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Old 18-11-2019, 10:57 AM   #1
Pee wee
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Question Amount of cycles for this games ?

Hi friends,

Pls, I would like to know the recommended amount of cycles for "Blood (1997)", "Alien Rampage (1996)" and "The Return of the Lost Vikings (1997)". I would like closer experience with original and I would like to know the following settings:

"CPU Core" (dynamic, normal or simple)
"CPU cycles mode" (auto, fixed or max)
"CPU type"

PD. I hope you do not find this too heavy, I play via retroarch.

Many thanks in advance!
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Old 18-11-2019, 02:55 PM   #2
zirkoni
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The emulation speed of DOSBox depends on your CPU. 10k emulated cycles on one CPU does not necessarily run at the same speed on some other CPU.


Anyway, for those three games the default settings (auto) should be fine (they are protected mode games so DOSBox will automatically switch to dynamic core & max cycles). CPU type should always be set to auto, there are very few games that don't work properly with that setting.


For Blood I'd also recommend increasing memsize (32 should be OK) and changing machine to vesa_nolfb.
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Old 18-11-2019, 04:17 PM   #3
Scatty
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If your machine is one of the more recent, strong types, gaming-optimized with strong CPU / GPU etc, I'd set the cycles to something about 45.000-65.000, at least for Blood since it was a CPU-intensive game for the hardware of it's time. Other two probably won't need nearly as much, something like 25.000-35.000 should be enough.
AUTO setting never worked for me on DosBox 0.74 (always kept at the default value of 3.000 cycles) for any game, but maybe it does on the newer DosBox 0.75.


For CPU type you can set it safely to cputype=pentium_slow, it would be probably the fastest setting, unless it's some older games which might have a problem with anything but 386_slow (I've had some of those). 386 setting had the most problems for me with many games, so I usually don't use that one.


Core setting should be always on core=dynamic, unless some game doesn't work with it, but that would be very rare. It's the best setting which provides the most speed, and I've had no problems with it yet ever since DosBox 0.73, otherwise just set it to core=normal or core=auto.


Also you should set xms= and ems= settings at the bottom to
xms=true
ems=true

to enable extended memory, any game from about 1991-92 on uses that to have more memory abvailable for it. Rarely, some games might have a problem with ems=true, in that case set it to false.
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Old 18-11-2019, 06:20 PM   #4
Pee wee
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Many thanks for replying, @zirkoni. I note the comment.
Your clarification is greatly appreciated @Scatty. I value your comment.

Kind regards
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Old 19-11-2019, 08:35 AM   #5
Smiling Spectre
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Quote:
Originally Posted by zirkoni View Post
The emulation speed of DOSBox depends on your CPU. 10k emulated cycles on one CPU does not necessarily run at the same speed on some other CPU.
I believe, you are wrong, zirkoni. DOSBox was made with _set_ speed in mind, so 10K cycles of one CPU equal to 10K cycles on any other.

Obvious restriction is too old processor and too many cycles. If your machine physically capable to pull out 10 000 cycles in Heretic, and you are trying to set 20 000, it still will be effective 10 000, only laggy as hell, as overloaded processor will _try_ to get more than it can and failsafe back now and again.

But it's easy to check with any resource monitor (Task Manager - for Windows). If DOSBox taken 90%+ of CPU - you got it too much.

Pee wee, easy universal solution is to get eXoDOS - or at least part of eXoDOS related to your games. It have all settings in "working" range. I can check settings at home, as downloading 18Gb of needed files is not very smart move at my work.

P.S. https://exodos.the-eye.us/
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