Dosbox And .pnd-File Video ... Posted!

[TitanUranus]

Right now I'm doing some experiments with DOSbox on the PC (in anticipation of recieving my pandora you understand!) and I have a question. Ok, I know there isn't any guarantees, but how accurate can I expect the "if it works at 3000 cycles on the PC it should work fine on Pandora" guide? Is it really the case that my intel I7 2.66ghz running DOSbox limited to 3000 cycles is actually virtually identical to the Pandora running DOSbox at 3000 cycles?

Is 3000 cycles the "generally accepted cycles to run on Pandora"? Can more be squeezed out of it, and if so what's the max? What sort of a PC are we emulating here, is it 10mhz 286/33mhz 386/ 33mhz 486 (SX/DX)? Has anyone ran any benchmarks to have any idea?

Ok, sorry for this irritating barrage of questions, but as I recall I dont remember any definitive answers beiong given to these questions (some half answers yes, but a solid block of relevant info would be welcome)

Thanks everyone.

EDIT: If anyone wants to try out a little idea I was hoping to test sometime, please do (and let me know): Setup a 30mb ramdisk, mount the ramdisk as C: in DOSbox, make a batchfile that auto-copies all the (pre installed) win 3.11 from SDHC into C: and run "win" from c:>

My hope is that this would speed Win3.11 up considerably, since it uses a page file as a kind of virtual memory/cache, if it's running from Pandora's ram instead of SDHC it might sve read/write times as well as save SDHC life. With 3.11 installing at 10-15mb it'd leave around 16mb free for page file. Obviously any other software can be installed, stored and run from d: drive mounted on actual SDHC, since there should be less reads and writes to and from it.

 

[skeezix]

They cannot be exact, but Pickle would be your man. But consider -- after emulating 3k cycles, the blitting on the PC would be faster, etc, so theres less overhead. But also, some parts of the emulation will run faster or slower differently between the machines -- floating point would be handled much better on the PC than an ARM platform for instance, so if the game is all 3d FP based math, it'd perform better on the PC.

Its a guideline, nothing more, I would say.. but Pickle is the expert

jeff

 

[Pickle]

well i dont know about expert ;-)

setting specific cycles can give you a rough idea. Basically if the game requires higher emulation in other areas, sound/fpu then thats going to push the max cycle limit down since the ARM cpu would be at its limit. Where on a pc it wouldnt matter cause you still have a lot cpu time left.
I tried to come up with a number of cycles and I think it was around 5000 when i ran dark forces. I think most anything for a 386 or low 486 is runable.

 

[TitanUranus]

Thanks pickle/skeezix. What about a possibility (long term future here) of using DSP for soundblaster to free up and help flex some ARM muscle on the x86 side?

 

[1magus]

What does it mean when people saying using or not using Dynamic core?

 

[Prometheus]

It means they're using or not using the dynamic core.

 

[1magus]

I'm going to take a guess here. is that the Digital Signal Processor?

 

[TitanUranus]

Dynamic core is just the fastest mode of emulation available (as in it dynamically recompiles the code from the original PC's x86 to run on the Pandoras ARM cpu - hopefully fast enough to be in real time). I'm not an expert on these things, that's how I understand it though. Unless it's specifically buggering up a particular game, it's the most efficient one to use. For games that are proving difficult to run a different core setting might work, but expect very slow performance.

I'm sure someone will correct me if I got that completely wrong. Wikipedia is a good place to get info on these things if like me you get randomly interested in stuff. For a simpler, faster and possibly wrong answer someone like me will do their best, when we fail, clever people will come to the rescue.

EDIT: The Digital Signal Processor is the DSP core I mentioned in my earlier post is something entirely unrelated to DOSbox. The DSP core is an actual specialised processor incorporated in the Pandora designed for processing sound and I think maybe video. It's a bit like having a dedicated sound chip or gfx card that can run various software functions without taxing the main CPU. At the moment it's not enabled in the firmware (I don't think), but when it is (probably in the next big update) then it may be possible to offload some tasks onto it, making emulators more efficient. Again, dont use this as an answer on who wants to be a millionaire as I'm not at all reliable! And please don't kill me if I made a mistake.

 

[VRAndy]

EDIT: Yeah, I scrolled up to what Chip linked and I'm mostly correct. Abandonware is not a leagal term but more of an effort to preserve history. I never thought about it but the media some of this software is stored on is in no way archival quality so if it wasn't classified as 'abandonware' by some then it would just cease to exist because the people that might own it don't know they own it or are even aware that it exists.

I agree with this a lot. If I were king of the world, Home of the Underdogs would be part of the Smithsonian Institute.

These games are an important part of our culture, the idea that anyone, even the original creators, have the right to remove something from our culture is distasteful. Far moreso than the idea that someone, somewhere, missed a royalty payment for something he made twenty years ago.

 

[ZoxFox]

sadly i have to admit that sim city 2000 also doesn`t rum very well although i`ve done some overclocking to 800....

 

[Tom`]

sadly i have to admit that sim city 2000 also doesn`t rum very well although i`ve done some overclocking to 800....

There's actually a fairly decent PocketPC port of SC2K, so if anyone ever gets WinCE working we might have a chance at that...

 

[Pleng]

Prometheus are keymaps being saves on ext?

I'm afraid I can't comment on this - I use DOSBox's own keymapper for this, which saves when you tell it to (but requires a bit of moving the window around to reach the save button).

I'm also using DOSBox's own keymapper, and it doesn't save my configuration when I tell it

 

[ZoxFox]

Zox, did you increase dosbox cycles to max?

nope does it increase the performance noticeable?

and how can i do that? maybe prometheus can help me
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