I don't quite consider DOSbox in the same class as WinUAE... nearer thing to UAE in PC realm is an emulator like Bochs.... nearer thing to DOSbox in the Amiga realm is something like "relokick" for booting older games on a newer kickstart ROM. Though they are a lot different in execution. But if …

Core 15 should be a secondary thread. The primary threads are 0-2-4-6-8-10-12-14 on a 8/16 CPU. And you probably want at least 4 threads assigned to PCem. Setting it to high priority might also help, although it shouldn't be that significant.

Thanks for the clarification, I was too lazy to check the remnants of information that lingered in my memory. I do remember, though, that even Voodoo 1 on a Ryzen 5600x needs 2 threads to reach full performance in GPU-heavy scenarios (although the difference is just a few percent).

I think for most CD protection systems, mounting a CD image into daemon tools on the host system (with DRM emulation options checked) may help with that. I've heard of stuttering when using a real drive before, but it doesn't happen with virtual drives, even though they are technically "host".

Well, first thing I'd try is to set the CPU affinity in the task manager to even-numbered cpus only to make sure PCem doesn't get assigned secondary threads, which can happen on rare occasions and does wreck the performance. By the way, it uses up to 4 threads if you are using a 3dfx card: 1 for the …