What kind of PC would gamers in the early 90s be using? I want

Just find a computer with doom's maximum recommended specs

Rich kid down the street had a dx2 66

So smooth, compared to my 486slc 25

>>3970303
DX2 is far from perfect for Doom though.

>>3970271
>What kind of PC would gamers in the early 90s be using? I want to play Doom the most authentic way possible, using the equipment that people used at the time.
There weren't any "gayming" PCs back then, just get a Pentium box with a good Sound Blaster card.

>>3970271
Check the archive, someone made a thread like this before, I don't remember what the answer was.

>>3970271
That depends.
Are we talking early 90s, or late 90s? It makes a huge difference.

Post 1997, one could expect a Voodoo graphics card to be in any serious gamer's computer.

>>3970271
For Doom and Doom 2: Intel DX4 processor, which is the 100MHz version of the i486 family. Guaranteed to run vanilla Doom beautifully, and also works pretty nicely for vanilla Duke Nukem 3D. Original Tomb Raider will also work, just as long as you stick to the lower 320x240 VGA resolution only.

Other: Soundblaster Pro 2 for audio, 16 Mb of RAM. MS-DOS 6.2 as the operating system. CD-ROM drive preferably for any CD-based releases. Mouse, keyboard. And all device drivers, of course. DOS never supplied those, they had to come from the manufacturers.

This is the perfect sweet spot to play pretty much any MS-DOS game ever released. Anything up to 1996, guaranteed to work on this setup. If you upgrade to a Pentium, and make sure the graphics card can do SVGA-resolutions, Tomb Raider and Duke3D will work without a hitch, and it also becomes a pretty good system to play Blood with, but because of CPU-timing issues, some older DOS games may start to run too fast, to the point of being impossible to enjoy. Mortal Kombat 2 notably suffers from this.

There you have it. Choke on the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT-files, I hope you enjoy tweaking them.

>>3970332
This

>>3970271

I have a dedicated 233mhz PC with Voodoo1 and Awe32, pretty good for stuff like Doom/Duke/Blood.
not so good for stuff like older adventure games, but I got about 95% of those working with cache disable programs and slowdown utilities.

Redneck Rampage runs a bit.. sluggish, though that might just be the way the game is supposed to run I dunno.
So yeah, try to get something like a 100/166mhz and install DOS on it. (no windows, stay away from windows if you want the authentic experience)

>>3970553
>And all device drivers, of course.
Hahahaha, have fun with EMM386 trying to load everything into upper memory so that the games you want to run still have their 600+ kB of conventional memory. No really, it's a part of the experience - getting a game to run in the first place was a meta-game of its own.

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>>3970332

>>3970553
>>3971995
A you using MS-DOS 6.22 as the OS? Or is FreeDOS just as good compatibility-wise (obviously it's much better for FAT32 support alone, which is a huge godsend if you want to install a lot of the later, larger games - a 2 GB FAT16 volume gets crowded quickly, not to mention to the 32 kB cluster size which will end up 20-30% of the space to be wasted).

>>3972025
>oh the time when a "gaming pc" actually looked genuinely good rather than ridiculous and cringeworthy

>>3972025
The monitor is fucking huge, if it's really as big (in comparison to eg. the keyboard or the 5,25'' CD-ROM drive) as it appears in the picture, it must be a 22'' inch tube (iirc the largest 4:3 CRT monitor tubes produced). Who honestly had a moster such as this back in the 90s?

>>3970271
If you want "hardware accurate" PC, here's what you aim for:
Late80/early90:
386@25mhz
8/16 bit ISA motherboard only.
Oak or Trident ISA VGA
generic pre-'94 ISA Controller card
Sound Blaster 2.0 or compatible. Gravis Ultrasound for rich kids.
Roland MT-32 for VERY rich kids.
8-16MB of RAM
DOS 5, 6 at best, Windows 3 is acceptable.
5.25 and 3.5 floppies.
Cartridge loading 2x-4x CD ROM for rich kids, and they will be proprietary connectors, not IDE (sound blasters will support them)

Early to mid 90s:
486dx2 or dx4 at 75-100mhz (AMD variants at 120mhz are acceptable if you wanna be a richfag)
16 bit ISA motherboard. VLB is recommended, PCI is acceptable for a post-94 build.
VLB video card of choice is tseng labs ET4000.
PCI is S3 Trio64 or Virge. Both are highly compatible with DOS games and demos, and work very decently in Windows 95.
EIDE VLB Controller card or PCI controller card. Your hard drives will be FAST. Onboard controllers also appeared at this time, so that is acceptable, but not as good.
SB16 sound cards are the standard. Avoid PCI, they don't work in DOS with some exceptions.
MT-32 is still for rich kids, but it's older and less supported now.
the REALLY rich kids have a Roland SC-55 or SC-55 Mk2. Duke Nukem 3D was composed on an SC-55.
32~ MB of RAM. Windows 95 is popular.
3.5 Floppies are popular, 5.25s are dying off.
Most CD Drives are now tray loading. 8x-12x is common.

