DosBox

[Unknown,Unknown]

Excuse me if this has already been done.

Let’s start a thread for people to post their DosBox settings. Specifically the CPU cycles setting. It seems to me to be the hardest one to get right. So far I’ve only tinkered with SQ6, and I found 4000 cycles to be the optimum setting. Any other ideas or settings will help. Let’s share the info.

[Unknown,Unknown]

The optimal CPU cycles is going to be dependent on the speed of host system. What is ideal for one computer may be way too fast for another system. Additionally, some games are more demanding than others. About the only thing that you can do is to experiment to find the right settings for your computer and the game that you are trying to run. CPU cycles and frame skip can be adjusted on the fly by pressing Ctl+F12 to increase and Ctl+F11 to decrease cycles. Likewise, frame skip can be adjusted with Ctl+F8 and Ctl+F7.

The best thing to do is to find a good median point for YOUR computer and set that in your dosbox.conf file. From this starting place you can adjust it for the game that you are trying to play. Once you have found the ideal settings for a specific game, you can make a DOSBox shortcut, pointing to another config file just for that game.

[Unknown,Unknown]

Wait, I’m confused. Why are Dosbox cycles dependant on the host computer? You are telling me that having Dosbox set to 5000 cycles on a 1.5 Ghz is significantly different than DosBox set to 5000 cycles on a 3 Gig machine if both machines are powerful enough to handle it? I could understand if you are saying that they would be different if one machine was powerful enough to handle the 5000 cycles and the other one was not.

-Jim

[Unknown,Unknown]

5000 cycles at 1ghz = 50000000
5000 cycles at 2ghz = 100000000

It works like the equation above. If you have a faster processor, the cycles are much shorter than a slower processer.

Otherwise there would be no point in changing the cycles.

[Unknown,Unknown]

The CPU cycles will be what ever you have them set at, regardless of the host machine, but the upper limit of DOSBox CPU cycles that you can use before you start having troubles, such as stuttering sound, etc. will vary according to the host machine that it is being run on. An older, slower box will choke on fewer cycles than a newer, faster machine. Other factors can also influence this. I dual boot regular 32 bit Windows XP and the beta of 64 bit Windows XP. Running one game I have in DOSBox in 32 bit Windows uses about 45% of my real CPU’s cycles, while running the same game with the exact same settings for DOSBox in 64 bit Windows uses 15%. If your computer can’t handle the cycles that a game might demand, then you will need to try other things, such as adding some frame skips.

[Unknown,Unknown]

So aren’t you kind of flip-flopping on what you said before? If the cycles in DOSBox are independent and assuming everyone out there has a machine fast enough to handle these games (most of us do), shouldn’t we be able to find the ideal cycles that these games should be run with?

-Jim

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