of the Pentium CPU but making the other programs to think that the cache is still enabled. This could work for Ultima VII which I have heard that it was notorious for re-enabling the L1 cache of the CPU.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-09-19, 15:26:

One Must Fall 2097 works best on a 486.

You can adjust the game speed in the menu to compensate for the overly fast gameplay on a Pentium, but that only works to a certain degree.

I see! Never played this game either. I just checked the gameplay on Youtube and... nope, doesn't ring a bell. 😀

Ringding wrote on 2021-09-19, 21:08:

Titus the Fox worked perfectly for 99% of the time on my 12MHz 286. No way this required a 486!

I know this game very well and during busy scenes it's far from perfect on a 286 or even a 386 for that matter. 😀 It can be playable most of the time, but when there are multiple bad guys on the screen it will stutter/flicker, which ruins the experience (at least for me).

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-09-19, 15:37:

Titus the Fox I'm fairly sure I've run on pentiums, with no other issue than the key repeat rate being higher and thus a bit twitchy on the controls, music worked on SBPro 2.0 compatibles.

That would be very weird. I've never seen this game properly initialize the sound on faster systems... not even on a 486 DX2-66. And I've tried all possible combos, tens of sound cards, etc.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2021-09-19, 23:20:

SetMul has support for the TR12 on Pentium CPUs (P54C and MMX) and with the L1DX parameter it will disable the L1 cache of the Pentium CPU but making the other programs to think that the cache is still enabled. This could work for Ultima VII which I have heard that it was notorious for re-enabling the L1 cache of the CPU.

Indeed, VIA C3 is also a good choice for that game for the same reason.

For me Blackthorne, Blackthorne needs EMS. But with EMM386 and QEMM97 it doen not always work. but now free EMSMAGIC does the trick. same with Alladin and some othes games that somehow do not understand XMS specifications, but are made for fast CPUs and are late VGA DOS games. Go figure. But 486 secific games, there really are not any. Usually the problem lies somewhere else why your Pentium craps out.

I'd be surprised if there was any. The 486 is already a huge performance range from SX-20 to DX4-120.

*bump*

Having built and tested a variety of 286 through Pentium builds in the past 6 months, I've also been wondering about the specific need for a 486-era machine.

I have tested games like Blackthorne and OMF 2097, and they run fine and are perfectly playable on my Pentium machines.

Ultima 7 does seem the one game to benefit specifically from a 486 with the DX-33 seemingly being the sweet spot for that game.

Still searching for any other 486-specific games, but not yet finding any.

I should probably mention I had a later re-release of Titus, came in a budget pack with 3 or 4 other games, but all I'm remembering right now is StarGoose being another.

Re-releases and later patches skew the field a bit, I remember thinking for years that Wolf3D was too fast on 486, but that was just the version I was using, 1.3?? The one that's around now 1.8 ? behaves fine, the one I had, you'd tap a key and slam the wall, and trying to aim one tap sent you all the way left, another all the way right.

I last did a lot of 486 era gaming on my old Cyrix 5x86 rig, so speed was top end of 486, I am trying to remember now what I had trouble with, there was definitely a couple that were too fast at normal speed and too slow "deturboed" but I didn't have the util to set clock to 1x then. Also not sure what turbo did on that motherboard, whether it was an all cache off cripple, or declock to ref (14.xxx/2)

Edit: yah just pulled up a Wolf 3D 1.4 install on an old drive the other day and on a 486 at 40 mhz it's too twitchy on the controls.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-02-28, 02:08:

Ultima 7 does seem the one game to benefit specifically from a 486 with the DX-33 seemingly being the sweet spot for that game.

For the Pentium computer that you have, try using the L1DX parameter with SetMul. Aside from that, there are other workarounds:

• U7DCP - Ultima VII DOS Cache Patch
• Ultima VII Frame Limiter Patch

Very few games "need" a 486. Most speed sensitive games actually need a 386 or slower. There are a few games where really fast can be a problem, but those almost all run just fine on a 386 as well. The only game I know of that really should be played on a 486 is magic carpet. The can be played on a slower POD, but a 486dx66 is a close to playable as that game gets.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-02-28, 02:08:

*bump* […]
Show full quote

*bump*

Having built and tested a variety of 286 through Pentium builds in the past 6 months, I've also been wondering about the specific need for a 486-era machine.

