First post, by Great Hierophant
- Rank
- l33t
The most important piece of hardware you need to run DosBox is a fast CPU, the faster the better. There are certain Dos games run in DoxBox that could bring even the mighty Athlon FX 55 to its knees, today's fastest gamng processor. (I won't even consider running a version of Windows and trying to play a game.)
This makes sense. In the old days, even a 486DX2 was not fast enough for some of the last Dos games. You really could get up to a Pentium 200 before you could stop. But aren't there ways to reduce the emulation overhead? For example, for systems with an x86 processor, why not let it handle the instructions while DosBox simply sends it to the processors at a speed that the game expects. Cache and compensate, superscalar architectures and branch prediction can be eliminated by sending the instructions to the processor abnormally slower.
What about the graphics and sound cards in a computer these days? A user with a processor like the Athlon 64 isn't going to cripple it with second-rate GPUs and APUs. Does DosBox use the Geforces, Radeons and Audigys for more than glorified frame and sound buffers? If these cards can take some of the heavy burdens off the CPU, then by all means use them and let the CPU concentrate on processing logic, not pixels or waveforms.
