5 ms·

surprisingly smooth considering that its reading all the textures from disk every frame

JohnBooty 3y ago
Yeah, that's wild. I imagine that on a physical vintage PC with a spinning rust hard drive (rather than in an emulator with storage presumably backed by an SSD) we'd be looking at a 1fps slideshow or less. But, maybe I'm wrong! Maybe things would fit into the HDD's onboard cache and it would perform OK.
- deadlyllama 3y ago
  Ha ha ha onboard anything PCs of a sufficient vintage had so little logic on the HDD that you could swap out the MFM controller card in your PC for an RLL one and get 50% more storage. The modulation of the signal written to the disk was the job of the controller card, not the board on the HDD. Turn your 20MB HDD into a 30MB with a controller change and reformat? Mighty tempting.
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    Hmmmmmm. I think they had some onboard cache around the time of DOOM? Now you got me interested.... This 4GB Western Digital AC-14300 with mfr date of 1995 seems to have 512KB of cache? Not sure if these specs are reliable though. - https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/western-digital/AC-14300-4311MB-3-5-SL-ATA66-ULTR.html https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/western-digital... - https://www.ebay.com/itm/325794470911?hash=item4bdadd1bff:g:QukAAOSwnf1kd1fU https://www.ebay.com/itm/325794470911?hash=item4bdadd1bff:g:... This 250MB Samsung from 1993 has 64KB of cache: - https://www.directitsource.com/product-p/shd-3122a-ds2.htm https://www.directitsource.com/product-p/shd-3122a-ds2.htm - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-X2uYEx7tU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-X2uYEx7tU This WD Caviar 280MB from 1992 seems to have 8KB of cache. - https://www.ebay.com/itm/154446527853 https://www.ebay.com/itm/154446527853 - https://www.priceblaze.com/WDAC280-WesternDigital-Hard-Drive https://www.priceblaze.com/WDAC280-WesternDigital-Hard-Drive This 40MB Maxtor from 1990 has 32KB of cache. - https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/maxtor/8051A-41MB-3-5-HH-IDE-AT.html https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/maxtor/8051A-41... So, I think any contemporary hard drive in those days would have some cache. Thanks for leading me down this nostalgic rabbit hole.
- jojobas 3y ago
  On a modern emulated 286 the entire HDD image would be cached in RAM, and sometimes maybe in L2/L3 cache.
Narishma 3y ago
But why is it doing that?
apricot 3y ago
The video is running at 15x, though...

Yeah, that's wild. I imagine that on a physical vintage PC with a spinning rust hard drive (rather than in an emulator with storage presumably backed by an SSD) we'd be looking at a 1fps slideshow or less. But, maybe I'm wrong! Maybe things would fit into the HDD's onboard cache and it would perform OK.

deadlyllama 3y ago
Ha ha ha onboard anything PCs of a sufficient vintage had so little logic on the HDD that you could swap out the MFM controller card in your PC for an RLL one and get 50% more storage. The modulation of the signal written to the disk was the job of the controller card, not the board on the HDD. Turn your 20MB HDD into a 30MB with a controller change and reformat? Mighty tempting.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Hmmmmmm. I think they had some onboard cache around the time of DOOM? Now you got me interested.... This 4GB Western Digital AC-14300 with mfr date of 1995 seems to have 512KB of cache? Not sure if these specs are reliable though. - https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/western-digital/AC-14300-4311MB-3-5-SL-ATA66-ULTR.html https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/western-digital... - https://www.ebay.com/itm/325794470911?hash=item4bdadd1bff:g:QukAAOSwnf1kd1fU https://www.ebay.com/itm/325794470911?hash=item4bdadd1bff:g:... This 250MB Samsung from 1993 has 64KB of cache: - https://www.directitsource.com/product-p/shd-3122a-ds2.htm https://www.directitsource.com/product-p/shd-3122a-ds2.htm - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-X2uYEx7tU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-X2uYEx7tU This WD Caviar 280MB from 1992 seems to have 8KB of cache. - https://www.ebay.com/itm/154446527853 https://www.ebay.com/itm/154446527853 - https://www.priceblaze.com/WDAC280-WesternDigital-Hard-Drive https://www.priceblaze.com/WDAC280-WesternDigital-Hard-Drive This 40MB Maxtor from 1990 has 32KB of cache. - https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/maxtor/8051A-41MB-3-5-HH-IDE-AT.html https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/maxtor/8051A-41... So, I think any contemporary hard drive in those days would have some cache. Thanks for leading me down this nostalgic rabbit hole.
jojobas 3y ago
On a modern emulated 286 the entire HDD image would be cached in RAM, and sometimes maybe in L2/L3 cache.

Narishma 3y ago

But why is it doing that?

apricot 3y ago

The video is running at 15x, though...