Oh! Also:

How would I do the math for the frame drop?

When I figure all this out I would be happy to write a game guide for Blood to add to the Wiki.

I am running the 'dynamic' CPU core but what I can gather from the forums this is unstable.

Don't know about Blood since I've haven't gotten around to testing it with Dos32a very much but using DOS32A with Duke3D freezes Duke3D. It's possible that Dos32A makes Blood unstable. From my tests switching to Dos32A from Dos4gw doesn't offer any speed improvements in BUILD games anyway.

Your cycles sound about right. I have an Athlon XP 2800+ 2.25ghz, running Windows XP.

320x200
Blood=36000 cycles for 99% processor usage

This equates to about 21fps just standing still.

So it's pretty useless right now to right a gaming guide for Blood for DosBox since only those with A64/Opteron/Xeon processors would be able to run Blood on DosBox @ 320x200 at acceptable levels....that's assuming that the sound will quality will be acceptable too.

Your probably better off trying Blood in Vmware, DosEmu, or Qemu.

Vmware sound quality is terrible and I don't know what the sound state is for DosEmu or Qemu. You'd probably be better off running it under Windows XP if you have a dual-boot or running it straight from Dos.

Dang. Well I will try those others and see if there are any improvements. If DOSbox is geared more for games what would be the benefits in trying the others?

Dos32A made things MUCH stabler as I was able to push the cycles higher (I think I didn't do too much testing as I switched pretty early) Any other recommendations?

Thank you for the quick reply. 😀

If DOSbox is geared more for games what would be the benefits in trying the others?

Yeah, DosBox is designed for games but in a way that's kind of it's downfall. DosBox is geared more for pre-1995 games on today's processors. I don't see this situation changing that much for quite awhile either unless some voodoo can be done with the DosBox code.

The latest CVS may offer a slight speed increase, I did a quick benchmark last week and I noticed a difference. Haven't bothered to do any serious testing tho so I can't give any figures, don't expect any miracles or even acceptable performance tho. I did change OS's between speed testing so that may have been the speed increase that I noticed.

Here's another interesting benchmark:

320x240 Duke Nukem 3D (standing still)
Host 2000SP4 with NOLFB=590fps
Duke3d@37000 cycles=26fps

Hm I have to say that BLOOD runs with acceptable speed on my P3 1.2 GHz with Dynamic Core, SoundBlaster 16 sound (22050Hz) and MPU 401 for music. OK there're some places where it runs quite slow and it sometimes crashes DOSBox 😖 but in general it is playable.
I'd suggest to turn off sound. Without sound I'm even able to run it with Simple Core @ acceptable speed.

You should definitely raise your frameskip! "frameskip=0" is too much for almost everything. Even action games run just fine with frameskip 2-4. This usually makes quite a difference.
And no fear using dynamic core. Some games seem to dislike it, but if it works for you, there's no reason not to use it.

ASM wrote:

Hm I have to say that BLOOD runs with acceptable speed on my P3 1.2 GHz with Dynamic Core, SoundBlaster 16 sound (22050Hz) and MPU 401 for music. OK there're some places where it runs quite slow and it sometimes crashes DOSBox 😖 but in general it is playable.
I'd suggest to turn off sound. Without sound I'm even able to run it with Simple Core @ acceptable speed.

heh. This depends on the user. What is acceptable to some is unacceptable to others. Obviously sound is very important for gameplay in FPS so running without sound is not an option. Also using a frameskip more than 2-3 can be kind of irritating. All this for 320x resolutions just so you can play Blood? When you can just use other solutions with 640+ resolution and probably their own problems but at least they would be far more playable than under DosBox.

Obviously sound is very important for gameplay in FPS so running without sound is not an option.

Well it is the only option if it runs too slow with sound and if you don't have any other possibility to run it (e.g. a real DOS/Win9x installation or sth like that). And if you can't live without sound you will have to wait for faster processors and/or faster DOSBox code.

All this for 320x resolutions just so you can play Blood? When you can just use other solutions with 640+ resolution and probably their own problems but at least they would be far more playable than under DosBox.

BLOOD, just like other BUILD games, only runs "properly" with 320x200. Anyways I don't care that much about it since I run it with an emulator and I don't expect miracles. If I want higher resolutions I can boot my Win98 SE installation.

BLOOD, just like other BUILD games, only runs "properly" with 320x200

If you mean in just DosBox and at somewhat acceptable levels for gameplay then yes.

If I want higher resolutions I can boot my Win98 SE installation.

Exactly.