I am currently having several problems with DOSbox and don't know if its working correctly or if im doing something wrong.
Either way they are frustrating me to the point where I want to hurt/break something. :wall:

First I can't get Archon Ultra or The Horde to run on either DOSbox or Windows XP and my pc should be more than capable of runing them.

Second Strife, Blood, Arena, X-Com 3, and Tyrian 2000 run slowly no matter how much I tweak the CPU Cycles or the Frame Skip.

Lastly the sound/music doesn't work well or at all on X-com 2, X-com 3, Tyrian 2000, Blood, and Abuse.


Please, if anyone has any ideas on how to fix any of these problems for any of the games I listed, or in general, I would really appreciate it.

have you tried VDM sound? its downladable fwom abandonia page and easy to use, give a shot.

oh btw if you want to use dos box, be little more specific about your pc specs, commnad lines you typed in to dosbox and errors you got when you was trying to run Archon Ultra or The Horde

the horde and archon ultra are hard to run because DOSBox emulates certain parts not correctly. I've heard on the DOSBox forum that they are working on it.

Your best guess is not to run these 2 games and play with the cycles settings of DOSBox for the other games. (tyrian 2000 runs at 10000 cycles just fine if your pc can handle that.

What are your system specs in the first place?
DosBox is quite heavy on raw CPU power needed, and several of the games you have listed (Abuse, X-Com 3 and Tyrian to be specific) needed quite fast machines, approximately 70 mHz and faster (if I remember right).

Data, I tried running T2K at 10000 cycles and even slightly higher myself. No go, it's still lagging.

You might try a few tricks:
1. Dynamic core in DosBox. This doubles the top limit of cycles your machine can handle, but DosBox itself becomes less stable when doing so.
2. VDMSound. This emulates much smaller portions of old hardware then DosBox and thus runs much faster (my machine ran it with X-Com Apocalypse... the resulting speed was completely normal, while in DosBox with frameskip 1 and maximum cycle setting it still lagged)
3. Bootdisk. There is a DOS bootdisk image for download from Abandonia, you might well try using that. That is, if your computer still has a floppy drive...
4. This is a kind of last resort, really, but... building a dedicated DOS rig is still an option. I did it myself and am quite satisfied with the results. No problems with cycles, nearly no problems with compatiblity too... except it might take a fair amount of work to fine-tune such a machine for DOS gaming.

Fifth: I finished the first 2 episodes on it on 12000 cycles. It was only slow when the screen turned black.
Don't set the detail level too high. (no pentium graphics)

But maybe my memory is flawed although I play tyrian and tyrian 2k quite often on this pc.

The details, you say? Right. Didn't think of that.

ok, im runing on Windows XP Professional with a Pentium 4 2.4 ghz CPU and 512 mb of ram.

also, I think I will try out VDM sound to see if that works.

and as for what I entered into the command line I have tryed it several ways, i have tryed to launch the games by actually navigating through it and launching the exe.
I have also tryed the thing where you drag the exe for the game onto the exe for DOSbox.

and finaly there are no error messages whatsoever, DOSbox either quits
responding and turns black, or it imediately crashes.

Try D-Fend with dosbox. its at the dosbox web site and it saves a lot of headaches

AFAIK, D-Fend can sometimes cause problems.

I can help with Tyrian - go into its settings in-game and turn the detail level down from Pentium to the next highest - it chugs horribly in DOSBox on Pentium settings (since it emulates a fast 486) but should be ok on the other settings.