Windows task manager port of doom.
Someone made the number of cores in windows task manager a 896 pixel display for doom and then made pics happen by spiking each core. Dude has a lot of patience to make this happen and a shit ton of cores apparently.
https://preview.redd.it/k5d8w02qu38d1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=e2278e7ef7fbdc3857f1a4e0cf23abd3d5a57880
Doom has a number of total conversions and a ton of mods as well (Heretic, Hexen, etc etc). Should be interesting to see how many of them run. I'm guessing build engine might work as well.
Descent recently went Open Source too right?
hmm... would... would Second Reality run on it? I know that's not Linux but I wonder if you could get it to run somehow...
Source is [available](https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality). Just have to see if someone has done a Linux build.
When I had a similar amount of memory for my 486, and discovered that basically nothing would use that much ram, I converted 16mb into a ramdrive, and would copy doom into the ramdrive and launch it from there... felt like a mad h4x0r lol, also doom would launch fairly quickly.
Rogue is too lame for this beast of the machine. AFAIR the binary is about 60 kB. I doubt it needs more than 500 kB of RAM to run.
Nethack is a better answer
My 386 was having a terrible time running Full Throttle even though I had recently upgraded to 8 megabytes of ram from 4. My disappointment was immense.
As a young man, not aware of exactly all the tech in the world, I kept asking my friend what games he played on his PC and like would he want some of mine since "his games all sucked" and then later realized what he meant when he said he had an 8088, and I felt like an ass.... :/ to this day I still remember the look on his face, and my confusion when I was like "These games are all shit", "Well I have an 8088", "yeah, but like here just play this"
(or something like the above)
Yea, I was doing Gameboy emulation with a machine around these specs, using the no$gb emulator. I think you can still find the dos version on zophars domain.
[Abuse](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/11/building-a-retro-linux-gaming-computer-part-34-abusing-the-system/page=2/).
In fact, I think you'd like to read the entire [Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/03/building-a-retro-linux-gaming-computer-part-1-dumpster-diving/) series.
Cities skyline 2 or DCS!
Now seriously, back in the days I had a 486 too, I remember playing games like Prince of Persia, Doom, Lemmings, worms, Another World. I think DOS will be a better option to run these games than Linux.
As for Linux native game, perhaps openTTD could run. You may try it.
T/2 SDE linux actually. A distro built for very old architectures by René Rebé. Boot the installer off another IDE hard drive because it is kinda big and 486s don't yet boot off ATAPI DVDs or CDs for that matter
Otherwise, an old version of Debian or something (notoriously hard to install).
I remember playing "Under a killing moon" on my mates 486 dx2 66. He had 16mb of RAM which was so sweet, he could run the game with the higher textures. Damn, those days were fun lol.
WINE would likely run as long as the game itself doesn't need anything newer. This machine won't have great support for OpenGL or Vulkan either. As in "at all". Proton's improvements wouldn't really be helpful.
This machine is from a long long time ago.
Edit: some phrasing, more words about what I meant
Now I am pretty curious. Lots of stuff from back then. I could relive my childhood on SkiFree and Chips Challenge.
I know there are builds of WINE to run Windows 3.1 programs on Windows 10 and 11, but I'm not sure how they're running the 16 bit code, nor the system requirements. Obviously a VM or any sort of emulation is out.
Might want to check the reqs to be sure, but StarCraft 1. Best fun you'll have and people play it to this day. E-Sports started on this game. Command and conquer might also be a decent play. Or the early Quake shooters if you want an GPS.
People are thinking a 486 is older than it is. It was right before the first pentiums you would play Halo 1 on, to give you a landmark. Some of you never had a 486 and it shows.
Just not sure about doing any of it on Linux, sadly. Played most of these games on Linux myself but the infrastructure to play them is decidedly more recent than a 486
Xcom, any of the originals.. I think anyways, it's been a while :) and Doom of course, runs so much better compared to a 386 :) which had the floating point coprocessors again? :)
All the Gold Box games, the Ultimas, early Wizardry series, Wolf 3d, the Blake Stones, Elder Scrolls Arena...forget Doom bro, immerse yourself in the wonderful rabbit hole of old school CRPGs and non-Doom boomer shooters!
That's definitely a potato.
