Comparisons between a bad and a good 286 build

On the left side is my Amstrad ALT 286 laptop, with an 286 at 16mhz, 2MB Ram, but the gfx card suffers, it's an 8bit ISA and can fill the full 320*200*8bpp VGA at most 20fps.

On the right side is a desktop build with a Harris 286 CPU at 20mhz, 4MB Ram and the best ISA 16bit gfx card, a Tseng Labs. It fills the full 320*200*8bpp VGA at least 4 times faster, over 80fps (strangely, on my 386 it hits 80fps, but in this 286 motherboard 96fps).

The difference shows especially in games like Wolfenstein 3D and especially Lotus 3. I am also trying partially two demos (I skip parts on Crystal Dreams, play Legend without a music (but overlay above)). Sorry for the blurry flickery video on the right (the benchmark results for the right are Memset to Vram: 97, Memset to Ram: 196, Memcpy from Ram to Vram: 72, Memcpy from Vram to Ram: 46, Memcpy from Ram to Ram: 97, Loop 16bit write to Vram/Ram: 24.2, 2D XOR loop: 9.7)

It shows how a 286 (also a 386) can shine with some good ISA card. These things make a difference between a crappy DOS PC and a decent one that can still play some really cool games! Lotus 3 is unplayable on the Alt, Wolfenstein is playable with smaller screen. Demos are doing a bit better with both as their code kicks ass as usually, although there are some minor slowdowns on the Alt compared.

0:00 Start
0:07 My Vram/Ram bench test code
1:22 Norton SI comparison
2:16 Wolfenstein 3D
6:55 Lotus 3
10:42 Crystal Dreams demo
14:26 Legend demo