Hi all,
I have installed the dosbox and I have to say that it ROCKS. I fired up some old games for dos with a little tear in the corner of my eye....
Creators of DosBox I SALUTE YOU!

I have noticed some inconsistency in the readme file concerning the CPU cycle configuration. If I follow the instructions in readme and add cpu cycles up till my CPU is used to a 98-100% I get to about 33000 but (I take Ultima 8 as an example since it's very hard on resources, it works on all other games that I tested as well) the sound is not continous and the game lags like hell. When I try to lower the CPU cycles the sounds and game speed starts getting better at about 13000 - 14000 cycles and is best at about 6400 - 7800 cycles at which point my cpu is used at about 30-50% ! The game starts getting slower again at any setting below 6000.

Now this is bizzare and could indicate a design problem or whatever in dosbox (studying the code now but don't grasp yet how it works entirely)
that when more CPU power is used the game runs slower inside the dosbox. This could mean that there is an ideal setting of the cpu cycles in the dosbox of around 6400-7800 and the power of the underlying CPU doesn't matter i.e 80% use on 1.2Ghz P4 and 20% use on 3.6 Ghz P4. If set higher the CPU power is wasted on running the dosbox loop without the computing power actually transferring to the runned game?

Unfortunately even though I have access to faster processors ie. 3Ghz it's very hard to test the actual speed of a game. I tried the keyframe droppings, yes the CPU use gets lower but it has no effect on the actual game speed whatsoever (maybe U8 is not as demanding on graphics as on other areas).

Now there is another problem. Some of the .exe and .com files inside the dosbox mounted directory seems locked once the dosbox has been run once and then closed. This is annoying beacuse one can't delete them from windows, a stream not closed perhaps?
There seem to be something wrong with the file I/O that shows during the U8 installation as I pointed out in this thread
Ultima 8 problem/question

One more suggestion, it would be nice to make the cpu cycles visible when in fullscreen. Not all the time just when they are being changed.

One more question, do you expect the dosbox performance to improve in time or we just have to wait for more powerful processors?

Thank you for your time reading this my PC configuration is below.

Mipam Moudry
Software Architect
Lausanne, Switzerland

Dell Proprietary - Inspiron 8200 laptop
P4-M 2.4 Ghz
1GB DDR
Radeon mobile 9000 - 64MB
Windows XP Pro
Ultima 8 - Origin patched
Reproductible all the time
SB 16
Software