Broken CPU Launched the Pentium Branding

After the 486, Intel went another direction and branded their 5th generation of microprocessor the Pentium! The first two models were clocked at 60 MHz and 66 MHz. Their significance in CPU history is without a doubt, but what about using such a CPU for Retro PC Gaming?

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[krz]

Feels like this is more of a collector's item nowadays than a serious candidate for a retro build

[dennisp.]

I remember this clearly. I had a friend who had spent a great deal of money on the shiniest new Pentium he could afford. It turned out his had the FDIV bug, since he was an engineering student, Intel sent him a brand new correct version and told him to keep the old one. He was able to sell the one with the bug and make a fair bit of his money back.

[Baoran]

If I remember correctly in Magic carpet you fly around and kill monsters and other wizards and collect mana to your own castle. Goal is basically to collect all the mana that drops. You also expanded your castle which meant that the castle would have guards that tried to protect it against any other wizards that would attack it. There were many different spells but you could only have 2 equipped at the same time.

[LordTuskis]

To elaborate on Magic Carpet a bit further than previous comments, here's the basic premise for the game from the first level.

You start facing a red vase. Flying into said vases picks up spells, in this case your first one called Posess. You use this spell to convert mana to your side as well as converting villages. If you fly a bit to the left from the start you'll come across your first village represented by a bunch of tents with people crowding around them. If you fire your Posess spell into these tents, it converts them to your side which is represented by a white flag appearing over them, which also nets you some mana. Converted villages spawn more villagers who eventually build more buildings which then spawn an army in the form of archers, which fight for you attacking monsters and enemy wizards.

If you fly around the first village a bit, you'll come across your next spell called Create Castle. If you fire this spell somewhere in the enviroment, it'll spawn a white tower with a hot air balloon over it. This balloon flies around the map by itself collecting all the mana you've converted and then brings it back to the tower, adding to the mana bar below the castle icon in the HUD. Your minimap's dotted and blinking line always points you towards your castle. If I remember right you can also upgrade your castle in later levels.

Your overall objective is to collect a certain amount of mana to win the level, how much you need is represented by the flashing white line on the castle icon's mana bar on the HUD. You find mana lying around freely as colored orbs in the stage, killing monsters and converting villages. All mana start at a golden color, which means it's neutral. Your color is white and the enemy wizards' is their color, for example blue. As stated, you fire the Posession spell into the mana to convert it and then the balloon comes around to pick it up to take it back to the castle.

If you fly around some more you'll eventually come across your first offensive spell, Fireball, which you use to kill enemies like the bats flying around. Enemies are represented as black dots on the minimap. You'll also come across some other neutral buildings like a fort, which if converted will spawn archers that fight for you like villages.

You can only have two spells equipped at a time, which map to mouse 1 and 2. Pressing enter will open your spell list which will allow you to map a spell to a mouse button by clicking it with that button.

If you want more info, GOG has the game manual in the extra downloads page.

I'll add, that the game is quite speed sensitive and playing it with a Pentium above, say, 166mhz will make it run too fast. You can try to toggle hires mode by pressing R to slow it down. Some of the F keys also control certain graphical effects which should help to speed the game up with slow CPUs.


Have fun, and thanks for the videos.

[rootaccessrequired]

My first Pentium was a 75 but I had it for years before upgrading because there was nothing I throw at it that it couldn't run. Great times! Somehow these days nothing seems nearly as exciting as it was back in the mid to late 90s.

[kevinhansford]

I remember when the p60 first came out and it being so ridiculously expensive compared to a high end 486 that it just wasn't worth it

[juliantolley]

I was an engineer developing array radar in the UK . Base software was written on a pdp11 and then compiled for the Pentium. When I left to join the city of London as an investment analyst the system was just not working on a Pentium but was when using the pdp11. Months later was sent the message that the fault was in the processor and not the software. I was a victim of the floating point error

[PCUSER]

I remember the first Pentium. I was jealous for my friend got a Pentium 133 I'm still stuck with a 486 LoL. Back in 90s it was very expensive upgrade. Pentium played Descent so smoothly, I'll never forget.

[DarkLordValmar]

Keep up the great work Phil, it's almost Patreon time, definitely well deserved!

[phanominon]

You should benchmark it with a PCI video card. Most boards with both VLB and PCI have a gimped VLB bus. Sweet board though. That is a keeper for sure.

