10 ms·
I'm old enough to remember that when Diablo came out, it seemed to be running too fast. This was before 3D video cards were mainstream (which happened with the
by zackmorris 8y ago
I'm old enough to remember that when Diablo came out, it seemed to be running too fast. This was before 3D video cards were mainstream (which happened with the Voodoo and Quake in 1997 maybe?).
I was working a lot with blitters at that point and running into speed issues on the Mac because Apple liked to release machines with half-width busses, which cut memory throughput by almost half. I'd be lucky to get 60 fps on a fullscreen 640x480 blit in 256 colors on a 68k Mac, but PCs seemed to do it trivially, and also do more with masking and color mapping at nearly the same speed.
Even PowerPC Macs ran between 2-10 times slower than their Pentium counterparts on tons of games. For example, Descent ran at 10 fps or whatever and was barely playable on a PPC 601, but ran great on a 100 MHz Pentium. Even Duke Nukem 3D ran full speed on a 100 MHz 486dx4. That could not have all simply been due to a lack of optimization on the Mac side.
This is all from memory so take it with a grain of salt. But I'm mildly curious what kind of approaches went into their blitting, and if they used things like palette animation (which wasn't available on the Mac because Apple put a blocking call on the palette change, which synced it to the refresh rate, although I never tried it from another thread because I don't think it was thread-safe).
- fusiongyro 8y agoI remember trying very hard to play Descent on a 33 MHz 486 DX. It did not go well for me!
- amatecha 8y agoDid you ever play that pre-alpha source port of Quake on Mac that was just roughly compiled from the DOS source? Got like 12 fps at best on 320x200 on a PowerPC 603e 120mhz... When you fired a rocket the framerate would slow down by like 50% :'D
- amatecha 8y agoAs a followup for whoever is interested, this unofficial port was usually called "HackQuake" and was compiled from source code that was apparently stolen from the web server of the developer "Crack dot Com". Unsurprisingly, it was not very well-optimized at all. It was leaked online far far before MacSoft's official Quake port was released (I want to say approaching a year?), so it was the only version of Quake that Mac gamers had for quite some time. I don't know much more than that about its history, though! BTW, the solution to the rocket/grenade lag was to replace your rocket or grenade .mdl file with one that had no particles (it was particle rendering in particular that caused major slowdown). Some obscure 90's Mac gaming history for you! ;)
- gwicks56 8y agoI had totally forgotten about Descent, thank you for the reminder. That game seriously scared me as a 13 yo boy at the time. I loved it.
- LoonyBalloony 8y agoCheck out Overload on steam dude. Made by the same peeps.
- lloeki 8y agoAdditional check out: Sublevel Zero, a Descent game with roguelike mechanics.
- VectorLock 8y agoI get a little sick to my stomach just hearing the word "Descent."
- Semirhage 8y agoI still have Descent dreams. If they’re good it’s just an exciting time, but if it’s an anxiety dream then it’s the equivalent of “the brakes on my car don’t work” anxiety dreams in 3D. I may have played those games a biiiit too much.
- cperciva 8y agoOddly enough, Descent was the one 3D game which didn't make me suffer from motion sickness.
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- scarface74 8y agoWhat was sad was that the same games ran better on my DX2/66 Dos Compatibility card with 32MB of on board RAM on my 6100/60 (with 16MB of RAM) than they did natively on the Mac.
- paulie_a 8y agoThat's because developers didn't care about Macs, they were and remain to have a tiny market share.
- scarface74 8y agoThe performance issues were mostly Apple's fault. The 6100/60 had a half speed bus compared to the full speed bus on most PCs. The early versions of MacOS for the PPC were partially still emulated.
- alanfalcon 8y agoThe FutureCop devs did :-) “I... Don’t Believe it!” Went the sound clip as a window popped up telling Mac Users to contact the studio and tell them that they were playing on a Mac since the Mac version was apparently a labor of love for the engineers. <3
- pjmlp 8y agoYep, in Portugal there was just one official importer Interlog with shops in Lisbon and Porto, with prices that would send anyone to by an Atari ST or Amiga instead.
- ben_w 8y ago> Even Duke Nukem 3D ran full speed on a 100 MHz 486dx4. That could not have all simply been due to a lack of optimization on the Mac side. Curious. I remember playing Marathon 2 on a 75MHz 603e and it seemed fine. What counts as “full speed”? I think Marathon was frame limited to 30 fps or close to that, from experimenting with semi-transparency based on fast-moving platforms…
- Zardoz84 8y agoDoom II on a 386 at 40 MHz was running fine.
- ben_w 8y agoThat’s irrelevant, isn’t it? I’m gave an example of a game comparable to the one I quoted, which did manage to run fine on Mac hardware of that era, presumably because Bungie was really Mac focused at that time so it was optimised for the hardware properly.
- bananaboy 8y agoDoom 2 only ran fine on a 386 if you made the window the size of a postage stamp!
- scruffyherder 8y agoDepends on the 386. I had a 386sx-16 4MB of RAM and a SoundBlaster, and it worked WITH sound... in a postage stamp at low resolution. However a friends AMD 386DX-40 ran it fine, well 'fine' until I saw it on a Pentium 60.
- phaedrus 8y agoI believe the PC version used palette switching for a lava effect, but not for scrolling (it used Direct X). Never got to see the Mac version of the game. I wrote a bot for Diablo 1 (https://sourceforge.net/projects/projectsolo/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/projectsolo/). Due to the way the game uses older Windows modes for the palette, the colors never come out right in screen captures and also get messed up if you alt-tab. IIRC I had to use an API call dating back to Win16 to get the raw bytes, and I used artificial color for the visualizations rather than figure out how to obtain the actual palette.
- cbsmith 8y agoIIRC, it was the 680x0's that so often had the crippled memory bus. The slowness on the PowerPC probably had more to do with the CPU power. PowerMacs struggled to be competitive with Pentiums for integer computation, and often the PowerPC Macs were not clocked competitively against their PC brethren. You referenced a 601... The PowerPC 601 based machines still had NuBus, which was slow compared to VLB & PCI. All the early PowerPC had a variety of disadvantages slowing them down: 680x0 emulation blowing the processor cache at times (particularly the 603), built in graphics were generally pathetic (and often used RAM as VRAM, undermining the value of the fast memory bus for gaming... but if you installed your own card with dedicated memory that problem vanished), and a the graphics card market was skewed for desktop publishing making it very costly to get good gaming performance. Of course Apple abused benchmark stats to make it all seem much faster than it was, but the memory bus was derived from the Motorola 88100 bus, and consequently was pretty decent (and if you think about it, the afore mentioned 486dx4 actually had a memory bus that was running about a third of CPU speed...). Radius graphics cards used to have fantastic blit performance.
- amatecha 8y agoSome PowerPC Macs were particularly crippled, such as the x200 series, using a 64-bit PPC CPU on 32-bit data bus, and memory running as low as 1/2 to 1/3 CPU speed. Because of the horrible design, heavy network traffic would critically slow the machine. See more info here: http://lowendmac.com/2014/power-mac-and-performa-x200-road-apples/ http://lowendmac.com/2014/power-mac-and-performa-x200-road-a...
- cbsmith 8y agoThe 603 in the x200's was a 32-bit CPU, and it explicitly supported 32-bit memory bus interfaces. That was part of how it kept costs down. In short, not a bug, but a feature (and there was support for interleaving to get you some of the benefits of a 64-bit bus). As per the link, the clock speed of the CPU was 90-120MHz. No PC was using 90-120MHz memory. They were all dropping to 1/2 & 1/3 (including Pentiums you are comparing against).
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