7 ms·

Although this seems to be a 33MHz CPU, the 386DX40 was the first "decent" processor I had access to when growing up so was quite memorable for me. In my teenag

Although this seems to be a 33MHz CPU, the 386DX40 was the first "decent" processor I had access to when growing up so was quite memorable for me. In my teenage years the PCs my brothers and I had access to were two 386DX40s each with 8MB of RAM and several hundred MBs of hard disk space (can't remember exactly, but pretty sure less than a GB). We really loved Blizzard's Warcraft II, which despite having a minimum requirement of 486 CPU, was able to run on the 386DX40s, albeit a bit slower than intended. Since we had two PCs we wanted to play together, but only had a parallel cable. I don't know why it was so hard for us to get hold of a serial cable, but the point is we only had the parallel one and Warcraft II would only be able to run over serial cables, not parallel ones. I eventually worked out a way though. The 386DX40s were actually also capable of running Windows 95 which had a feature where you could "network" two PCs over a parallel cable. I then ran IPX/SPX over that network which allowed us to play Warcraft II over it. The gameplay was pretty slow, but as I recall it was very reliable and we played quite a bit on this setup. Eventually we got a couple of BNC network cards and cables for a much more conventional setup.

tssva 5y ago
A little late but you could also have used the Crynwr plip packet driver to run IPX over the parallel cable avoiding the significant overhead of running Windows 95 on a 386 system.
- jonathanlydall 5y ago
  Only about 25 years too late :D, but that would have been cool to know about. It does make me think though about how I might have discovered such a thing at that point in time. I don't think I even had internet at home then, I never used things like a BBS and later I was never big into forums either. So the only way I really learnt things was either through fiddling (which is how I found out about the parallel cable networking) or through word of mouth. It also might not have occurred to me yet how to find answers on the internet and besides, there was no Google back then. There also wasn't any local community I was aware of that was into these kinds of things. So I only learnt very limited amounts. I guess I could have tried computing magazines which may also have helped, but I didn't have any real money then, and it's also possible that the options were very slim in South Africa anyhow.
  - tambourine_man 5y ago
    It’s really hard for anyone under 25/30 to appreciate how hard it was for information to come by. I vividly remember loving a song that was playing on a store’s radio and then standing there for half an hour until the spokesman eventually listed all songs he had played. I did my best to identify and memorize the author, so I could later look them up on a music store.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    > I guess I could have tried computing magazines Here are some offline methods other people used to get such information: 1. magazines and "zines" 2. books 3. word-of-mouth (as you said) 4. clubs or meet-ups Online methods that pre-date google: 1. newsgroups (usenet) 2. yahoo groups 3. bbses 4. forums 5. msdn 6. other search engines, even ones that used categories like yahoo were sometimes effective. It just took longer to search to find exactly what you wanted 7. manufacturer websites. for example if you need the pin settings for a WD MFM or RLL disk drive, go to the WD website and look it up. --- It wasn't as bad as people think. It just took a long more time to find.
    - jasomill 5y ago
      Additionally, when available, information was frequently of higher quality than is readily available online. Even today, it's probably easier to find detailed, accurate technical documentation for OpenVMS and z/OS — where developers can't just be expected to "Google it" — than it is for Windows, Linux, or Apple OSes. Moreover, pre-Internet, I never encountered a scenario where important documentation was only available in video form. At worst, you'd very rarely see consumer products bundled with a videocassette for users who couldn't be bothered to RTFM. Sharing information is certainly easier today, as magazines, user group memberships, long-distance BBS calls, and in-person conferences present a far more significant barrier to entry than the Web. The trend seems to be reversing, however, as more and more information once available over the Web now seems to be siloed in systems like Facebook and Discord that are neither searchable via Google nor regularly archived by the Internet Archive. What I wouldn't give for a "Usenet 2.0", i.e., a widely-used, persistent, open, distributed discussion system to reverse this trend.
officeplant 5y ago
If you ever get the urge for playing it again the Warcraft 2 package on GoG even comes with the IPX patcher you need to play on modern windows. WC2 is still my favorite of the bunch and it's joy to have a game with old friends from time to time. I also play WC1 in dosbox from time to time. I still have many fond memories of playing WC2 with friends across town via modem to modem. We were lucky that our dads were gaming friends that often played WC2 together over modem so we quickly fell into the same habits.
- jonathanlydall 5y ago
  I actually bought the Battle.NET Edition when it came out, which added a few quality of life features from SC if I recall, like selection groups. But after having played SC2, I found that I don't really have the patience any more for the the primitive control options of Warcraft II.
  - philistine 5y ago
    Last time I played Warcraft 2, this is what stopped me from playing pretty quickly too; how primitive the controls were. Command & Conquer 3 had spoiled me with its intricately refined control scheme.
- jpablo 5y ago
  Another way is to use Stratagus, it can import the WC2 assets from an original CD and play using that. We used to play on huge maps many years ago with several people playing over lan (It was called freecraft back then). I'm not even sure it's maintained anymore.
  - officeplant 5y ago
    Oh damn somehow I've never heard of this. I'll look into it.
walrus01 5y ago
If I remember correctly the AMD 386DX/40 sold for about the same price as the Intel 33 MHz part, was definitely faster in any benchmark, and in the same era when a 486DX/25 and motherboard was a very expensive system, matched or outperformed the 486 in a few benchmarks. It was very popular around 1992-1993 or so. In terms of ratio of price/performance in the budget category, it would probably be analogous to a zen3 based $175 ryzen today installed on a $150 motherboard.
- rasz 5y ago
  386DX40 was somewhere between 486SX16 and 20 when running 32bit code. Both 386DX and 386SX executed 16bit code at very similar speed to 286 clock for clock. 486 arch as a straight up x2 speed increase. https://dependency-injection.com/the-slowest-486-vs-fastest-386/ https://dependency-injection.com/the-slowest-486-vs-fastest-... I have old 1994 catalogs listing AMD 386DX40 + motherboard (128KB cache) combo at a price point of three 1MB simm sticks, or one Intel 486DX25 processor, or one VLB graphic card, or one 14" VGA mono monitor :) 386SX with motherboard was 2/3 of that. I build whole 386 computer at the time spending pizza money on it (386DX40 + bunch of older used components). If you really wanted to compare it to today it would be more of a $40 board + $50 CPU situation while everyone buys $150 boards for their $200 CPUs.
  - StillBored 5y ago
    So, I was there and made this purchasing decision too. And if you remove doom from the benchmarks you linked it matches what I remember. Which is that the AMD 386-40's where faster in pretty much all cases than the Intel 486SX-20's. They were also slightly cheaper at the time. And that fact gave me a terrible time deciding which one to buy, but in the end I got the 486 because it had two huge advantages. The first being that at the time, if one carefully selected the motherboard it was possible to overclock the 486SX-20's to 40Mhz and have a rock solid system. The second was the VLB was starting to be a thing. A 486 with a VLB graphics card was considerably faster than anything I would have been getting on the 386. And of course it was pretty clear that faster 486's could be plugged in, rather than requiring a motherboard upgrade. So IIRC, it was like an extra 15% difference in price to get a machine that was well over 2x faster. So, I saved my pennies and borrowed some from my parents and got the 486SX. It was rock solid for the next couple years until I managed to get my hands on a DX2. That was also my first overclocking experience and by far the largest increase I've ever managed. That machine is also probably the fastest booting x86, I've ever owned because it was running MRBIOS. The boot time to DOS was entirely limited by the HD spin-up time, and with a much later DX4-100 upgrade was one of my longest running linux firewall/network servers i've ever used until it died in the mid 2000's in a heat event. (well maybe the abit bp6 counts...)

