Castlevania MS-DOS Tandy Performance Demonstration

Channel:
United States Nerdly Pleasures
Subscribers:
715
Published on ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l2Oc3_HgQ0


Game:
Castlevania (1986)
Duration: 7:40
373 views
16

Here is a capture of the MS-DOS port of Castlevania running on my Tandy 1000 TL using its built-in graphics and sound capabilities. The Tandy is running an Intel 286 CPU at 8MHz and has 768KiB of RAM (of which 128KiB is given over to the video). I wanted to show what the performance was like on this machine using almost the fastest Tandy system available at the time. Only the Tandy 1000 TL/3 is faster at 10MHz (still a 286) and supports the IBM PCjr/Tandy Graphics modes and probably was not available for development as this game was released early in 1990.

You can plug in accelerators into the TL's 286 socket which will give this system in the neighborhood of midrange 386 performance, but those come with their own drawbacks and were not available for years after the release of the Tandy 1000 series.

Now you might ask that with a system with a 16-bit CPU that runs over 4x the speed of the NES's CPU and has many times the amount of memory available to the game, why does Castlevania run so poorly on the Tandy? The Tandy Graphics Adapter has no hardware that allows for hardware scrolling and no sprite capabilities and has to brute force those functions via nearly full-screen redrawing of the frame when movement is happening. The NES can handle smooth per-pixel scrolling and multiple sprites in hardware.

Dialing down to CGA graphics may improve performance, but if you have a Tandy, what's the point? EGA graphics do not suffer from screen tearing, unlike Tandy graphics, but the scrolling is not smooth and the game is not notably that much faster. You can install an EGA or a VGA card in almost all Tandy 1000s, but it was not a popular option at the time. I load a few programs beforehand that are intended to boost performance, but I don't believe they had much effect on this game.

For some reason an echo got into this video and a few previous videos, I think I have found the problem and it should not happen again.



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Other Statistics

Castlevania Statistics For Nerdly Pleasures

At present, Nerdly Pleasures has 994 views spread across 4 videos for Castlevania, and less than an hour worth of Castlevania videos were uploaded to his channel. This makes up less than 0.83% of the total overall content on Nerdly Pleasures's YouTube channel.