Wolfenstein 3D hacked to work on 8086/8088 CPU

[dedskin1]

,y god it doesnt work ,low Fps,try overclocking graphic card with Riva Tuner ,it does bouth ati and nvidia cards ,u should be able to get it work like with 1 frame more per secoun,might be usable then ,not sure it is now :)

[GR8TM4N]

I wonder if a Amiga computer ( like the 500 or the 2000 ) could somehow run this.

[drsmithanimation]

Impressive!

[MyNameIsBucket]

Should run nicely on a 5150 maxed out to 640k with a chip upgrade. Do you know if Catacomb or Hovertank are open source? It might be more productive to see if they can work on an 8088.

[kingcrimson234]

@MyNameIsBucket i don't think they are, but i have not checked. and no, it runs very slowly on a 5150. i've tried it. even with a V30 upgrade like mine has. it's kind of playable if the screen is shrunk all the way, but not fun.

[strongbanded]

LOL at 0 EMS XMS

[esoul128]

Could you not link to Public Domain Shareware Data files?

[kingcrimson234]

@esoul128 no, it doesn't work with the shareware data files.

[OTAlucard]

King Crimson is the man

[GemaMedia]

that's the future, old bits are better bits !

[MTd2]

Congratulations! Great job! :) BTW, do you think it is possible to hack wolf3d to run on the old Nintendo 8bit?

[kingcrimson234]

@MTd2 absolutely not possible, that is far more than a simple hack that would be required. the code is for a completely different processor type and system layout. the nintendo just isn't powerful enough. raycaster engines have been made for the NES, but there is no way to fit wolf3d into one in any way that it would be recognizable.

i have written a NES emulator, so i am very knowledgeable on what the machine's capabilities are.

[BalancedSpirit79]

Awesome job, man. It's always fun to push old hardware to its limits.

[deusprogrammer]

As a fellow programmer, I salute you sir!

[kingcrimson234]

@deusprogrammer thank you! +1 for being a programmer. we make the world go around. except when we're making 20 year old games work on computers even older than that.

[run64dll]

reminds me of the time where I was a kid

we had no money to buy expensive cumputerhardware to have a faster system

so I tried EVERYTHING to make games run on slow hardware

awesome video!

[Szederp]

That is Awesome! Next stop: Crysis! : )

[St33lR0b0t]

Nice work, and original one. Most people make ports of old games to modern systems like win7, linux or OS X, with gfx enhancements, but here we have a port of old game for really old PC, and it works. Of course 8086 is too slow for Wolf3D but still it's funny thing to see this game running on such old machine.

[TahreyUK]

Heh... I remember it being sluggish on a 286 unless you made the viewport a bit smaller, so this isn't SO surprising :)

Maybe turning the sound off would help?

Also, I've seen enough games using the Wolf engine that actually run in EGA, so if you could hack it to use that, it may speed up (chucking 4-bit data about = 2x as fast as 8-bit? given that neither EGA nor VGA have any kind of hardware acceleration)

By the way, is that the PC itself under the monitor, or a huge modem / hard disk / etc?

[kingcrimson234]

@TahreyUK i think it'd require some major reworking to do 4-bit, but it's not the 8-bit part that's killing it. there are some very intense calculations required for each pixel and it's just brutal to an 8088. it would probably be slower in 4-bits too, because of all the work involved in combining multiple pixels into one byte.

and no that's actually just a power director under the monitor.

[Tricob1974]

@TahreyUK - Disabling the music does increase the framerate somewhat. But one of the slowest parts of the code is just doing the calculations for the "Actors" (enemies dead or alive) and the "Static Objects" (items and objects). The more of those you have in one map, the slower the game performance. That's why E1L1 always had the best game performance on slow systems.

[fronzel99]

Now make it run in 640x200 monochrome CGA and support PC Speaker nad it will be usefull for the HP 200LX

[marquis0r]

UND WAS SOLL DIESER SCHEISS HACK JETZT BRINGEN DA??? 0 FPS BEI 40x25 AUFLÖSUNG?

[Adrammalech7570]

I think my cell phone has more processing power than the machine used here.

