anbody tried a 486?

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Slick

anbody tried a 486?

Post by Slick »

I'm using a Macintosh with Virtual PC to play this, and Virtual PC runs only slightly faster than a 486, (I'm using a 300mhz 603e) yet it IS playable. In some ways, it's slightly faster than the Apple IIGS version of Dungeon Master I, and in others (like mouse speed) it's slower. Many thanks for making the game playable on older machines.
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Paul Stevens
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Joined: Sun Apr 08, 2001 6:00 pm
Location: Madison, Wisconsin, USA

Re: anbody tried a 486?

Post by Paul Stevens »

You are most welcome. I worked hard at that very aspect
of the game. I have a laptop that I can slow down to about
the speed of a 486-dx33 and I managed to make it playable
at that speed. It were'nt easy. The keyboard shortcuts
make a lot of mouse movement unnecessary, thank
goodness. The only 486 I own is a 16-color job. Now that
is ugly. Even though CSBwin only uses 16 colors at a time it
is not designed to go with a 16-color video card.

Thanks for your comments.

PAul
prsteven@facstaff.wisc.edu
Quest

Re: anbody tried a 486?

Post by Quest »

wrong,
CSB (and DM) used 32 colours - even on ST. They were able
to remap colour-palette on the fly (to be more exact, they managed to do it twice on every screen)
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Paul Stevens
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Re: anbody tried a 486?

Post by Paul Stevens »

As I said. The program uses only 16 colors at a time. It
changes those 16 colors twice during each vertical retrace
when the 3-D view is visible, as you say. It was a pain to
map this business into a Windows program.

PAul
Sundeep Nandra

Re: anbody tried a 486?

Post by Sundeep Nandra »

So Virtual PC runs like a 486 eh? no wonder its so slow. If only the modem was on my PC...
Slick

Re: anbody tried a 486?

Post by Slick »

Virtual PC 3.0 emulates a Pentium I. It runs only slightly faster than a 486 on a 300mhz Powermac 6500 (603ev processor, NOT a G3). It IS faster than a 486 however. We timed various things, and the Mac beat the 486 on average by ONE or TWO seconds. Sometimes they were even, sometimes the mac beat it by a little more. Not much, but it's noticably faster.

BTW, I always suspected that the Apple IIGS version of Dungeon master might have used multiple palettes, and what you described seems to confirm that. I still don't understand why thousands of colors is needed to run CSB however. 256 should have been sufficient, but when I tried it the graphics became ugly.

The IIGS could only display 16 colors per line, but you could define up to 16 palettes, and assign each line to one of those palettes.
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Paul Stevens
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Re: anbody tried a 486?

Post by Paul Stevens »

Yes, indeed. 256 colors would be quite sufficient if the
CSBwin code were to be aware of the fact and build a
palette to make proper use of the 256 colors. But it does
not do this. It just goes ahead and sends 16-bit color
to the Windows video interface. Windows then tries to do
something......God knows what. And it generally comes
out very ugly.

Windows has a real problem with limited colors because it has
to share those colors amongst all the open windows, whether or
not they are actually visible/minimized/or whatever. So it takes
some effort to get it to do what you want for your particular window.
And it doesn't always work for me.

CSB needs many more than 32 colors because it uses additional
colors as the room darkens. All-in-all a painful process.

If there is someone who cannot play the game because of this
then I might attempt to overcome the problem. You gotta promise
to play the game all the way to the end if I go to all that work!!!!!

PAul
prsteven@facstaff.wisc.edu
Slick

Re: anbody tried a 486?

Post by Slick »

There is a noticable speed improvement when I put it on 256 colors, but like you said, it's ugly. However, the speed gained is not worth the effort to rewrite the code. The game is quite playable as it is. I have very little knowledge of the Windows/Intel archetechture, so I'm sorry if the question I asked was dumb. I am a computer science student, however I've only had two semesters of C++ (one's elective, I like C++) and a (required) COBOL class. I'm taking (required) ASSIST assembly now.
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