486 rating

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leilei
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Joined: August 16th, 2007, 2:45 pm

486 rating

Post by leilei »

seeing as the 486DX 100 is the 'middle ground' computer for most games of the DOS era it could be cool for those who use real old computers get a result of how it would run on such system indicated by a series of dots probably.
Pentiums at or over 100mhz have no problems with most (all) of the games on the site and that would be considered 'high end' and exceed the 486 rating. Low end would be 386SX 16/486 33MHz and as such indicated by the rating.
Good idea?
inclusivedisjunction
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Joined: December 12th, 2008, 4:16 pm

Re: 486 rating

Post by inclusivedisjunction »

I think the range of processors on which one could run a DOS game is too broad for such a rating to be useful. For instance, an 8088 and 220k of RAM is without a doubt "low end", but many DOS games will run on it, and ones that run on it might not work correctly on faster systems.

Also, performance is rather subjective. I may think a game runs fine, while you may think its too slow, or vice versa. Some games have different settings to expand / limit the resources and hardware they use, and running different TSRs or versions of DOS may affect the amount of memory available.

The only thing you can really do is go by the recommendations of the publisher. If they say 80286 or higher (80386DX-33 recommended), you should post the requirements. If there are known issues running on really fast processors, these should be noted as well.
ThreeHeadedMonkey
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Joined: January 16th, 2008, 1:23 am
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Re: 486 rating

Post by ThreeHeadedMonkey »

I agree that calling a 486/DX 100 the "middle ground" is a bit much. I used to own a 486/33 back in the day and it ran a lot of DOS games perfectly fine. I'd say a 486/DX 100 is pretty high end for a lot of DOS games, if not most of them. The publisher's estimations of system requirements would probably be the best indication of what type of machine a game would run best on.
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