tssva 5y ago

A little late but you could also have used the Crynwr plip packet driver to run IPX over the parallel cable avoiding the significant overhead of running Windows 95 on a 386 system.

jonathanlydall 5y ago
Only about 25 years too late :D, but that would have been cool to know about. It does make me think though about how I might have discovered such a thing at that point in time. I don't think I even had internet at home then, I never used things like a BBS and later I was never big into forums either. So the only way I really learnt things was either through fiddling (which is how I found out about the parallel cable networking) or through word of mouth. It also might not have occurred to me yet how to find answers on the internet and besides, there was no Google back then. There also wasn't any local community I was aware of that was into these kinds of things. So I only learnt very limited amounts. I guess I could have tried computing magazines which may also have helped, but I didn't have any real money then, and it's also possible that the options were very slim in South Africa anyhow.
- tambourine_man 5y ago
  It’s really hard for anyone under 25/30 to appreciate how hard it was for information to come by. I vividly remember loving a song that was playing on a store’s radio and then standing there for half an hour until the spokesman eventually listed all songs he had played. I did my best to identify and memorize the author, so I could later look them up on a music store.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  > I guess I could have tried computing magazines Here are some offline methods other people used to get such information: 1. magazines and "zines" 2. books 3. word-of-mouth (as you said) 4. clubs or meet-ups Online methods that pre-date google: 1. newsgroups (usenet) 2. yahoo groups 3. bbses 4. forums 5. msdn 6. other search engines, even ones that used categories like yahoo were sometimes effective. It just took longer to search to find exactly what you wanted 7. manufacturer websites. for example if you need the pin settings for a WD MFM or RLL disk drive, go to the WD website and look it up. --- It wasn't as bad as people think. It just took a long more time to find.
  - jasomill 5y ago
    Additionally, when available, information was frequently of higher quality than is readily available online. Even today, it's probably easier to find detailed, accurate technical documentation for OpenVMS and z/OS — where developers can't just be expected to "Google it" — than it is for Windows, Linux, or Apple OSes. Moreover, pre-Internet, I never encountered a scenario where important documentation was only available in video form. At worst, you'd very rarely see consumer products bundled with a videocassette for users who couldn't be bothered to RTFM. Sharing information is certainly easier today, as magazines, user group memberships, long-distance BBS calls, and in-person conferences present a far more significant barrier to entry than the Web. The trend seems to be reversing, however, as more and more information once available over the Web now seems to be siloed in systems like Facebook and Discord that are neither searchable via Google nor regularly archived by the Internet Archive. What I wouldn't give for a "Usenet 2.0", i.e., a widely-used, persistent, open, distributed discussion system to reverse this trend.