[wertywerrtyson]

It’s interesting being the first Pentium. Back in the day I never knew anyone with this CPU though. Everyone had a 133, 166 or 200mhz Pentium. In school we still used 486s though. It wasn’t until a was an adult I even knew that there were Pentiums below 133mhz. I remember back then the 200mhz MMX pentium was my dream machine. I didn’t know what MMX was but I didn’t care it sounded awesome and it was used in the marketing a lot.

[pankoza]

Def wasn't expecting one of these nice OPTi VLB Pentium Chipset Boards here, very nice

[dangingerich]

For those who don't know, the reason why the 1MB cache configuration was slower in some things is that larger caches require longer times to look things up. Plus, some programs aren't large enough to keep that much in the cache, so they don't benefit from more cache. Sometimes, there isn't enough data being cached to make up for the longer latencies of the larger cache. So, it's a balancing act.

[ThBeowulf]

It's been a hot minute since I played Magic Carpet but yeah, the swret spot for that game was a 486DX/2 66Mhz.

Dusting off some cobwebs, you're supposed to fly around, collect mana orbs and destroy every hostile thing trying to knock you out of the sky. There's not much hand-holding... just fly around and explore.

One of the whacky gimmicks in that game were all the Graphics Modes:
* Normal
* Red/Blue 3D (glasses in the box)
* MagicEye (that distorted shopping mall 3D format where you had to cross your eyes and squint to maybe see a 3D boat in some colorful digital noise.) The game rendered that noise in real time, it was pretty wild if you could get your brain to lock onto the 3D image.

Nice video and I love that vswitchzero made such an awesome donation!

[HighwayHunkie]

Pentium 60 I remember back then when i had to decide between a used Pentium 60 system and my second 486, it was a DX4-100 intel with a whopping 32MB of RAM and S3 Trio VGA. I was happy i had chosen the 486 because it ran nicely stable at 120mhz with a 40mhz bus and it kicked P60-ass. It was 1996 and back then even new Pentiums (120, 133, etc) were sold with only 8MB of RAM. What a shame. But my RAM constellation was a bit weird. It was a Soyo Board, with PCI and 4 PS2 RAM slots, 2 of them were populated with 8MB each and then i had a SIMM-Shuttle filled with 4x4MB 30pin SIMM.. Well it did work! Glorious times back then! Cheers Phil and a nice weekend!
(i would love to send you a modded SL2Z4 Intel MMX Processor so you can make an interesting Video about it if only i knew your shipping

[FrustratedApe]

I studied computing around 1995-7 and I was aware of them as we had a technical manual (I had come from the world of Motorola 68k/PPC so had basic knowledge) and I remember the crossover from 486 to Pentium's well. The Pentium 60/66 was pretty rare, most people I knew bought either a 486DX4/100 or a Pentium 75 or newer. I was given a Compaq Deskpro XE 560 in the early 2000's, it had a Pentium 60 and 8Mb RAM. I upgraded it to 136Mb of RAM but IDE was a pain - I eventually got a 2.1Gb drive working with it. It had Compaq QVision 1280 graphics on a proprietary local bus and only 4x ISA slots! My one also didn't have a 256k cache module. Apparently the IDE bus was also hobbled... I ran Win NT 3.1 on it. I donated it onto another collector when I moved out of my parents house.

[Martin-skdf]

I got my P-60 in 1995 at a discount. I learned most of MS-DOS and QEMM etc. on this system. It had 8MB and my brother wanted to play FIFA Int Soccer but it needed all the (ext/exp) memory for the audio commentary to work. Spent a lot of time configuring startup scenarios. Still have it in storage.

[nikmilosevic]

I think I still have a Pentium 90 system in storage which had the FDIV bug, was working at a university IT department when it happened and we were tasked with changing them out. In the end, with the last batch, the supplier didnt want them back. About a year later I built a PC with pone of the buggy Pentiums to play with and ended up keeping it.

[Svein-Frode]

Oh wow! That brings back memories. Thanks for another great video!

I bought myself a Pentium 60 when I was in High School. I was into music production and composition and had it outfitted with the Sound Blaster AWE 32. Mine had the floating point error and I got a great deal on upgrading the system with a Pentium 100 and new motherboard a short while later.

[mpettengill]

My family had a Pentium 60, purchased second-hand, back around ... 1996? It replaced a 386sx so it was a pretty exciting step up at the time. I remember over clocking it from 60 to 66 mhz! It wasn't long before it got replaced by something newer, though it stuck around as a 2nd machine for a long time and I even took it to college my first year.

At the moment I have a Gateway Pentium 60 in my collection but haven't gotten around to actually setting it up for anything - and I may never. As far as useful / fun things to do with retro stuff there are certainly more practical and easy-to-acquire options out there.