James-F wrote:In my experience when dosbox exceeds the cycles your actual CPU is capable emulating, the emulation starts to stutter. […]
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In my experience when dosbox exceeds the cycles your actual CPU is capable emulating, the emulation starts to stutter.
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Here is a small chart of what cycles equals to what CPU: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/performance
Anything from 10,000 to 200,000 will equate to about 386 to Pentium which is what you want from DOSBox.
Two other things are also in play. If you are capturing video, the video capture code is in the main thread, and typically cuts the maximum emulation speed in half (due to having to copy the screen image, and audio a second time.)
The second thing in play is disk speed. For all intents, no dos game should actually be hitting the hard drive, it should be reading from the disk cache in the host OS. But this doesn't apply to using disk images. Case in point, copy files from two disk images on the same host drive inside dos box. It will look like it's doing nothing for a minute or two, and then say it's copied all the files all at once.
When I play games, without capture on, there will be the occasional audio stutter, which I've chalked up to the audio buffer being not quite the right size. But what IS interesting is that if you capture the audio, there is no stutter at all in the captured audio, which means it's more likely the OS is causing the stutter. It would be interesting to find out if OSX or Linux experience the same problem or if it's just isolated to DOSBOX 32-bit on 64-bit Windows OS.