Anyone For Dosbox?

[borgqueenx]

Main issue is with the C dynarec in dosbox is that it is not a full dynarec, it only recompiles certain operations, whereas if you had a full dynarec you would be recompiling more operations. At least thats how ive come to understand it.

Gp2x : 800-1000 cycles with dynarec
Pandora: 4000-5000 cycles with dynarec

So the hardware is definitely providing a good amount performance over the Gp2X.
The MIPS backend may be more efficient in recompiling x86 code than ARM is. Although I dont claim to know all the details, someone like exophase/M-HT can probably give some insight into why the difference in performance is there.

How many cycles are typical on the PSP?

if i knew a way to find out, i would.
If you can make a .bat or .exe file that shows it, i can run it.

The Dosbox version i have, uses keymaps, so i cant really use the keyboard. keymaps are great to play keen on the psp.
I play pinball dreams, ants, bmenace and keen on the psp

would it be any help to make a video? no problem...!

 

[Pickle]

How many cycles are typical on the PSP?

if i knew a way to find out, i would.

Its set in your dosbox.conf. But if its set to max,auto/some non number than the only way to figure out the number of cycles is to put in a hard coded number and increase it until the performance gets worse.

 

[borgqueenx]

How many cycles are typical on the PSP?

if i knew a way to find out, i would.

Its set in your dosbox.conf. But if its set to max,auto/some non number than the only way to figure out the number of cycles is to put in a hard coded number and increase it until the performance gets worse.

i'l check it out.

here you go:
core=dynamic.
cycles=sync
cycleup=2500
cycledown=400
autocycle=true
mincycles=600
maxcycles=3000

 

[Pickle]

How many cycles are typical on the PSP?

if i knew a way to find out, i would.

Its set in your dosbox.conf. But if its set to max,auto/some non number than the only way to figure out the number of cycles is to put in a hard coded number and increase it until the performance gets worse.

i'l check it out.

here you go:
core=dynamic.
cycles=sync
cycleup=2500
cycledown=400
autocycle=true
mincycles=600
maxcycles=3000

Ok ive never seen the option sync or autocycle, mincycles, or maxcycles. So these must specific to psp, but you can see maxcycles=3000. If thats really the max then pandora is outperforming the psp.

 

[borgqueenx]

How many cycles are typical on the PSP?

if i knew a way to find out, i would.

Its set in your dosbox.conf. But if its set to max,auto/some non number than the only way to figure out the number of cycles is to put in a hard coded number and increase it until the performance gets worse.

i'l check it out.

here you go:
core=dynamic.
cycles=sync
cycleup=2500
cycledown=400
autocycle=true
mincycles=600
maxcycles=3000

Ok ive never seen the option sync or autocycle, mincycles, or maxcycles. So these must specific to psp, but you can see maxcycles=3000. If thats really the max then pandora is outperforming the psp.

well, not compared with the videos you uploaded. but those mostly seem to be out of sync only(with sound)
il upload a stopid movie.
On the end of the video i'm holding the iphone with my chin, so i can control the game with my hands. bad result.
Plus that the iphone camera aint that great. on the psp i play very smooth, with no lag in sound or music.
Here's the video, dont laugh at the last 2 secs where i drop my phone .
if you want, i can send you the config file, so you can do some experimenting on the pandora...

*converting into mp4 now --- 60%*

 

[fusion_power]

Impressive Videos. Me as a old "Keen 4" Veteran likes the Performance. Dark Forces also looks very smoooooth. A FPS and Clocking-Display would be useful to see the true performance of the Games.
I can play Keen4 onto the GP2X F100 with even 200-266MHz but it's not always Full-Speed, the Sound is laging and the complicated Dosbox Configuration is a pain in the ass. (I only could activate "PC-Speaker" Sound for example). The the crappy D-Stick of the F100 is also a very limiting factor but this has of course nothing to do with Dosbox. ^_^
I hope, the Pandora-Dosbox will be more easy to use. Well, I'm sure it will be alot more easy just because of the much better D-Pad of the new Handheld. And if I can play "Keen 4" or "4D Sports-Driving" (THIS would be a interesting Video for me ) onto Standard-Pandora-Clocking or even less, I would be very happy.

 

[borgqueenx]

Impressive Videos. Me as a old "Keen 4" Veteran likes the Performance. Dark Forces also looks very smoooooth. A FPS and Clocking-Display would be useful to see the true performance of the Games.
I can play Keen4 onto the GP2X F100 with even 200-266MHz but it's not always Full-Speed, the Sound is laging and the complicated Dosbox Configuration is a pain in the ass. (I only could activate "PC-Speaker" Sound for example). The the crappy D-Stick of the F100 is also a very limiting factor but this has of course nothing to do with Dosbox. ^_^
I hope, the Pandora-Dosbox will be more easy to use. Well, I'm sure it will be alot more easy just because of the much better D-Pad of the new Handheld. And if I can play "Keen 4" or "4D Sports-Driving" (THIS would be a interesting Video for me ) onto Standard-Pandora-Clocking or even less, I would be very happy.

commander keen, bmenace and red alert are the games where i want dosbox for

EDIT: converting done, uploading now. (20%).