>>3972076
Late 90s:
Super Socket 7 rules the world. Some people have P2 or P3 motherboards. ISA still exists, but it's disappearing. PCI is stadard, AGP is on the rise. FSB is 100-133mhz.
AMD K6-2 and 3 is the king. P2s struggle to match it, P3s are for rich people, and barely keep up.
Your video card is either early Radeon 7000 or Early GeForce MX. The gold standard is the Voodoo 3 3000 in AGP.
Nobody buys controller cards anymore, the integrated ones work fine.
AWE64 is the gold standard for Sound Cards, but requires an ISA slot.
For a few folk without ISA (Intel folk), you might find a motherboard and soundcard with SBLink or PC/PCI header (a 2x3 pin header with only 5 pins in a U shape) that allows some PCI sound card like Yamaha YMF724 to retain full DOS functionality with a cable.
Windows provides decent general midi support, but rich people still have SC-55s and a few have SC-88s. 32 MB ram is standard. Most have 64-128MB.
5.25 floppies are dead.
CD Writers are a thing.
Computers start turning black.
LCDs are becoming more common, but expensive.

>>3972062
>21" Viewsonic G810 Monitor, SVGA, Edge to Edge, NI, .25 Dot Pitch
https://web.archive.org/web/19980524004334/http://www.falcon-nw.com:80/machv3.htm
very few had such beast back in the day

>What kind of PC would gamers in the early 90s be using?
In the early early 90's, you were lucky if you had a 386 as a lot of people were still very much stuck on 286, but as far as something that can play doom, just get a 486 and one of those overdrive expansions, and just about everyone with a 386 was using that shit to play Wing Commander. Or you can just get a Pentium and play just about any dos game without having to worry about your CPU being too weak.

In short, just get a Pentium and a good soundblaster, along with drives or Floppy Emulator and you should be able to play just about any DOS game as the way most people played back then... well, minus the fact that you have a pentium, but it's not like anyone will tell the difference between Doom on a great 486 and Doom on a Pentium.

>>3972028

I'm using DOS 7.10 (which someone stripped from a windows build) so I can have bigger partitions (I have an 80gb IDE in there).
Runs everything just fine.

>>3972076
>>3972084
That's a nice summary. Do you feel though that barely anyone used the 66MHz bus and most jumped from a 33MHz bus (486 era) straight onto a 100MHz bus?

>CD Writers are a thing.
>Computers start turning black.
>LCDs are becoming more common, but expensive.

That'd be more an early 2000s thing iirc. I remember beige/gray PC stuff until well into the 00s. CD writers in the late 90s were an expensive novelty, they only became "a thing" (think something popular enough to be expected) in the early 00s. Back in the 90s many if not most combinations of CD writer, blank media, and CD burning software you would end up with was unreliable, with many discs being misburned (many people I knew used to alway simulate burning first due to the high failure rate). Also practically nobody was using LCD monitors in the 90s, almost everyone was using CRTs well into the 00s (early LCDs being ridiculously expensive while having very small screens and horrid viewing angles).

>>3972260
>DOS 7.10

That's the DOS version that runs underneath Windows 98 (Windows 95 had 6.0 and ME had 8.0).

>>3972286
>Windows 95 had 6.0
*7.0

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>>3972062
I still have my 22" CRT Syncmaster, and it works great, and does 1600X1200 (you can set it even higher at a lower refresh rate). I currently have it rotated to play shmups.

If you want big, Gateway had sold a computer that came with a HUGE monitor (about 35") in the mid 90s. The resolution was terrible (MAX 640x480) but what would you expect from what was essentially a TV with vga input?

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>>3970271
At the time, I had a 386DX-40mHz. Blindly purchased based on a beta screenshot in Videogames & Computer Entertainment magazine. It was fine for me, but for acceptable framerates, I had to switch to its low resolution mode for 1 step under fullscreen, or about 4 steps down in higher resolution mode. However, later I convinced an uncle to get a Gateway P75, and Doom was running well at high resolution mode 1-step down from fullscreen (I like the menu hud at the bottom). Uncle still hoards that Gateway P75 with its 17" CRT monitor (Trinitron), it would be mine if I ever have the room for it.


>>3972025
I always wanted a Falcon Northwest computer back then, but they were well overpriced. Their ads made it seem like a computer with the same specs cannot beat their computer due to their overclocking. Then I started assembling my own computers, and the cost savings were more comforting.

I played Doom on dad's pentium system with 100mb HDD and I think windows 3.1. I wore out the clicky switches on his Focus 2001 keyboard and he was pissed at me for a while. He deleted Doom to free up the 4mb for one of his projects. I remember how the PC clones at the time were ridiculously expensive.

I received my pirated copy of Doom from a co-worker at Hewlett-Packard. At that time we were building SCSI hard drives that retailed for about $7-800 if I recall.

>>3972032
That keyboard choice makes me question the designer's sanity.

>>3970553
>but because of CPU-timing issues, some older DOS games may start to run too fast
That's still true with with the 486 (especially the 100MHz one), mostly XT and 286-era AT games, but those can still run too fast.

