<story><title>Don&apos;t waste money on a math coprocessor they said</title><url>https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/11/12/dont-waste-money-on-a-math-coprocessor-they-said/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>glimshe</author><text>I got a math coprocessor relatively early for my 386SX20 - I wanted to use 3D Studio, the killer app for math processors back in the day! The vast majority of games simply used integer math and didn&amp;#x27;t require, or could take an advantage from a coprocessor, but I have no idea what was going on in the article. In the early 90s, the only games I can remember that could optionally leverage a coprocessor were the Falcon 3.0 family of simulators.</text></item><item><author>rob74</author><text>I was actually hoping that by the end of the blog post, the mystery of why the game didn&amp;#x27;t run would be cleared up, but sadly it wasn&amp;#x27;t. Looks like it had trouble accessing the HDD - but why should HDD access for a DOS game running under OS&amp;#x2F;2 require a math coprocessor?!&lt;p&gt;I have my own story of living happily without a math coprocessor for quite some time: from 1992 to 1997, I had an IBM PS&amp;#x2F;1000 with a &amp;quot;Blue Lightning&amp;quot; CPU which can be best described as a &amp;quot;486SX3&amp;quot; (25 MHz bus clock, 75MHz internal). Then I tried to run the Quake demo and found out that &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; 3D games need an FPU :(</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rwmj</author><text>For me the killer app was POVRAY.  Ran so much faster with a 387 (I seem to recall something like 100x faster but it was a long long time ago).</text></comment>
<story><title>Don&apos;t waste money on a math coprocessor they said</title><url>https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/11/12/dont-waste-money-on-a-math-coprocessor-they-said/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>glimshe</author><text>I got a math coprocessor relatively early for my 386SX20 - I wanted to use 3D Studio, the killer app for math processors back in the day! The vast majority of games simply used integer math and didn&amp;#x27;t require, or could take an advantage from a coprocessor, but I have no idea what was going on in the article. In the early 90s, the only games I can remember that could optionally leverage a coprocessor were the Falcon 3.0 family of simulators.</text></item><item><author>rob74</author><text>I was actually hoping that by the end of the blog post, the mystery of why the game didn&amp;#x27;t run would be cleared up, but sadly it wasn&amp;#x27;t. Looks like it had trouble accessing the HDD - but why should HDD access for a DOS game running under OS&amp;#x2F;2 require a math coprocessor?!&lt;p&gt;I have my own story of living happily without a math coprocessor for quite some time: from 1992 to 1997, I had an IBM PS&amp;#x2F;1000 with a &amp;quot;Blue Lightning&amp;quot; CPU which can be best described as a &amp;quot;486SX3&amp;quot; (25 MHz bus clock, 75MHz internal). Then I tried to run the Quake demo and found out that &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; 3D games need an FPU :(</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Loic</author><text>20+ floppy disks to get 3D Studio and of course you always had a bad one and not the first.</text></comment>