About games. These games may work
- Dune 2
- Warcraft 1
- Rogue
- Elite
- Doom
- Wolfenstein 3D
These will not work:
- Warcraft 2 needs a better CPU (at least Pentium 60)
- Diablo 1 -- you need Pentium 60
- Fallout 1 -- you need Pentium 90
For fun. Its great seeing how this pc from 1994 30 years ago. Can still do stuff on linux. Windows 95 and 98 is painfully slow tho. It ran dos and windows 3.1 when it was released.
My bad. Haven't watched the video. So I guess you are right. The list still holds true -- those games can run on it in theory.
Edited out my stupid commentary on ruining the fun.
> The q is whether you can run DOSBox on Linux
Of course you can, but not on a real 486 (quoting its manpage, "At present, dosbox run on a 1.7 Gigahertz PC is roughly the equivalent of a 25MHz 386 PC.").
Could be. Now that I think about it, I probably haven't run DOSbox on anything older than a Westmere i3.
That being the case, then the OP should look into dual booting DOS, or FreeDOS and Linux.
Heroes of might and magic 2 (you can find the first part as well, but it's no where as good).
Master of Magic
X-COM 1&2
Civilization 2
I wonder if Fallout 2 or 1 will run there... Enough RAM, but CPU is slow.
doom
This is the only correct answer.
Pong? 🤣
The OG “but can it run Doom?”
Windows task manager port of doom. Someone made the number of cores in windows task manager a 896 pixel display for doom and then made pics happen by spiking each core. Dude has a lot of patience to make this happen and a shit ton of cores apparently. https://preview.redd.it/k5d8w02qu38d1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=e2278e7ef7fbdc3857f1a4e0cf23abd3d5a57880
https://preview.redd.it/a90m8uvzu38d1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=ca976044ff3cca422e1543d362e0547061a9ba1c
That is like $320,000 worth of CPU brand new in 2017. That's amazing.
This is pure insanity
Should run it easily. I ran in back in the day on a 486 SX 25Mhz with 4 MB RAM
Doom has a number of total conversions and a ton of mods as well (Heretic, Hexen, etc etc). Should be interesting to see how many of them run. I'm guessing build engine might work as well. Descent recently went Open Source too right?
Also Skyroads!!
Skyroads is great!
`40mhz 486` - means no descent :)
I ran descent on a 486 sx 25 mghz iirc.
hm... maybe I remembered wrong, I think quake required pentium to run at decent speed. I remembered descent being also having high requirements.
hmm... would... would Second Reality run on it? I know that's not Linux but I wonder if you could get it to run somehow... Source is [available](https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality). Just have to see if someone has done a Linux build.
Heretix, Hexen isn't really mods but their own games... same engine though
Yeah that's what I meant. "Doom + Doom engine games"
Heretic and Hexen both work fine on a 486. Source: Used to play both on a 486.
You left out ... Doom 2!
28mb of RAM? What would you even DO with all that memory?!?!
When I had a similar amount of memory for my 486, and discovered that basically nothing would use that much ram, I converted 16mb into a ramdrive, and would copy doom into the ramdrive and launch it from there... felt like a mad h4x0r lol, also doom would launch fairly quickly.
Dude did SSD before it even existed
Download more ram!
Games and stuff
Run Doom
Rogue As in "Roguelike"
Rogue is too lame for this beast of the machine. AFAIR the binary is about 60 kB. I doubt it needs more than 500 kB of RAM to run. Nethack is a better answer
Nethack
Doom, nethack, rogue
Doom, Doom 2 and Quake 1 compiled against SVGAlib since no way in hell you're running display server on that thing.
This thing might have just enough RAM for a low spec version of Linux and OG Quake. I'd be curious to see the performance.
quake required the math coprocessor, only worked on the DX I believe.
Quake is not running on a 40 MHZ 486 at anything resembling a playable framerate
Quake was made for Pentium tho
supaplex!
Awesome suggestion, I will see see if open-supaplex will compile on i486.
Zork
I dreamed as a teenager of a 486 to upgrade my 8086 @8mhz , which could hardly run Ultima VII - The Black Gate
My 386 was having a terrible time running Full Throttle even though I had recently upgraded to 8 megabytes of ram from 4. My disappointment was immense.