[zupperm]

Does it get any faster if you disable the sound?

[romefox]

The Crysis of it's day!

[cds587]

NASA called... Jk they don't want their computer back.

[Jerkwad152]

@cds587

They wouldn't have any use for it anyway. They scrapped the space shuttles.

(which, interestingly, used 486's. They're the only processor that could survive reentry).

[cds587]

@Jerkwad152 Well i just learned something, thanks.

[TahreyUK]

@Jerkwad152 As far as I was told they used some kind of custom made wire-wrap CPU (rather than ICs) that was based on the 80186 architecture? You need a surprisingly small amount of processing power to deal with the sensors, telematics and control commands to maneouvre a spaceship-cum-flying brick and run its life support / comms hardware.

(And a 186 at 10mhz would still be about twice as fast as this thing!)

[SamuraiClinton]

I think the higher system requirement for Wolf3D was simply a gimmick by id Software to get people to buy a newer machine of the time.

[TahreyUK]

@SamuraiClinton

id made & sold PCs / CPUs, now? Your argument makes no sense. The lower they could make the requirements whilst still providing an exciting, groundbreaking game, the more people would be able to buy it (your choice: buy 2 games that work on your PC, or buy 1 & the upgrade to run it? What if you can only afford 1 anyway?) - Hence why you could change screen size in Wolf, Doom & Quake, before 3dfx made it moot.

Also, see Apogee's little "buy a 486!" message in Rise of the Triad...

[didogazeto]

i love those old computers...LOVE them

[barichm0]

I've worked with the Wolf3D source code since early 2001, when I was 13 years old.

What type of changes did you have to make to the source code to make this work? Did it require extensive changes, or just some?

And did you have any problems with the Flashing Screen Borders / Out of Memory bug when you die? With some levels (although none in the original Wolf3D) that often occurs even with a full amount of memory, let alone the small amount that you have there.

[kingcrimson234]

@barichm0 it was surprisingly easy, actually. it only involved removing the bit that quits if it doesn't detect a 286, and going through each source file look for assembly instructions that aren't 8086-compatible, and replacing them.

the 286 requirement was wrong. it only would require an 80186 if they didn't throw in a 286 check into the code. it only uses real mode, and the only assembly instructions i had to change were PUSHA/POPA, and some multi-bit shifts that used immediate operands.

[SamuraiClinton]

@kingcrimson234 And ya know what, Perhaps Wolf3D had high requirements for its time as a gimmick to get people to upgrade their machines.

[yeoldeengineer]

Back in those days, chipset - and thus memory - performance varied *considerably*. An old 386DX-20 PS/2 P70 really is no faster than a newer 386SX-20 Compal notebook. 486SX-20/25s also tended to be noticeably inferior to AMD 386DX-40 systems, especially those with cache (an upscale machine might have a whopping 64K). Memory read speeds in 486 chipsets may vary by a factor of 3 or more (OPTi 495SX vs. 895: 8 vs. >30 MB/s).

As such, a 386SX with a sucky chipset might well lose to a speedy 286.

[yeoldeengineer]

...And trust me, Mozilla on the same 486DX/2-66 felt like twice as fast when going to the 895 equipped board.

Chipset performance actually stayed a hot topic until about 10 years ago. The last really lame ones I remember would be VIA's Apollo Pro 133 (like half as fast as a 440BX until interleave optimizers came along) and the infamous SiS 630 whose integrated graphics sucked up like 2/3 of the memory bandwidth at 100 MHz FSB and effectively turned a 1 GHz machine into a 500 MHz one.

[metro2002]

ah very smooth... lol. But cool that you made it work.

[nopochoclos]

Hey man, hello from Argentina, in 1992 i install Wolfenstein 3D on my friends 80-286 computer and run very fast, why you cant run on 386 Sx? maybe hardware problem or something like that.

[Tricob1974]

@nopochoclos - One of two things - Either the 80386 doesn't have enough Conventional Memory (a.k.a. Base Memory or Main Memory), or the graphics card is wrongly detected as being non-compatible with VGA graphics. A lot of SVGA cards had this problem back in the 80386 days.

