Quake: Hardware issues

Will Quake run on a 486?

The short answer is "Yes, but rather slowly."

Reports suggest that a DX4/100 manages roughly 8 frames per second (fps) at 320x200 screen resolution, "not great but playable".

Quake runs MUCH better on Pentium systems. Here are some examples:

P120: 21fps (320x200, #9GXE video card)
P166: 31fps (320x200, Diamond Stealth 64 video card)

The minimum realistic spec for Quake is a P60: this should achieve roughly 11fps at 320x200 screen resolution: noticeably faster than a DX4/100!

Note that these figures are highly dependent on factors such as the video card being used. In other words, Your Mileage May Vary.

What's the best hardware setup for running Quake?

Hardware has moved quite a long way since Quake was launched in 1996. Back then, a Pentium-166 was reckoned as a good platform to run Quake, and as mentioned above this does indeed turn in a respectable frame rate at 320x200 resolution.

The faster the processor, the better the resolution. A 333-MHz Pentium II can give a decent frame rate at 800x600 resolution, and believe me, Quake looks a LOT better at the higher resolution.

A special version of Quake known as "GLQuake" (check out the FTP sites for the latest version) has been released to take advantage of the 3D video cards that are commonplace nowadays: with GLQuake (and a good 3D card) you can get even better screen resolutions than is possible with the original Quake.

Some rules-of-thumb:

Don't buy a Cyrix cpu, they are no good for Quake due to the less optimised floating point maths instructions. This means a Cyrix P166+ gives a lower FPS than a P100 in the same system. Later Cyrix processors are a bit better, but not much. Your best choice is an Intel processor, with AMD second and Cyrix way back in last place.
If you've got more than 16 meg memory already fitted, adding extra memory won't make Quake run any faster. It may stop it swapping to disk but it won't give you any more FPS.
Quake was designed with the Soundblaster 16 sound card in mind. Fitting an AWE32 (or later) card won't improve the sound at all.
A decent 3D video card (e.g. Voodoo2, Voodoo Banshee, Riva TNT, Matrox G200) won't improve the original Quake much (or at all...) but the special "GLQuake" can be used with these cards to good effect.

Sound card problems

No sound in Quake? Or white noise instead of sound effects?

Your first step would be to upgrade to the latest version of Quake, if you haven't already done so. Sound card support in version 1.08 is much better than in version 1.01.

For the record, the sound card support list looks like this:

Soundblaster	All problems fixed in version 1.01
Ultrasound Max, Ultrasound PnP	Some bugs in version 1.01; improved in 1.06
Ultrasound Classic	Some minor bugs in 1.06
Ultrasound Ace	Reports suggest this should work with version 1.08

Tip for Gravis cards: Quake may have trouble initialising the card. If you think this may be the problem, try running another application (e.g. a Gravis utility) to initialise the card before running Quake.

Finally: some PnP sound cards will need special settings in autoexec.bat to set them up to behave in DOS mode. Check your hardware manuals.

I'm getting sound effects but no music. Why?

Firstly, SHAREWARE QUAKE HAS NO BUILT-IN MUSIC!

However, if you put a music CD into the CD-ROM drive before loading Quake, audio tracks from that CD will be played.

If you change CDs while Quake is running, it will not automatically recognise the new CD: use the console command "CD RESET" to get things going

Various other CD-related commands are available: see techinfo.txt for details.

The registered version of Quake has audio tracks on the CD-ROM, but if you prefer you can change that for any music CD as described above.

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