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Thanks DOSBox (running oldskool PC demos)

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First post, by kevingpo

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Wow, this is amazing. Two years ago when I wanted to show my girlfriend my long lost favourate demo Solstice by Valhalla, I thought it wouldn't happen. Solstice, a 1995 PC demo that was #1 in Wired '95 competition. Running on Windows XP was like impossible. I tried DOSBox and it still wouldn't work... something about sound blaster or EMS/XMS not fully emulated yet.

Two years later and my cravings to watch Solstice again came up. I gave it another try. Wow! It really works! Thanks DOSBox guys! You have restored my Solstice viewing pleasure... to maybe around 80%. (it's a bit chuggy, but I can still enjoy the music).

Try out PC demos like Solstice:

ftp://hornet.madtracker.org/mirrors/hornet/de … /s/solstice.zip
(+ and patch below)
ftp://hornet.madtracker.org/mirrors/hornet/de … 96/s/solfix.zip

Query, will DOSBox emulate assembly 3D graphics better in future?

Reply 1 of 7, by `Moe`

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There's nothing to emulate for "assembly 3d graphics". From the emulators point of view, "assembly 3d graphics" is like "assembly sprite drawing" or "assembly waiting for user input".

What demos usually do, and what drives emulators insane, is to modify their own code. That's a neat trick on those old CPUs to get nice amounts of extra speed, unfortunately it makes optimizations difficult. Even modern "real" CPUs do not like self-modifying code.

The demo can run quite satisfactory if you choose sound blaster sound. The wisdom that GUS is faster than SB seems to be a myth, at least for this demo: SB sound seems to work several times faster.

Reply 3 of 7, by HunterZ

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On real hardware, I'm sure demos could run faster with a GUS because they could offload a lot of sound processing onto the GUS hardware. However, as the GUS is more complex, it takes more processing power to emulate in software (e.g. DOSBox), and thus doesn't surprise me that it might slow things down overall.

The SB and SB Pro series are all 8-bit cards, so there probably won't be much difference among them (except maybe that the SB can only do monophonic digitized sound)

Reply 4 of 7, by HunterZ

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I tried running the demo and it seems to run okay under a recent CVS version of DOSBox. I used the dynamic core, so I noticed that at times I had to lower the cycles to as low as 3500 to keep the sound from being to choppy, while at other times I had to go as high as 30000+ cycles to get the smoothest framerate possible. I think at times it does calculatons that take a lot of work for DOSBox to emulate or something.

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