>>3972025
>say A copy is never as good as the original
>sells IBM PC clones.

>>3975501
Why? Because it's one of those "ergonomic" types? They were quite popular in the late 90s/ early 00s even with people who didn't touchtype at all (somehow believing that it would benefit them anyways).

I was born 1993 so my first pc had pentium 4 with XP etc.

I want to build 2 computers in an attempt to replay the classics. One from 93~ and one from 98~

I've heard that building computers from that time was annoying as fuck with retarded drivers and OS from the time. Or is this just bitching and it's similar to building an early 00s pc?

>>3975721
The PC parts market was a wild west, there were no clear standards concerning many peripherals, there was no Plug and Play (at least not until Windows 95, and even then it was kinda flaky at best), no unified API (DirectX was only available on Windows 95 and later and slowly gaining traction, most 3D accelerated games in the late 90s supported Glide rather than Direct3D), resources such as IRQs, ISA DMA channels and I/O port numbers had to be fiddled with manually to avoid conflicts, DOS often needed >600 kB of free conventional memory which wasn't trivial to achieve considering such elementary things as drivers and some TSRs providing support for some device or other functionality... so, yea.

>>3975809

That sounds like a nightmare. Might just stick with dosbox ;)

>>3975826
If you really want to build a 1993 computer you might be in for a tough ride. You might want to build a late 90s computer instead which should be much easier to work with (motherboard shoudl have a plug'n'play BIOS which can autoconfigure resources such as IRQs and I/O ports) and make a DOS/Win98SE dual boot (most DOS games should work fine with the right graphics card and an ISA sound card). If you have a PC from back then you may want to go on and tinker with it, otherwise you shoudl first read a bit (the VOGONS forums are a good resource) before thinking about buying any parts.

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>>3972284
1997 motherfucker. Looked nice but it was a horrible mishmash of hardware slapped together under Windows 95 which was never meant to support it. If they had waited for 98/98SE it probably would have run like a champ

>>3972025
You do realise this is almost 5 years after Doom came out, 5 years after the period we are talking about?

>>3970271
Most likely a piece of garbage that could just barely run it since PC's were far more expensive back then.

Why spend a shitload of money to buy a new computer for that game when your kid already has a super nintendo (which can run it) and the future console of choice can run it no problem?

>>3970271
>period gaming

>>3977923
That's why you bought an Amiga

>>3975693
>gaming PC
>massive gap between keys
It seems like it would severely limit macro potential.

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>>3977868
butter smooth 40 fps

>>3978549
I don't see the gayming hardware anywhere

>>3972294
I use to have the P2 version of this minus the monitor. But I got rid of it because it only used EDO RAM. Kinda wish I still had it.

>>3977868
>Wanting the hardware of the time period
Really, getting a good Windows 95 or 98 machine with a good pentium 2 or 3, optional 3D accelerator and a good soundcard will just save you a lot of stress in the long run

>>3979273
Pentium 3 is Windows 2000 territory already and not for this board in the first place.
Also, the talk was about 1993, so yeah, suck it.

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>>3975501
>>3975693
>>3978538
I still use the same keyboard to this day. I like the two halves angled, it feels nice to me. Also it is because, I cannot afford that sweet Corsair K70 with the Cherry MX Blue switches.

>>3980462
For one, Pentium 3 can do dos, and two, get a Pentium 2 then. They're pretty cheap, easy to find, and not so hard to build, and you might as well make an ultimate windows 9x and dos machine.

>>3980954
You really don't need a Pentium 2/3 for a "ultimate" DOS machine.
If you want it to be ultimate in the first place, you want something that can do the best games (You really won't gain anything after a 266MHz Pentium) while still being able to disable cache and lower clock when you want to play older titles.

>>3978650
>1mb vlb video card
>svga monitor
>soundblaster
>joystick

>>3970271
>gamers in the early 90s be using

You know, gamers didn't exist back then. We're just kids or teenagers playing games on dad's Compaq Presario and dad had that because the guy in the store said he could use a word processor and write emails just fine with it.

>most authentic way possible, using the equipment that people used at the time

Yeah, that would the only computer in the house and it sucked to play games. So get a computer that doesn't play the game too well and you'll be experiencing just like we played it back then.

>>3970271
>What kind of PC would gamers in the early 90s be using?
That's vague. There's a huge difference between what was available in 1990 and 1994.

>>3982172
Pretty much this, in 1990 most people still had 286 processors and the 386 was pretty much considered "High end". By 1994, Doom had been out for a while and people had a reason to get a 486 outside of "Muh spreadsheets", so you either had a 386 or 486, or you just didn't bother with PC games. Pentium was pretty much financially off limits for a good couple of years.

>>3981996
So, any standard beige shitbox of the time.
Suddenly having a sound card makes a machine "gayming", kek.

>>3983014
in 1993 that stuff was high end

>>3983265
For PCs.
Also for example Adlib was already cheap as fuck in 1993.