When I hear 8088 I'm picturing like an IBM PC original from like 1981, so seeing the video of this running on a 286 isn't as impressive in the end.

Doom barely ran on 386s and lower 486s, so running at all on a 286, let alone better than most any 386, is pretty impressive to me.

In the video it runs in an emulator clocked at 15x the clock speed of a real 286.

You can clock the 8088 to 10MHz, and the NEC V20 drop-in replacement ran up to 16MHz. I'd be curious to see one of those run this.

Looks just like the DOS Doom that I played in the 1990s

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

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.

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.

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...

- 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.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.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-41...

So, I think any contemporary hard drive in those days would have some cache. Thanks for leading me down this nostalgic rabbit hole.

On a modern emulated 286 the entire HDD image would be cached in RAM, and sometimes maybe in L2/L3 cache.

But why is it doing that?

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

Looks about how wolfenstein 3d ran on my 286 Tandy 1000 rlx. Luckily you could reduce the graphics window size and dramatically improve performance

That's pretty good. There was another early 2.5D game that ran on my IBM PC that I played in around 1994 that this reminds me of. I'll go search for it now

Back, that was fast https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_Abyss

I think the framerate was closer to like 5fps or so.

I was under the impression that this series running on an 8088 was a unique property but Wikipedia fails to mention it. I was a kid then so let's just presume I was wrong

> There was another early 2.5D game that ran on my IBM PC that I played in around 1994 that this reminds me of.

Catacomb Abyss was also a John Romero and John Carmack game.

This is sped up (look at the cursor blinking fast). This guy's experience on a 24 Mhz 286 is more like 0.1-0.2 fps. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1911540009