I have tested games like Blackthorne and OMF 2097, and they run fine and are perfectly playable on my Pentium machines.

Ultima 7 does seem the one game to benefit specifically from a 486 with the DX-33 seemingly being the sweet spot for that game.

Still searching for any other 486-specific games, but not yet finding any.

There are patches for ultima 7 though, and IMO a mid range 386 is the sweet spot for that game. The animations are definitely too fast on a 486.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2023-03-01, 02:07:

The only game I know of that really should be played on a 486 is magic carpet. The can be played on a slower POD, but a 486dx66 is a close to playable as that game gets.

Isn't a Pentium recommended for Magic Carpet though?

mothergoose729 wrote on 2023-03-01, 02:08:

There are patches for ultima 7 though, and IMO a mid range 386 is the sweet spot for that game. The animations are definitely too fast on a 486.

There seem to be different opinions ranging from 386 DX-40 to 486 DX-40 speeds for U7. Though most recommendations I've noted seem to focus on 486-33.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-03-01, 03:09:

mothergoose729 wrote on 2023-03-01, 02:07:

The only game I know of that really should be played on a 486 is magic carpet. The can be played on a slower POD, but a 486dx66 is a close to playable as that game gets.

Isn't a Pentium recommended for Magic Carpet though?

At higher framerates the motion sickness gets a lot worse IMO and the enemies are really difficult to deal with. The framerate on a 486 is not great (like 15 fps) but the difficulty feels about right and I don't get sick as quickly. I think somewhere in the manual it recommends a 486dx66.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-03-01, 03:10:

mothergoose729 wrote on 2023-03-01, 02:08:

There are patches for ultima 7 though, and IMO a mid range 386 is the sweet spot for that game. The animations are definitely too fast on a 486.

There seem to be different opinions ranging from 386 DX-40 to 486 DX-40 speeds for U7. Though most recommendations I've noted seem to focus on 486-33.

IMO the 486 is too highly thought of in these retro circles. I don't know where this idea came from that the 486 is the definition DOS machine.

Someone made a really cool patch that lets you set the game tick rate at a fixed amount (regardless of CPU speed), and after playing with it for a while a much slower game speed felt right. The game was released in the early 90's (where most of the speed sensitive titles are) and it's possible the game is just programmed poorly, but worth noting that basically nobody owned a 486 in 1992. The 486dx processor had just come to market a month before the game was released. I would bet the dev machines used to develop ultimate 7 were 386 class.

A little test for you, in the opening intro you can see someone hit the top of a tv with their fist. It's pretty fast on a 486. In the opening intro cinematic there is scrolling and animations and what not. If that looks right to you on a 486dx33 then hey power to you. For me, a 386dx33 is much closer to what it feels like it should be.

Interesting further discussion on the topic. The top post sums it up pretty well https://www.reddit.com/r/Ultima/comments/o9su … _speed_wdosbox/.

tl;dr play it however you like but I am pretty convinced the game was intended for a 386

I have been playing the game pyrotechnica recently, it's an early 3d space ship game kind of like descent. Anyways, it's 3d graphics make it way too demanding to play on a 386 where it plays like a slideshow... However on my pentium 75, or higher spec machines, the game appears to run well with a very smooth frame rate BUT the rate of fire of the enemies seems somehow linked to the processor speed, as the barrage of lasers being shot at the player by the enemies in level 1 makes the game basically impossible to play on a p75 or higher and it is a much more substantial barrage than I get on the 386 (like, I can't dodge the bullets or kill the enemies because they are shooting a constant stream of fire at me, but on the 386 it's not a constant stream of fire)... I don't have a 486 to test the game with, but it seems to be too demanding for a 386, and has a game breaking issue on pentiums, so I'd be very interested to see how it works on a 486. Incidentally the game came out around the time 486 PCs were popular so it wouldn't be far fetched to consider that the developer was using or targeting 486 machines for the game.