[nopochoclos]

@Tricob1974 Wolfenstein 3D System requirements

80286 class CPU, 640 KB RAM , i remember most people here uses Trident Svga 1mb Vram. I play Wolfenstein 3d in 80286 with pc speaker... run very well too

[Tricob1974]

@nopochoclos - Trident SVGA cards are known to be 100% compatible with VGA. But many SVGA cards back then weren't.

[Thomsonicus]

love the microstick keyboard

[Thomsonicus]

love the microstick keyboard

[linuxrobotdude]

thats funny, it has more VRAM than system ram.

[ipadize]

yea this was an gamer pc xD

[Da1shocker]

Let's get Quake running.

[NINJACH0P957]

My TI-84 calculator is faster than that. lol

[TheCickAss]

@NINJACH0P957 You're an asshole too.

[NINJACH0P957]

@TheCickAss And why?

[fanofgames2009]

i remember playing this game when i was about 3 was one my faves on a 286 this a prince of persia orginal to think that huge white box with monitor that probs weighed 3x amount of me at 2 years old has less processing power than my mobile phone lmao so funny to look back nice work tho

[thecooldude9999]

why dr-dos?

[Nvidiaguides]

Now change Crysis' source code to work with an 8086 :P

[TheDjdog123]

w -7 XD lag lag XD

[TheDjdog123]

w -7 XD

[UZI9MMAUTO]

This is kinda cool! :) Appreciate it actually..

[kbbbb7]

Oh stop, you. You're making my 6 year old Pavillion Centro blush with its speed ;)

[Datah0g]

I ponder, might it be possible to get a larger screen/achieve a higher frame rate by reducing the resolution of the textures, or using a different (lower depth) color mode perhaps? :0

[vorkev1]

that is cool

[GGFSquallStrife]

I think it's cute when people habitually type the file extensions when they're using DOS. ;)

Unless you have files sharing the same name but with different extensions, that's four superfluous keystrokes. Efficiency brah! :P

[AmstradExin]

Can you make a version that utilizes the 8087 coprocessor? It might speed up a few things like geometry...

[neutrino78x]

@AmstradExin that's a good point, I have an 8087 on mine...also I wonder if it would help if you used one of those compactflash to IDE adapters and ran the game off of that instead of an old IDE hard drive. and wonder if LIM/EMS board would help. :)

[AmstradExin]

@neutrino78x I dont know where you live, but these XT-IDE controllers are far too hard to get.And back then it wasnt a standard, so its pretty unlikely to get a CF card working on such a machine that way. Also, a EMS board, despite the question of compatibilty won't speed up the game one bit. It might only make larger levels possible without dynamically loading external data from disk. I use a SCSI host adapter (The "widespread" Seagate ST-01). And its horribly slow on my 8088/10mhz....

[neutrino78x]

@AmstradExin my IBM PC 5150 has a 8 bit ISA IDE card :) but we (my dad and I) installed it in 91 when I was 12. ;-) you could use a SCSI card to put in a compactflash also, what you would do is put the compactflash in a CF to IDE adapter, then connect that adapter to a IDE to SCSI adapter. Of course, those two adapters will run you about 300 USD total :-O see synack.net/~bbraun/ridsce.html

[AmstradExin]

@neutrino78x Well, my SCSI controller was less than 15Euro. But even a simple scsi to IDE converter goes for 50Euro. and then i'll have to see if it even works with my scsi controller. However, i found the method of swapping data over to the XT with a CD ROM drive and mulktisesson cd's more practical and cheap. This is how i got the game over to the XT. (A turbo XT at 10mhz). I'm waiting for the V30 to arrive. lets see how fast it will be :D

[sparky4444444444444]

STATE OF THE ART MACHINE

[kingcrimson234]

@sparky4444444444444 what the hell ever happened to your IRC server bro

[speewave]

god.. did everyone have that CTX monitor and those speakers... (they're great.. but i remember them from like 97 at alot of other houses \ schools

[EvilGoneGood12321]

I have an old pentium 3. It runs alot of old games from Wolfenstein 3D to

Age of empires 2 on windows 98

[BlueNeon81]

absolutely unplayable :D :D

but thumbs up for Sound Blaster on 8088 :)

[hakemon]

This game failed to load on my IBM PS/2 Model 25, with a V30. I really wanted to try it.. I even tried running it with autoexec.bat and config.sys bypassed, and on both a VGA card, and internal MCGA chip.. Just locks up at the DOS prompt.

