did you try double buffering ?

Since the screenshot is made from dosbox internal buffer in render.cpp this should be well before any output settings. But I did try the fulldouble option (with surface output) and no change. I might add that I notice tearing in other games as well although it's less apparent if the screen is not scrolling horizontally.

Double buffering got really slow in 0.62, so it's more or less unusable now unless you only want to be able to use half the cycles.

I followed your advice and set VGA_PARTS to 1. While there was still tearing in the games, the picture was only broken once in some frames. A typical issue when vsync is not used...
Then I dusted off some old computer I have lying around here and loaded the test games native in DOS 6.22. It seems that most games indeed do not use vsync as I noticed the same problems. I wonder if my vision is getting better through the years 😁. I could swear I never noticed this few years back.
Anyway, VGA_PARTS seems to help to some degree because it does not make weird artifacts when frame is split 3 or 4 times between frames. I didn't notice any slowdown so I guess I'll be compiling it like this.

it was there as the amount of time spend in the screenupdates (if it's in one part) caused sound stuttering now and then.

gulikoza wrote:

I wonder if my vision is getting better through the years 😁

Nobody used to notice how bad the scrollings sucked on PC, except if you had an Amiga 😉

I just remember two things that had good scrolling on PC. Most freaky demos and Turrican. 😁