interresting is he able to operate dosbox at all. ? I mean can something be typed in the shell and can games be started (disregarding the fact that they run very slow ?)

yes he is able to type commands; games can be startet too, but they run very slowly ... it's really odd, because his normal windows cpu usage is as it should be (0 - 4 %) ...

we just tried to deactivate all sound and network emulations, but it didn't help

a further strange thing is, that he can normally use windows functions (icq, voice chat over teamspeak, etc.) when dosbox runs in background, allthough he has the mentioned 100 % cpu usage ... i guessed, that for some reason, cool n' quite dont recognize the cpu usage and the clock stays at the lowest possible level ... but even with 1000 mhz or less, 100% would be to high imo

I have a 3400+ i gb of ram and a 9800pro 256mb and xp. I too have the same exact problem

use 16 bit colour depth and not 32 bit in your windows, so I had become a performance boost

It could be that the processors trying to run the 16bit code in 64bit mode, that would cause one hell of a slowdown.

I am getting very angry.

Athlon XP 2400+
256MB pc2700
On-board ProSavage8 DDR

Same Problem for weeks. Cpu is at 100% when dosbox starts, i can type into the console, mount directory's, even load ultima VII but my cpu temp reaches 60 C after a few minutes. Have not touched the DOSBox.conf but it is the same even at 5 cpu cycles a second. WHAT THE?

This seems to be common with most new AMD cpu's. I have not seen any problems mentioned with older Athlon & Duron cpu's. I will try under Win98SE and see if that works.

Cheers, Hugh.

Hey again,

I downed resolution to 800x600 which kept my cpu at 85%-95%. With 800x600 and 16 bit colour 55%-65%. Should it not run a lot better on a 2ghz cpu?

cheers, Hugh.

WatcherZero, AMD64 supports both 32bit and 64bit.

@WatcherZero: No 16-bit code is ever executed by the host system.
You can disable Cool'n'Quiet in the system BIOS to have the CPU always run at its top clock speed. Turn that off and see what happens.

My config is also Athlon 64 3400+ (altough with 1GB ram 😁 ) , graphics Asus V3800 (a little bit old) and I have it running on 21000 cycles, where the cpu stays stable on about 17% load. Presently running Crusader No Regret.
I would target the graphics driver rather than DosBox . Or elsewhere.
Have fun

Guest: You make me excited to get mine 😉
Too bad I've had reports from other people about the same problem 🙁

I had the same problems with my Athlon64 3200+. I could fix them by changing output in dosbox.conf to overlay/ddraw. The standard (surface) seems to be extremly ressource demanding...

Greetings
Feadanaigh

My experience with DOSBox on my Opteron box is that I was getting periodic slow downs while running it. Every few minutes any game I was running in DOSBox would grind to a crawl for a few seconds. This problem has since gone away, don't know what changed. On a side note, I am dual booting XP and the public beta of XP 64 bit edition. I can run one game in DOSBox in XP and it uses about 45% of CPU cycles on the first CPU and none on the 2nd. In 64 bit Windows the same game with the same DOSBox config settings uses about 15% the 2nd CPU and none of the 1st CPU. I suppose that difference could be drivers, but ATI is not seen as having very good 64 bit drivers out, yet.

Geez, a dual opteron. I'm jealous~

I have a asus k8ne-deluxe mobo, amd athlon64 3000 cpu, 512M ddr400 mememory, winxp home sp2
Dos box uses 100% cpu at 3300 cycles/milisec.
I discovered that when i switch the computer to standby and then wake up the computer by moving the mouse or touching the keyboard,i can easely set the dosbox cycles to 14000 and the cpu uses about 50%.
In other words; dosbox works excellent after the computer has been in standby mode.
What changes after been in standby i don't know, but is works fine too me.

When using dosbox i always close cool & quiet (asus smart doctor) because sometimes this utility gives false errors about gpu temperature or wrong voltages.

good luck........

I had the same problem on my ACER Aspire 1501 Notebook with Radeon 9600 Mobile.

It happenend after i replaced the ATI driver supplied by ACER with the recent ATI OMEGA Drivers.

-> 100% CPU at startup of Dosbox. 😕

After i switched back to the original drivers the problem was gone.
😏

Try replacing your graphics card drivers or changing output mode in Doxbox (as mentioned above).

Problem:
Dosbox (0.63) takes up 100% resources. Dosbox started
with default settings (Cycles=3000, Output=Surface.
Gus=diabled, EMS=disabled)

System:
Linux (Fedora Core 2, kernel=2.6.9)
Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB, Geforce FX5200
mobo=Asus A7N266VM

When tested with WinXP on the same hardware, Dosbox never
went past 40% CPU usage even at 7000 cycles.

Are you using the latest video and sound drivers on the Linux version? Have you tried different output renderers and sound sampling rates? Have you tried disabling sound altogether? Are you testing with the exact same DOSBox configuration on Linux and Windows, or are you changing other settings besides cycles?

Also, what program are you using to monitor "resource" usage in Linux? Does it actually say that your CPU is 0% idle?