Your cycles are set too high. You just need to turn down your cycles.

What and play at the speed of a slow 286? These games were designed with a 486 in mind, and setting cycles at less than 3000 is too painfully slow to be worth the trouble. The screen transitions are a minor thing I can put up with. But in my opinion, an emulator should emulate the original hardware as much as possible. VGA cards were not that fast, so neither should DOSBox.

You shouldn't have any problems at 7000-10000 cycles, unless you have a fairly old computer. What you were describing made it sound like you had the cycles set way too high. Others do not have this issue, including myself. I suggest that you post a thread in the DOSBox Games/Apps forum for further assistance with this and leave this thread for the feature requests. Perhaps a mod could split this thread?

I suppose it could be that I have an old comp. It is after all a 4½ year old 2 GHz P4. But I upgraded the video card to a GeForce FX 5900 AGP (all the latest drivers), which I thought was at least formidable. I've also seen a video of the QG2 Intro on YouTube and the up and down scrolling feature when they're on the carpet is too fast to see there also. I guess I thought it was a universal problem. I just don't understand why an older computer would be faster than a newer computer. Surely I'm not the only one who has this problem. I'll try to find answers elsewhere again, but I couldn't find anything the last time I looked.

Oh yeah.. Another thing: I REALLY don't think this transition timer is in ANY way linked to the CPU cycles. As I stated before, my Pentium 3 has no problem playing these particular transitions any less smoothly than my old 486 does. These transitions should last about a full second. In DOSBox (for me a least) it sped through it at only a fraction of its correct time even at 5000 cycles. This led me to believe it based itself on the VGA card speed. Again, I just don't understand how a faster comp. is gonna fix this.

I'll also add: It does this in both full screen and windowed; with both dynamic and normal core selected.

And by the way... I did post a question on the game/apps. forum on April 10, and guess what? Nessuno risponde! I HAVE researched this problem, but to no avail.

Edit: Sorry, if I sound feisty. I've recently been debating nuts on YouTube. 😉

I know they're very crappy, but I've uploaded 2 videos to YouTube to demonstrate my point. When viewing them, please click 'more' and read the video info.

Video transitions on my Pentium III at correct speed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OhZPrv5CSA

Video transitions on my Pentium 4 in DOSBox:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj6rsQkVuAw

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You can see examples the too-fast transitions in the following:

Someone else's video of SQ1 VGA Intro:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex2a_xuU8LM

Someone else's video of QG2 Intro:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3paeeD_dqgY

On the thread I started h-a-l-9000 posted:

If you'd like to check here is a CVS build with limited VGA memory speed.

http://home.arcor.de/h-a-l-9000/test/do...mdelay.zip

Most notably in the panic demo (the part after the fractal mountain) and Terminal Velocity (when displaying the two first logos).

h-a-l-9000 knows what I meant. That's why he posted the link. I tried this CVS build, and you know what? It works PERFECTLY. My audio no longer pops. I have my speculations as to WHY it works so well, but if I said, I'd probably just be treated like an idiot again. All I know is: It works. That's all I care about.

I have posted two more YouTube vids-

Standard build, as is:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=6jCP6cdiro0

Special CVS build with video memory speed adjustment:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=L771esSxv6Y

While the skipping audio is a separate issue, I have noticed audio problems with the .70 release (see the Space Quest 6 in DOSBox 0.70 audio corruption thread) that hal's build seems to fix, too.

The game's running too fast in the second vid. It's also running WAY too fast on your Pentium II vid too. When the game was released 486 DX2 66 was the best CPU available for Intel x86 machines, infact when the Quest 1 remakes were actually launched 386 was being sold.

Don't pay attention to the speed of the sprite. That can easily be changed with the game's speed adjustment. The issue is with the scrolling from one room to the next. In the .70 build when Roger enters the next room the side scrolling of the screen is near instantaneous. In hal's CVS build you can see the screen scroll. Not that it is that big of a deal, since it doesn't seem to effect the game's animations. Who knows about other games, though.

Who knows about other games, though.

Thank you, that's precisely my point. As I stated above:

The screen transitions are a minor thing I can put up with. But in my opinion, an emulator should emulate the original hardware as much as possible. VGA cards were not that fast, so neither should DOSBox.

Lazerith_444 wrote:

Who knows about other games, though.

Thank you, that's precisely my point. As I stated above:

The screen transitions are a minor thing I can put up with. But in my opinion, an emulator should emulate the original hardware as much as possible. VGA cards were not that fast, so neither should DOSBox.

Perhaps for a PC-emulator, but DOSBox is not a PC-emulator - it is a DOS (game) emulator with the necessary hardware emulation to allow the game experience to be recreated. Only if that "experience" is somehow degraded due to shortcuts in the emulation methods should DOSBox do something about it. And only if the people doing the coding has sufficient motivation to do so.

For others that might want the solution, here is the post by h-a-l-9000 from the other thread.

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

If you'd like to check here is a CVS build with limited VGA memory speed.

http://home.arcor.de/h-a-l-9000/test/do...mdelay.zip

Most notably in the panic demo (the part after the fractal mountain) and Terminal Velocity (when displaying the two first logos).

This build does fix the scrolling issue and the audio bug with the .70 release also seems to be fixed.

I am not pissed of by anything in this thread. I merely pointed out, that DOSBox is not, and should not, emulate the hardware as closely as possible. It should, and does, takes allowable shortcuts, all in the interest of getting a decent speed.

Emulating the hardware as closely as possible would mean that DOSBox should also include some kind of x86 BIOS code that would need to be emulated. It would be slow, but it would be a more accurate emulation (I think Bochs do this). Instead, DOSBox merely hooks the documented BIOS interrupts and transforms them into calls to the underlying host operating system. That is not "emulating the original hardware as much as possible".

It is the same with networking. Do we want DOSBox to emulate the hardware of a 3Com network card, down to the level where you need to load a 3Com network driver before you can use the card? And a driver for IPX and IP before you can play network games.

A real MSCDEX driver? Keyboard driver? Where do this "emulating the original hardware as close as possible stop"?

As I said - DOSBox takes shortcuts in the emulation. If those shortcuts means that some games won't run probably, they will eventually be fixed.

cleaned up.

Hal, what did you change in that build (as it fixes the spacequest problem as well (that wc3 soundblaster fix)

Hmm I actually found some code in there I had forgotten. But it's relatet to autocycles.
collector didn't say if he tried with a plain CVS, maybe it was fixed there?
The memory speed change is just using a newer version of the much-hated iodelay.

Attached the complete diff of that branch.

Yes, audio is fixed with plain CVS from AEP, 2007-05-22.