Game:

Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (1997)

Duration: 0:00

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7

REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 8:5/16:9 ASPECT RATIO.

Feelin’ tight for some Jedi Knight! This time we see how Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (Lucasarts, 1997) performs on a Pentium 90 MHz processor and high-end 1994 PCI video card (Mach64GX) in software mode. Resolution is 320x200 (in VGA ModeX) and the window size acts as our only graphical setting, which is kept at a sensible enough size to balance visibility with acceptable performance.

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). I find that with these Mach64 drivers I don’t have to enable the backbuffer-in-system-memory checkbox to get acceptable transparency performance. In fact, the game complains when you attempt to do it! What’s weird is that enabling the backbuffer with the Mach64 drivers on the Jedi Knight CD causes crashes to desktop when going between in-game and the GUI (menus). What’s up with that?

With the way Outlaws ran on this system you would have expected Jedi Knight to crawl like crazy but it doesn’t run TOO god-awfully on this poor CPU. The Pentium 90 was the minimum specified processor on the Jedi Knight box so it will obviously run, although the way it runs depends on your tolerance for smaller screen sizes. Really large polygon-dense scenes like the ground level view of the Palace tower in mission 6 can be extremely ROUGH and drop the frame-rate down to slideshow (and audio stutter!) territory but that’s thankfully a quite rare phenomenon throughout the whole game.

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

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 — Double-Cross on Nar Shaddaa
2:08 — The Lost Disk
3:54 — Screen size performance testing
4:57 — The Lost Disk (cont.)
5:39 — The Return Home to Sulon
7:13 — The Jedi's Lightsaber
11:00 — Baron's Hed, The Fallen City
13:31 — Into the Dark Palace

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