Ive put Linux on a couple of older computers (pentium I's), with the hopes of using them for network gaming. (I don't have the windows disk required to add network support to the computers, and windows (especially 95) comes with enough problems of it's own. So I decided just to switch them over and have networking work without all the hassle)

The problem is I can't get any games to run at a playable speed.
I tried doom using a linux engine (legacy and xdoom), everything worked,
but the speed of the game mad it just unplayable. (about 1fps, maybe less)

I installed starcraft with cedega, same thing. Everything works fine, but again
somewhere around an unplayable 1 fps.

These games worked wonderfully under windows on this machine
its a Pentium I 133, 32mb ram, 300mb swap, 6x cdrom
running slackware 10.1, cedega 4.3.1

sorry, I don't know anything about the video, and I'm fairly inexperienced,
so given the right commands I could post the output.

I boot xfce before I start cedega. . . does this eat up enough system resources to cause a problem or not? if so, how would I go about changing the config file for x to start up with just an xterm?

So, and ideas as to how to speed up the gaming on this old machine

starcraft's system requirements for windows were pretty modest
pentium I 90mhz
4x cdrom drive (I think you can play without the cinematics with a 2x)
8mb ram

and I know doom is even easier to run, requiring only a 486

Should I try an older distrobution, would that speed things up at all? or
do I need new video drivers or something. . . if so, where would I find them, how would I install them? Any ideas at all.

Even suggestions of fun network games that would work on the hardware
would be greatly appreciated.

With 32MB of RAM you're pushing it a bit!

When you first log into XFCE4, open a terminal and run 'top' to see how much RAM is being used. Even X.org is going to take up a lot of RAM. I'm on a windows box right now - but booting DammSmallLinux through QEMU showed that at bootup running a small X server (X Vesa) and Fluxbox (a light window manager) that 40MB of RAM was being used.

You may be able to get things working a little better if you run XVesa or some other light X server - maybe you should download DammSmallLinux and try it on one of your machines as I'm not sure how easy it is to run XVesa on Slack.

Daniel

this leads me to wonder how windows 95 managed to run well (for windows 95) on 4 or 8mb of ram. Why isn't there an x server capable of that, is 40mb used as good as it gets?
I stumbled upon some extra ram chips so I may put another 128mb in the old box, and see if starcraft will run then, but the whole situation still befuddles me.
Thanks tho,

Starcraft on my p166 with 64 megs of ram was horrid for me as soon as about 2 more units were made And on win95, never tried it with wine.