[Tricob1974]

@hakemon - I'd try different command parameters to get things working, such as WOLF3D - NOPRO -NOAL -NOSB -NOSS.

[marracotube]

It doesn't work on i7 920 & GF 8800GT. Not enough power.

[PhasmatisApparatus]

No source?

[cy012201]

The iMac G3 is in the corner waiting for you.

[mrjustin5]

My first computer was a "Laser" brand 8088 that ran at an astounding 10MHz and had two double-density 3.5" floppy drives. CGA monitor and 8-Bit CGA graphics card. There was no hard drive. No sound card. Very abysmal system. Even though I got it in 1990 or 1989 I was very frustrated because I could not figure out how to use DOS and I didnt have any good software for it. It would have been better if I got an Apple IIe or something with a library of software.

[Mayhem1347]

Yeah it work, now try with Metro 2033 :D

[Tbird761]

Very cool. =) As a programmer, I can absolutely appreciate this.

[christy2drag]

You should try running DOOM on that.

[Manimal347]

Well, this game ran pretty horribly on my old 386sx/16 with 16-bit VGA and the benefit of XMS and no Sound Blaster overhead. Say, 10FPS, with the window at a reasonable but not full size. So, obviously, even a 12MHZ V30 will puke on it. Certainly cool to watch, but I'm sure our coder here knew from the start that it would be a slideshow.

[kingcrimson234]

@Manimal347 that's interesting.. i have a 10 MHz 286 machine with an SB16 and 16-bit VGA that plays wolf3d very well at full window size. hmm. it gets roughly 15 FPS or so. very playable.

[majcherek128]

@kingcrimson234 Amazing that you've got it to run that good.

But yes, I've had a 10 Mhz 286, with SB16, and running it full size too.

[Jerkwad152]

@kingcrimson234

The 386SX 16 was about as fast as an 8MHz 286 on its best day. :3

[speedyy]

@Manimal347

lol, i had a 386/SX-16+2 MB Simm and a 512KB Trident VGA card on it and could even run C&C Dos  version with it :)

[jeremysart]

Wow, an 8088? So this would run, sort of, on a Coleco ADAM computer then. Interesting.

[Kailette22]

we accidantly managed to play C&C 1 on a 386

[Cihl280777]

Still faster than Vista. :-)

(sorry couldn't resist)

But it IS the best 8-bit version of Wolf3D i've seen yet.

[razoorsharp]

You used a KVM Switch.. you did!!

[nelizmastr]

this is like running Crysis on a Pentium 4

[RamzesXIIIFPPMZ]

Great job.

[1xWertzui]

This runs much faster than the game called Dark Side on the C64 with real 3D graphics (around 3 frames per second...)

[fisk0]

this was amazing, even though it was totally unplayable. Surprised to see it running in MCGA/VGA too, didn't even know those old machines could handle VGA cards.

I don't think I've ever had such an old machine, my first PC I can clearly remember was an 286, but I think I played Digger, Pole Position and Paratrooper on something older than that. I did get a wonderful rush of nostalgia when I saw that long delay when it calculated the free space at the end of the DIR command.

[atarimon]

Those slow fades are epic to me, for some reason...

[935thegroup]

FAIL



[kingcrimson234]

@935thegroup not really. i totally did not fail in what i tried to do. doesn't make it playable though. ;-0

[SouthwesternEagle]

LOL! It's unplayably slow, but still cool. :3

[wysoft]

Are you running a hard card in there for your disk? Haven't seen one of those in an eternity.

[rick62008]

Man, congratulations on that setup!

I imagine how people from the year that cpu was released would react if they saw that game running..it would be mind blowing for them..even if at 5 fps.

[quangluu96]

MY HTC phone is like 100 times faster ^^

[vwestlife]

A CTX monitor! I haven't seen one of those in a long time.