officeplant 5y ago

If you ever get the urge for playing it again the Warcraft 2 package on GoG even comes with the IPX patcher you need to play on modern windows. WC2 is still my favorite of the bunch and it's joy to have a game with old friends from time to time. I also play WC1 in dosbox from time to time. I still have many fond memories of playing WC2 with friends across town via modem to modem. We were lucky that our dads were gaming friends that often played WC2 together over modem so we quickly fell into the same habits.

jonathanlydall 5y ago
I actually bought the Battle.NET Edition when it came out, which added a few quality of life features from SC if I recall, like selection groups. But after having played SC2, I found that I don't really have the patience any more for the the primitive control options of Warcraft II.
- philistine 5y ago
  Last time I played Warcraft 2, this is what stopped me from playing pretty quickly too; how primitive the controls were. Command & Conquer 3 had spoiled me with its intricately refined control scheme.
jpablo 5y ago
Another way is to use Stratagus, it can import the WC2 assets from an original CD and play using that. We used to play on huge maps many years ago with several people playing over lan (It was called freecraft back then). I'm not even sure it's maintained anymore.
- officeplant 5y ago
  Oh damn somehow I've never heard of this. I'll look into it.

walrus01 5y ago

If I remember correctly the AMD 386DX/40 sold for about the same price as the Intel 33 MHz part, was definitely faster in any benchmark, and in the same era when a 486DX/25 and motherboard was a very expensive system, matched or outperformed the 486 in a few benchmarks. It was very popular around 1992-1993 or so. In terms of ratio of price/performance in the budget category, it would probably be analogous to a zen3 based $175 ryzen today installed on a $150 motherboard.

rasz 5y ago
386DX40 was somewhere between 486SX16 and 20 when running 32bit code. Both 386DX and 386SX executed 16bit code at very similar speed to 286 clock for clock. 486 arch as a straight up x2 speed increase. https://dependency-injection.com/the-slowest-486-vs-fastest-386/ https://dependency-injection.com/the-slowest-486-vs-fastest-... I have old 1994 catalogs listing AMD 386DX40 + motherboard (128KB cache) combo at a price point of three 1MB simm sticks, or one Intel 486DX25 processor, or one VLB graphic card, or one 14" VGA mono monitor :) 386SX with motherboard was 2/3 of that. I build whole 386 computer at the time spending pizza money on it (386DX40 + bunch of older used components). If you really wanted to compare it to today it would be more of a $40 board + $50 CPU situation while everyone buys $150 boards for their $200 CPUs.
- StillBored 5y ago
  So, I was there and made this purchasing decision too. And if you remove doom from the benchmarks you linked it matches what I remember. Which is that the AMD 386-40's where faster in pretty much all cases than the Intel 486SX-20's. They were also slightly cheaper at the time. And that fact gave me a terrible time deciding which one to buy, but in the end I got the 486 because it had two huge advantages. The first being that at the time, if one carefully selected the motherboard it was possible to overclock the 486SX-20's to 40Mhz and have a rock solid system. The second was the VLB was starting to be a thing. A 486 with a VLB graphics card was considerably faster than anything I would have been getting on the 386. And of course it was pretty clear that faster 486's could be plugged in, rather than requiring a motherboard upgrade. So IIRC, it was like an extra 15% difference in price to get a machine that was well over 2x faster. So, I saved my pennies and borrowed some from my parents and got the 486SX. It was rock solid for the next couple years until I managed to get my hands on a DX2. That was also my first overclocking experience and by far the largest increase I've ever managed. That machine is also probably the fastest booting x86, I've ever owned because it was running MRBIOS. The boot time to DOS was entirely limited by the HD spin-up time, and with a much later DX4-100 upgrade was one of my longest running linux firewall/network servers i've ever used until it died in the mid 2000's in a heat event. (well maybe the abit bp6 counts...)