EDIT2: doene. waiting for youtube to finish.

EDIT3: here you go pickle, hopefully its a little bit useful. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPTA5X7vG7s

if you need something better just tell me. il take another shot.

 

[WizardStan]

I'm not seeing what you mean. Both videos look butter smooth to me. Keen 4 seemed to run perfectly smooth on the Pandora (albeit the sound timing was off, but that could be buffer problems), and you can't make it more smooth than perfect.
Try something that requires a little more oomph. Blake Stone should be a good proper comparison.

 

[craigix]

Can't you just try dark forces on the psp?

 

[borgqueenx]

Can't you just try dark forces on the psp?

alrighty.
edit: argh i need to keymap the installation file .

edit2: no use. the emulator has builded in that no free space is available. (but keen is able to save the game:S)
can someone send me a version that i can copy and paste?

 

[Joshwaan2k]

Thanks for the videos Pickle's love you work

I know your a busy man, but have you got time to test out Black thorne?

One of my fav PC/SNES games, the PC was better though

If it's not full speed on Dosbox there's always the snes version

 

[Optimus]

Dark Forces is impressive!
Some time ago I heard that the Pandora would max 3000 cycles and it sounded disappointing. But Dark Forces running so smooth isn't only 3000 cycles for sure!
Did Dark Forces ran so smooth in PSP dosbox? I don't think so. The last time my brother was playing light requirement games like eye of the beholder in his PSP and this was jut ok in speed.

 

[sold]

I decided to try a few games at 5000 cycles and using different cores in dosbox on an eeepc 701 to compare to Pandora. I got some weird results. It seems that the Pandora runs things a lot better at the estimated 5000 cycles than an eeepc does. All games were tested on the same settings using latest dosbox and the d-fend reloaded frontend (which is nice, and apparently open source).

The games I tried:
Blake Stone (for a direct comparison to the Pandora)
Warcraft 2
Carmageddon demo.
Black Thorne
Blood

Results at 5000 cycles, CPU (core, cpu type) on auto setting. Memory 16MB, Frameskip 0:

Blake Stone (v3.00): Sound was jumpy. Menus screen wasn't displaying correctly. This games performance set the scene for me as it ran surprisingly poorly in comparison to Pickles video. I was getting pretty nasty graphics glitches.

Warcraft 2: Loaded and played intro smoothly, but started suffering from decreased speed when loading main menu screen, mission screen and game. It wasn't full speed in game, but it was still actually kind of playable, although there was stuttering sound and graphics glitches on the map area on the sidebar.

Carmageddon (demo): Didn't expect this to work at all. But it did. Sorta. I didn't configure the sound, so there wasn't any. Menus were glitchy. It got into the game, and everything was moving, albeit slowly. Very slowly. After taking like 5 minutes to load into the race. At the demos intro screen it said that one of the benefits of the full version was an improved graphics engine at 30% faster frame rate. That might help. Then again, maybe not.

Black Thorne: Intro sequence was glitchy and the music was jumpy. A little slow, but it looks like it may work on the Pandora.

Blood (demo): I ran it without sound which may be why it was faster than expected. I was expecting it to be worse, but it was still slow. Funny thing is, I remember trying blood on dosbox for xbox1 and it was waaaaay slower than this. Turned detail down and got a slight increase in speed. And no apparent graphics glitches.

Hope these results help. By the looks of things, the Pandora at the same cycles as the eee 701 seems to be doing a better job. Maybe some of these games will work better than expected on actual Pandora hardware.

 

[Enverex]

What I would have done is increased the cycles until you got roughly the same performance in Blake Stone as pickle did, that way you'd have a more accurate reading of the cycles that the Pandora is able to achieve.

 

[sold]

Yeah, maybe I'll try that later on as well if I can find some spare time. It shouldn't take long. But anyway, the point of the comparison was to see if the 5000 cycles that has been the most recent estimate of maximum dosbox performance is accurate, and how it compares to pc dosbox at the same set number of cycles.

It seems like the Pandora is either running at a higher number of cycles as max, or the pc version is crapping itself because of other overheads. I'm hoping it comes down to the former rather than the latter.

 

[Enverex]

I was trying to test this out but whenever I try any DOS games that use the mouse, the cursor gets stuck in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. I can move it back into the screen, but the moment I stop moving it, it immediately teleports back to the bottom right hand corner. Oddly enough this also happens with any MAME games that use the mouse (i.e. Time Crisis which uses it as the lightgun). Any ideas why? It's stopping me from being able to test and I can't see what may be causing it. Works fine in Linux games and normal use though.

I don't have any other input devices than my mouse and keyboard connected.

 

[Harakiri23]

I wouldnt worry to much about the speed, this looks already great without many devs looking into optimizing it.

Besides, there is always a chance for the x86 to arm patcher for specific games.

 

[Enverex]

Well the speed isn't great at the moment and struggles on anything that isn't basic, and that's even while overclocked, although I'm not sure what you've been watching and if you know something we don't...