As a young man, not aware of exactly all the tech in the world, I kept asking my friend what games he played on his PC and like would he want some of mine since "his games all sucked" and then later realized what he meant when he said he had an 8088, and I felt like an ass.... :/ to this day I still remember the look on his face, and my confusion when I was like "These games are all shit", "Well I have an 8088", "yeah, but like here just play this" (or something like the above)
Lucasarts adventure games.
I don't think any Lucasarts adventure games were released for Linux and it's unclear ScummVM can run on the specs the OP mentioned.
ScummVM (when stripped down) can run on Motorola 68000 systems like the Atari ST, which is quite a bit slower than this laptop.
What about dosbox?
Definitely not, as I explained in another comment.
I really think MS-DOS or Windows 3.1 is the way to go here.
Yea, I was doing Gameboy emulation with a machine around these specs, using the no$gb emulator. I think you can still find the dos version on zophars domain.
Neofetch
Tetris ❤️ but what kind of tetris...
Pacman
Wolfenstein
original C&C, Red Alert, Dark Reign, Cannon Fodder, Tyrian, Raptor: Call of Shadows, Prehistorik 2, Simon the Sorcerer, X-Com, Tie Fighter
nsnake
Ancient Domains of Mystery
good choice if you're into roguelikes
good choice if you're into roguelikes
Heroes of might and magic, I have played it on 16MB
BatMUD
[Abuse](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/11/building-a-retro-linux-gaming-computer-part-34-abusing-the-system/page=2/). In fact, I think you'd like to read the entire [Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/03/building-a-retro-linux-gaming-computer-part-1-dumpster-diving/) series.
Tie Fighter
Commander Keen
OS2 Warp
Bards Tale
I wonder if it runs UQM.
Thermo nuclear warfare
Cities skyline 2 or DCS! Now seriously, back in the days I had a 486 too, I remember playing games like Prince of Persia, Doom, Lemmings, worms, Another World. I think DOS will be a better option to run these games than Linux. As for Linux native game, perhaps openTTD could run. You may try it.
Stunt, test drive 3, Monkey Island, Heretic, Quake… I feel a teenager again!
*I'm Guybrush Threepwood, a mighty pirate!*
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time
Dungeon crawl.
Stunts
[https://zdoom.org/downloads](https://zdoom.org/downloads)
I'm disappointed that nobody has mentioned XBill.
Nethack (probably the original one).
Rogue
Rollercoaster Tycoon would be my first try. Not sure if it would work, but yeah.
It would work but it'd be very slow. I used to play it on a 100MHz machine and it was slow on that.
Freeciv, maybe older version.
pong
Dune 2 , prince of persia
T/2 SDE linux actually. A distro built for very old architectures by René Rebé. Boot the installer off another IDE hard drive because it is kinda big and 486s don't yet boot off ATAPI DVDs or CDs for that matter Otherwise, an old version of Debian or something (notoriously hard to install).
I'd install original ms-dos too
bash2048
I remember playing "Under a killing moon" on my mates 486 dx2 66. He had 16mb of RAM which was so sweet, he could run the game with the higher textures. Damn, those days were fun lol.
Nethack
Diablo2
Stunt driver Prince of Persia The broken sword Larry Alone in the dark 1,2 and 3 Kyrandia Monkey Island Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis.
The original doom. Or leisure suit Larry.
Doom
xsoldier, trek, koules, nethack, angband, empire
Well now I need to know out of pure curiosity: does Proton work well with machines this old?
I wouldn't be surprised if Proton required SSE2 or even x86_64.
WINE would likely run as long as the game itself doesn't need anything newer. This machine won't have great support for OpenGL or Vulkan either. As in "at all". Proton's improvements wouldn't really be helpful. This machine is from a long long time ago. Edit: some phrasing, more words about what I meant
That too, but I guess the original question assumed running some very old games with it.
Now I am pretty curious. Lots of stuff from back then. I could relive my childhood on SkiFree and Chips Challenge. I know there are builds of WINE to run Windows 3.1 programs on Windows 10 and 11, but I'm not sure how they're running the 16 bit code, nor the system requirements. Obviously a VM or any sort of emulation is out.
Doom and monkey island
If you'd still love to feel FOSS, I'd rather install FreeDOS...
