DosBox runs games really slow?
 

I'm running the latest official build of DosBox (0.72) and it runs my games very slowly on my new machine which is weird since on my old machine, which was nearly 10 times slower in terms of hardware I used various 0.6x builds and all the games ran pretty fast. But now on my new machine I can't get any games to run decently and few side-scrolling such as Tyrian 2000 and Highway Hunter run very slowly, 15fps on average with fps dipping to 2-3fps sometimes.

I have tried using different renderer's such as opengl, ddraw, and similar with no positive effect.

My new machine specs are as follow:

CPU: Q6700 @ 3.7GHz
RAM: 4GB Corsair XMS
HD: 2x160GB in RAID0 + storage drives
GPU: single GTX 260
OS: Vista Home Premium 32bit

Any assistance would be appreciated.

DosBox is a pretty resource-intensive program, though four gigabytes of RAM ought to be enough even on Vista. The only possible remedies that come to mind are shutting off as many extraneous background programs as possible, and if you've got a multi-core CPU, assign Dosbox to one core and anything else you really can't afford to close down to another. If that doesn't work, there's not much I can suggest except to try another emulator; my personal experience has been that VDMSound is somewhat more RAM-efficient, at least, or you could even run 98SE in VMWare or something similar if you were really determined.

0.7x is much much more optimized than 0.6x, so I'm really surprised to hear that. Are you running it with the default options? Tyrian 2000 for one works perfectly with 2.8GHz and 1 GB of RAM (and much less). Maybe it's one of those graphic driver problems? Again, are you using the default configuration? What does DOSBox's title bar says (especially about cycles count) when run windowed? (Maybe your computer is too damn fast, try pressing Ctrl+F11 repeatedly?)

try asking at vogons forum=)

The bar shows that the CPU cycles is at 10000, and it pretty much is 10000 constantly. Haven't seen it move. Also, in the bar, frameskip is at 0.

I tried running with default options at first, I had same problem. Then I thought D-Fend Reloaded (frontend for DosBox) was at fault, so I tried running the games directly via DosBox. No change. Then I tweaked the default conf file, tested out different renderers, CPU cores and similar. No change.

My old single core Athlon XP machine ran all these games fine and I only had 1GB of RAM back then. Now with quad CPU and 4GB of RAM and a video card 10 times faster I can barely run those same games.

It could be Vista maybe? Although my drivers are latest versions. Also, I don't have much running in background. Right now, only one core is showing 3% to 5% load, other cores are at 0% most of the time.

maybe your core is set to "full"? what's in your dosbox.conf?

also, 10000 cycles is really slow, my 64bit 3000+ athlon runs fine with about 50000 cycles(i don't remember exactly). try setting it to "max" or "auto"

Edited: I fixed it. I un-installed D-Fend/DosBox then I just downloaded the latest DosBox directly from the official site. Works perfectly! I don't know what was wrong with D-Fend version but it works okay now. A bit harder to start games since I have to mount all the directories manually but it works.

Thanks for the assistance everyone.

just be happy that you didn't go to vogons :) (you might have been seriously
flamed (and for a good reason))

try DBGL as frontend if you find the mounting troublesome.

There's no need, feel free to read my sticky. :D You could use the basic tutorial but since you already know how to mount manually you're surely ready for the advanced one. There are other tutorials as well in their own folder, use what suits you best.

Nice guides. I didn't know you could drag and drop game executables onto a DosBox shortcut like that. Drag and drop sure does speed things up. I've been researching other frontends. D-Fend looked really nice, but it has some serious bugs.