Dosbox Fun

[mcobit]

Here a video of C&C running on fixed 3000 Cycles in Dosbox:

Command&Conquer 3000 Cycles

As you can see, it is not nearly playable.

But what will be playable at this Cycles is Little Big Adventure, one of my favorite games at the time.

LBA DosBox

Edit: Added LBA

 

[younghifi]

Good news about LBA, mcobit I still have the original box somewhere

 

[r00tw00t]

Yeah, and I have the CD somewhere But 3000 cycles. How does it run in let's say 2200 cycles. Isn't 3000 cycles the cap the Pandora can push if we are lucky?

edit: LBA reminded me of another game called Ecstatica. If anyone have it, please try with Dosbox and see how it runs

 

[mcobit]

With 2200 Cycles I would say LBA is still playable, but a bit slower.

LBA with 2200 Cycles

Ecstatica is really unplayable, even with 3000 Cycles, sorry.
But maybe we get some more optimisations with the time.

Ecstatica with 2200 Cycles

 

[r00tw00t]

Ah, wow thanks for the tests! Nice too see there's a good chance LBA will run at playable speed! I thought Ecstatica would be 'faster' then LBA but can't have it all

Really appreciate that you took the time too test at lower cycles, kudos!

 

[wermy]

With 2200 Cycles I would say LBA is still playable, but a bit slower.

Thanks for doing those tests! I'm curious how LBA2 will run. Here's a video of it running on a PSP with DosBox: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTDVqw7u8IM...feature=related Surely it would run better than that, right? Also, there is a PSX version of LBA1 (released only in PAL), so that might be a more viable option for playing this great game on Pandora.

 

[borgqueenx]

stopid dosbox. red alert asks for a stopid cd key, and duke nukem 3d hangs when loading some file.

i cant test anything

 

[Monk]

stopid dosbox. red alert asks for a stopid cd key, and duke nukem 3d hangs when loading some file.

i cant test anything

I loathe that so many games need the CD/floppy in place to load. That's one thing that makes DOSBox so much less handy than it could otherwise be

 

[Loonie]

Perhaps running the sound emulation at its lowest rate might help claw back a little bit of runtime.

I gave Witchaven a try for a laugh, defaults and 2500 cycles offers about 1.3 seconds per frame, with an awkward menu.
Radix clocks in about 1.1 frames per second.
Terminal Velocity kinda crashed.

I shall try the latter two with lower details and lower sound emulation and see what happens.

 

[mcobit]

I tried to disable sound in some games, but they seem to crash on startup then.

@Loonie: I think 3d dosgames are out of reach for the Pandora Hardware. Even Alone in the Dark needs about 6000-8000 Cycles to run accurate.

 

[WizardStan]

Fortunately Duke 3D is already open source and just waiting to be ported.

 

[Prometheus]

stopid dosbox. red alert asks for a stopid cd key, and duke nukem 3d hangs when loading some file.

i cant test anything

I loathe that so many games need the CD/floppy in place to load. That's one thing that makes DOSBox so much less handy than it could otherwise be

I thought that DOSBox had an option to mount disk/disc images, nowadays? Or is that not useful for cases like these?

As an aside, I tried to test out Jazz Jackrabbit in DOSBox on my Ubuntu 9.04 box, but couldn't find any way to stop it from showing percentages and the like instead of the number of cycles. Has anyone else tried out Jazz, yet?

 

[JerryG20]

stopid dosbox. red alert asks for a stopid cd key, and duke nukem 3d hangs when loading some file.

i cant test anything

I loathe that so many games need the CD/floppy in place to load. That's one thing that makes DOSBox so much less handy than it could otherwise be

I thought that DOSBox had an option to mount disk/disc images, nowadays? Or is that not useful for cases like these?

As an aside, I tried to test out Jazz Jackrabbit in DOSBox on my Ubuntu 9.04 box, but couldn't find any way to stop it from showing percentages and the like instead of the number of cycles. Has anyone else tried out Jazz, yet?

I'm assuming you tried changing the cycle setting in the .conf file?

I just tried OMF2097 and it needed nearly 20000 cycles to run full speed

 

[urjaman]

A simple minihowto (on linux) to setting dosbox to run at some X cycles.
1. Run dosbox
2. Do "config -writeconf dosbox.conf"
3. Close dosbox
4. In your home folder should be dosbox.conf file
5. Edit it with any text editor, find the [cpu] section, after that theres a "cycles=auto" line, change it to eg. cycles=3000 (or what amount you want)
6. Save file
7. Run dosbox

see for more conf stuff:
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Dosbox.conf

The change to dosbox.conf should be same on windows - but i dont know where the conf is in there, or do you need to writeconf it (i think not).

 

[Prometheus]

I'm assuming you tried changing the cycle setting in the .conf file?

I tried, but no such file exists. :huh:

I'm on my 8.04 box again now, so I'll try out urjaman's how-to and report back shortly.

EDIT: Ok, Jazz Jackrabbit CD, with all quality settings at their highest, runs a little bit sluggishly - a few too many random speed-ups and slowdowns breaking up the action. The menus are a little bit unresponsive, too.

I'm going to test it with lower-quality sound and the like, now, and see how it goes.

If I take too long, assume I've gotten caught up in playing it. :lol:

 

[urjaman]

Oh and Death Rally is a no go, 5000 cycles needed to play the menu music properly, ~15 000 cycles needed to play the game.

I thought the Cortex-A8 had some power, but if the pandora can't do more than 3000 cycles in dosbox (@600 Mhz) means either that it is per mhz much less efficient than my AMD sempron (in the task of running dosbox) (by a factor of 3 - i calculated that my sempron could do 9000 cycles at 600Mhz) or dosbox is unoptimized for the ARM. Hoping for the latter and that coders will optimize it to the max given time

 

[younghifi]

QUOTE
I tried, but no such file exists.

It must, maybe you just didn't look in the right place? If you work on Ubuntu, open up the terminal, do a "updatedb" and then try "locate .conf".
It should appear somewhere My guess is that it's either in the /etc or somewhere deep in the /usr hierarchy, but I'm not too certain.

 

[urjaman]

sorry for the double post - connection problems (EDGE).

 

[Loonie]

As an aside, I tried to test out Jazz Jackrabbit in DOSBox on my Ubuntu 9.04 box, but couldn't find any way to stop it from showing percentages and the like instead of the number of cycles. Has anyone else tried out Jazz, yet?

Pickle had done an earlier port of OpenJazz, so probably not much point in DOSBOXing it.

As an aside, I gave Radix a spin with ultra-low detail and 8000Hz sample rate with mostly the same results. I expected as much, these are just the DOS games I have handy at the moment.

 

[urjaman]

My guess is that it's either in the /etc or somewhere deep in the /usr hierarchy, but I'm not too certain.

It doesnt need to, on linux dosbox will use default settings if the .conf doesnt exist. And its in your home directory if it exists.

Try running from a terminal - no config:
CODE
[urjaman@sempron ~]$ dosbox
CONFIG: Using default settings. Create a configfile to change them

create a config with "config -writeconf dosbox.conf", then:
CODE
[urjaman@sempron ~]$ dosbox
CONFIG:Loading primary settings from config file dosbox.conf