[0Shocker0]

Have you tried using HIMEM.SYS and EMM286.EXE in your configurations?

[ImoenOfTelengard]

Since all computers are Turing machines, it can be proven that an 8088 or even a MOS-6502 can run Windows 7. It all goes back to the Nazi Enigma. All modern CPUs have the same past: designed to defeat the Enigma.

[rick62008]

@ImoenOfTelengard No cpu bellow a amdk6 (as for example a pentium 166mmx) can run windows 7 due to the lack os instructions sets.

[nipperoid]

Great computer :3

nice imac too

[Minecraftgamer]

I use to play this game on my OLD Computer from the early 1990's or so

[Core2QX]

4:15 haha^^

[Wochensau]

WOW!! It's amazing to see and hear how well the Sound Blaster is actually performing there. You get sound & music without any interruption, something that fails on any modern machine running that game in some kind of compatibility mode...

[kingcrimson234]

@Wochensau yep, but the reason the sound samples dont have interruption is that ever since version 2 of the sound blaster card, it's supported a feature called auto-init DMA. the sound card reads the audio data directly from RAM, and the CPU is basically unaffected.

a program sets up a buffer for the sound data in memory, tells the sound card which address it's at, and tells it to start playing. the CPU doesn't have to worry about timing or anything this way, just refill the buffer now and then

[gjc82071]

@Wochensau you can usually run those games using DOSBox (an MS-DOS emulator), I mean that is, if you really want to play. & don't know how to re-configulaflgulate your source code & all that like most of us (although he did accomplish something amazing/cool). Just saying, if ya wanna play (or DOOM), there are other (easier) ways.

[stosin]

unplayable

[Kharn526]

LOL turbo!

[AntDX316]

iphone 4 games r so much better than this

[aei05h1]

@AntDX316 No shit bub!!

[candygameengine]

Impressive. If I had my old XT still, I'd give this a try!

[pn0yb0iProductions]

TURBO~! I miss that button. Wish it was still there :-)

[tosgem]

to put this into perspective, that's an FPS running on an 8 bit processor. Would like to see how it runs on an 8086 @8mhz, it's probably playable.

[kingcrimson234]

@tosgem the 8088 is actually a true 16-bit processor, just like the 8086. the difference between them is that the 8088 only has an 8-bit wide interface to external data, like from RAM. the 8086 is 16-bit both internally and externally.

i actually got another 8088 motherboard recently which actually runs the CPU at 10 MHz on turbo mode. i tried wolf3d on that for a few minutes, it was quite playable. you still have to have the view shrunk, but it's still fun to play.

[kingcrimson234]

@tosgem continued.. one way to think of an 8086 vs. an 8088 is to imagine a busy two-lane road with heavy traffic. (where the traffic is data to/from RAM and ISA cards)

now imagine that two-lane road merging into 1 lane and causing a huge traffic jam. that's the entrance to the 8088. :P

[tosgem]

@kingcrimson234 thanks for the explanation mate, it's ok, i know what the bus is ;-) So the 8088 is a bit like the 68000, which has a 16bit bus but internally is 32bit

[SouthwesternEagle]

@kingcrimson234 Best explanation I have ever heard. Thanks for that!

[dudejo]

would it be hard to drop the detail level of Wold 3d?

like remove textures, lower the color palette, etc?

that would probably give a boost to the frame rate.

[ChrisUKFF]

lol how it struggles to render the "dir" command :D.

[gartner10112]

wow it barely runs, hey? that used to be my favourite game when i was a kid. have you played the newest wolfenstein for the 360?

[MegaMacHo777]

аххахахахаха

ЛОЛ

у МЕНЯ ТАКАЯ ИГРА НА ТЕЛФОНЕ нОКИА СМАРТ ЛЕТАЛА)))

ТАк у меня на телефоне проц 256мгц

[ewupawly]

@kingcrimson234 ha okay?

[Jonhny2]

Wow, that was so slooow!

[LostSubscriber]

it would be amazing if it could run gta iv or crysis.....but impossible....