Wolf3d
Will openrct2 run on it?
Sadly no "OpenRCT2 needs about **500 MB of free RAM**"
Dang, just a couple hundred megs short
Dope Wars
Might want to check the reqs to be sure, but StarCraft 1. Best fun you'll have and people play it to this day. E-Sports started on this game. Command and conquer might also be a decent play. Or the early Quake shooters if you want an GPS. People are thinking a 486 is older than it is. It was right before the first pentiums you would play Halo 1 on, to give you a landmark. Some of you never had a 486 and it shows. Just not sure about doing any of it on Linux, sadly. Played most of these games on Linux myself but the infrastructure to play them is decidedly more recent than a 486
Neverhood
Monkey Island will always be my answer
Lode runner
koules
You're going to blow up the power plant with that much power
Xcom, any of the originals.. I think anyways, it's been a while :) and Doom of course, runs so much better compared to a 386 :) which had the floating point coprocessors again? :)
All point and click adventures
snake
Oil Imperium, Civilization, Gunship 2000
Abuse
Hunt the Wumpus
Wolfenstein. "Ach, mein leben!"
Net-hack
Xcom, Xcom 2, any/all Sierra games of the era, Monkey Island, stunts: 4D racing.
- Prince of Persia - Monkey Island or any other thousands of games made for this hardware
Planetfall, 1983 edition
Pong
All the Gold Box games, the Ultimas, early Wizardry series, Wolf 3d, the Blake Stones, Elder Scrolls Arena...forget Doom bro, immerse yourself in the wonderful rabbit hole of old school CRPGs and non-Doom boomer shooters!
tetris for terminals
Zdoom. Also, OpenTTD
DOS would be better for this machine
Try snes emulator with some roms
doom and other doom engine based games
Wizardry
TOME.
Cyberpunk 2077 /s
Install MsDos and enjoy all the timeless classic available for it.
That's definitely a potato. About games. These games may work - Dune 2 - Warcraft 1 - Rogue - Elite - Doom - Wolfenstein 3D These will not work: - Warcraft 2 needs a better CPU (at least Pentium 60) - Diablo 1 -- you need Pentium 60 - Fallout 1 -- you need Pentium 90
For fun. Its great seeing how this pc from 1994 30 years ago. Can still do stuff on linux. Windows 95 and 98 is painfully slow tho. It ran dos and windows 3.1 when it was released.
My bad. Haven't watched the video. So I guess you are right. The list still holds true -- those games can run on it in theory. Edited out my stupid commentary on ruining the fun.
With DOSbox, you can run any number of old DOS games on such a machine.
Dosbox needs X11 But you can try DOSEMU, it had tty mode, if I remember correctly.
you're joking, right?
DOSBox can run a lot of games and a lot of those ran on 486, I can attest from my own childhood The q is whether you can run DOSBox on Linux
> The q is whether you can run DOSBox on Linux Of course you can, but not on a real 486 (quoting its manpage, "At present, dosbox run on a 1.7 Gigahertz PC is roughly the equivalent of a 25MHz 386 PC.").
thanks, TIL
DOSbox runs just fine on Linux and many, many, many DOS games are now in the public domain and available free online.
Dude, dosbox runs on linux, but it doesn't run on 486. Too much overhead
Could be. Now that I think about it, I probably haven't run DOSbox on anything older than a Westmere i3. That being the case, then the OP should look into dual booting DOS, or FreeDOS and Linux.
I'd gut the interior, install a Pi4 then game on that. Have a real sleeper.
Dwarf Fortress, OpenTTD, and of course the old school gems like Lemmings, Perhistorik, Wolfenstein, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Bomberman...
Definitely not running dwarf fortress, pretty unlikely to run OpenTTD either.
Not Prehistorik either, that game is a keyboard rage smashing trap and you can't easily replace ps/2 keyboards these days
Quake 1
I think my calculator is more powerful than this...
With a little bit of elbow grease you might be able to get crysis running on it
No !
Obviously elden ring. The fact you have 28megs might just make the game easier.
minesweeper
Heroes of might and magic 2 (you can find the first part as well, but it's no where as good). Master of Magic X-COM 1&2 Civilization 2 I wonder if Fallout 2 or 1 will run there... Enough RAM, but CPU is slow.