Game:

Saints Row 2 (2008)

Duration: 0:00

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4

REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 8:5/16:10 ASPECT RATIO.
Happy 30th anniversary, Descent!

Merry frickin' Yuletide, people! It's THAT time of the year again so I figured it would make sense to cover something from around that time. Here is the MS-DOS shareware version of Descent (from December 24th 1994, according to this press release https://web.archive.org/web/19961220010604/http://www.interplay.com/press/descshpr.html) which predates the full version of Descent (Parallax Software/Interplay, 1995) by a month or so. It's a technically ambitious texture-mapped 3D shooter with polygonal enemies and lots of 1-bit transparent textures (bitmasks) which I thought would give a Pentium 90 MHz system from '94 some good exercise. This footage shows how this software rendered monstrosity performs on said system at a screen resolution of 320x200 pixels!

Well, how does Descent run on a high-end computer from this time? Fairly well, all things considered. The screen-size (as usual) makes a notable difference when rendering on the CPU but you really don't have to compromise much in this case. With the exception of the fullscreen view, Descent handles the action just fine across the board, with the really ugly slowdown reserved for crowded rooms. Reducing detail settings certainly helps to speed things up but you have to make some radical sacrifices in visual quality to really benefit from the added speed.

There is, funnily enough, a good excuse to not have it run too smoothly, however; it improves the speed of the mouse look. I guess the way the game is polling mouse input is tied directly to the frame-rate somehow. When the game runs smoothly you will find it considerably more difficult to make snappy turns and continuous pans with the camera without really working that mouse arms (or trackball, in my case)! Aiming with a joystick or keyboard keys is of course possible too but I don’t personally condone that in this case.

Still don't have MS-DOS 6.21 installed yet so I continue relying on MS-DOS 7.0 and Windows 95 graphics and sound adapter drivers. Drivers used for the video card: out-of-the-box Windows 95 RTM (OEM) drivers for ATi Graphics Pro Turbo (Mach64). Drivers used for sound card: out-of-the-box Windows 95 RTM (OEM) drivers for Sound Blaster AWE32 (and Sound Blaster 16 too, I guess). The Roland SC-88 is hooked up to the AWE32 joystick/Gameport connector using a MIDI in/out to Gameport cable and acts as a General MIDI playback device.

This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
Gateway 2000 P5-90 case and motherboard (manufactured April 27th 1994)
Intel 430NX chipset
Intel Pentium 90 Mhz processor (S-Spec SX879, heatspreader is marked week 12 1994)
256 KBs of asynchronous L2 cache
ATi Graphics Pro Turbo (Mach64 GX) 4 MB graphics card (P/N 109-25500-10, early revision with silk-screened blank FCC ID white rectangle, sticker with “FCC ID: EXM255” on card, manufactured around April 1994)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 sound card (CT2760, manufactured around Q2 1994)
48 MBs of FPM RAM; 8MBx2 (1993) and 16MBx2 (1997) SIMM, 60ns
Roland Sound Canvas SC-88 synthesizer module (manufactured March 1994)

The capturing was done with VCS (which can be found on the Internet Archive) and OBS Studio using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card plugged into an ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard with an Intel Core i7-2600K using 8 GBs of DDR3 SDRAM and an nVidia GTX 580 video card installed (basically, using my 2011 “vintage” PC). A VGA cable is connected between the source computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable into the line in on the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard from the sound card of the vintage computer. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 640x400 capture to 3200x2000 was done using VirtualDub2.

TIMESTAMP TABLE
0:00 — Level 1
3:15 — Level 2
6:14 — Level 3
9:31 — Level 4
14:12 — Level 5

Parallax Software later became Volition Inc. and made the wonderful games Red Faction (2001) for Playstation 2, The Punisher (2005) for Playstation 2/Xbox as well as the excellent sandbox games Saints Row (2006) for Xbox 360 and Saints Row 2 (2008) for Xbox 360/Playstation 3. We don’t talk about the later Saints Row games…

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