[Appule69]

Thats pretty amazing. A processor from the late 70's running Wolfenstein 3D, runs like crap but runs none the less!

[dushanostoich]

ahha cool ! :D it runs like starcraft on my 386DX 40MHz :D and little faster then my 386SX 8MHz (16MHz turbo mode)

[FyberOptic]

Awesome work. Was it basically a recompile, or did you have to make code changes? If so, of what sort? I browsed the code once before and remember some was in pure assembly, though I don't remember if it used any 286 and up opcodes.

I was stuck with an 8088 for several years, when everyone else had "cool" computers, and despite the speed that the game was running at there, I'm quite sure that I would have played it anyway!

[kingcrimson234]

nope, it required some code changes. i removed the code that makes the game quit if it doesn't detect at least a 286. i also had to modify a good portion of the assembly where it used SHL/SHR ops with more than 1 place bit shifting. there was quite a bit of that, i just changed it to multiple single shifts so that an 8088 could run it.

a few other things that i can't remember off the top of my head as well. long live the 8088! :)

[dudejo]

@kingcrimson234 basically, the original game code could change several values in one operation, which was unsupported by the 8088?

[kingcrimson234]

@dudejo basically, yes. the SHL and SHR operations move the bits in a value left or right (respectively)

if you move all the bits in a value one place to the left, it doubles the number. if you move them all one to the right, it halves the number. with the introduction of the 286 (or maybe it was the 186, i forget) those SHL/SHR operations became able to accept an argument telling it how many places to move the bits at once rather than having to use multiple ops.

[tosgem]

@kingcrimson234 interesting, the mnemomic for the equivalent op on motorola chips is ASL and ASR, but I didn't think I'd seen this feature where you specify how many places to shift.... but just looking at my 68k manual, it seems that does at least. There you go!

[kingcrimson234]

@dudejo continuing... for example an SHL with the argument of 3 has the same end result as three single SHLs on an 8088, but it's done 3 times faster.

[stiehler1117]

Which is faster TI83 or 8088?

[Dant2142]

@stiehler1117 The Ti83 uses a Z80 processor, so it would be just as fast if not faster.

[anss321]

Very impressive, even if it runs slower than Quake II on my old Pentium 60 :D

[Kage999]

That prolly will not get good marks on 3d mark vintage :0)

[burtobm]

@Kage999  but what system does? :)

[Ben333bacc]

And by the gameplay... we can tell why they made the game require a 286...

[dosse91]

Cool! i wish i still had my old 8086... even if this game runs like shit :)

[MrSchmerr]

nice, the message is kool

8086/8088 hack by mark chambers (-:

[AmazonianBeauty]

i always wondered if someone would do this hack

my 1st PC was an 8086 but with CGA and a 20mb MFM HDD at 7.15Mhz!! and i couldn't exactly run much on it (512k wasn't much to work with)

[tosgem]

@AmazonianBeauty I'd imagine the hack for CGA would be a lot harder than the hack @kingcrimson234 did for the 8086/8, because iirc VGA has a native "chunky" graphics mode, which makes it a lot easier to process vertical strips. Wolf3d is a "strip" engine. The Wolf conversion to the Atari ST, which was more powerful than most 286's, runs slower than most 286's because the processor has to convert all the "chunky" screen data to "planar". I think CGA would require the same work from the cpu.

[MyReksio]

What do you write?

[stiehler1117]

wow as much processing power as my cell phone

[kingcrimson234]

much less than your cell phone.

[AmazingDX]

It would be better if the phones manufacturers include the proc. speed of the phones XD

I remember that i have played realtime 3D on my Sony z310a at least at 18fps.

[blakegriplingph]

@kingcrimson234 - As some phones nowadays have CPUs with clock speeds of over 600Mhz

[ThePhoneUpdate]

My phone has an Intel XScale @ 312mhz.... so most phones would own this thing at Wolf3D :)

[snipesre]

stank

[8086xt]

Hi,

Where can i find your hacked file to run wolf3d on my amstrad 1640 xt computer.

Bye :)

[linuxlove4004]

lol 1337 h4xx0r

and where is the cheese on your imac? it's not mac and cheese without cheese...