Ah yes, of course... but which ones have timesync support? Does ykhwong's build?

Yes, Ykhwong's build has timesync support.

Eeeexcellent... -goes off to download it-

Okay, it seems to be working rather well... even got high-color full-screen videos running pretty smoothly, with 50000 cycles. However, at random intervals, the controls will freeze - the Crusader will either stand unmoving, or continuously walk in one direction indefinitely... is this a related problem? The emulation pausing to 'catch up', or something? Or just a totally unrelated bug? Either way, it's rather troublesome, since only my character is affected by it - the enemies can keep shooting. :p
Fortunately, it seems that hitting escape solves the problem, at least temporarily - which is somewhat odd concidering that escape has no function within the game - the main menu's reached with F1. Which seems to suggest that the problem's somehow related to DosBox... or what?

Make sure Task Manager isn't exceeding 90% processor usage. Crusader is one of the more intensive Dos games so you'll need to watch your processor usage much more closely.

Also ESC does the same thing over here that you describe. I didn't encounter your issue but if I hold down the cursor keys, while the character is walking and I hit ESC then the character will stop. I also pushed processor usage up to 100% and wasn't able to reproduce this problem.

Usually the stuck key problem in Windows NTVDM is caused by high processor usage so this may be the same thing.

hmm I thought the key stuck problem for crusader was fixed. (spend a lot of time debugging it)
Not sure if ykhwong adds some keyboard stuff to it.

It wouldn't surprise me if the problem was caused by high processor usage... in order to run full-screen high-color videos smoothly, I pushed the cycles up to 50.000... o_o Next time I run it, I'll try to check the actual CPU usage, but from earlier experiences with the normal DosBox build, Crusader easily pulls 100% when you're moving...

Oh, and Qbix? That avatar is frighteningly hypnotic...

blackdragon. Well that is partly to blame on the game itself though. A lot of data is being transfered when the screen moves...

the avatar is quite nice I agree.

Just ran a trial... I was hitting roughly 90% CPU usage when standing still - and, according to the Dynamic Cycle Display, running at around 35.000 cycles per sec. Of course, that probably means that I'm pushing 100% when moving, although I haven't found a way to check that without leaving full-screen mode - which, I presume, would jilt the results anyway...

-watches Qbix avatar for a few minutes, mesmerized-

...huh? Oh, yeah, and I haven't seen any more of those sudden, inexplicable shutdowns that I experienced while running the ordinary DosBox. All in all, I'd say it runs better than can be reasonably expected from an emulation of a particularly difficult game such as this... I just wish those control shutdowns wouldn't come at such damnably inorpotune moments... like just after you set a spider-bomb. :p

I always run DOSBox in windowed mode myself... Doesn't seem to be noticeably slower.

Okay, I tried to run it windowed... providing that those results are reliable, it's pulling 95% of my CPU when I'm in motion - which is basically everything there is.

More worrying, however, is the fact that I just got another 'crash'... suddenly, inexplicably, without warning, DosBox shut down while I was playing No Regret. It happened once with the ordinary build of DosBox, too, I might add...

It's easy for a layperson like me to imagine that the emulator simply overheated as a result of trying to keep up with the huge demands the game was making, but I may easily be mistaken... :p

😀

Hopefully you've found a dosbox bug and not a crusader bug....

Can you try running the game in normal core? Yeah, it'll be slow and take forever. I would have you set "waitonerror" option in dosbox.conf (so we could get the rror message)but it doesn't seem to work here....and supposedly it's set to TRUE by default and suposed to work......

Nothing that a program does in an emulator should ever cause the emulator to crash. If it wasn't a fluke then it's definitely an issue in DOSBox.

Well, there are several situations which cannot be handled in dynamic core. DOSBox will shut down then, but the error is only reported on the console. That will change, there will probably be a decent "Oops, this program is not compatible with dynamic core" error screen somewhen.

Ah, right! So, the issue could be handled by switching to another core-type... Full, Normal, or what?

Any that works 😉
Normal core should not fail under any circumstance and is the recommended choice when dynamic doesn't work.

I tried with Full core... verrrry odd...

At first, it seemed to decrease performance - the cutscenes were hacking like nobody's business - but when I got into the game itself, that was running fine. And what more is, according to the display in the top, I was only pulling 10-12.000 cycles per second, even while moving! 😦

I don't get it... well, I didn't experience a crash, but the trouble with those kinds of things are that you never really know whether it's there 'till it jumps out and hits you in the face - there doesn't seem to be any particular pattern to how long time passes before it goes down...

I'll try to experiment with some of the other core-types...

I tried Ykhwong's newest build (8 Dec 05).
With the default config, Regret was incredibly bad as ever, every now and then severe slowdowns, horrible sound stuttering, awful videos - you name it.

After some experiments with the config, the game runs almost as it did in the good ol´days of my 468. Okay, some mild slowdowns are still there, but videos are perfect (even fullscreen), music can be played (before, it had to be zero, otherwise no playability whatsoever). There are crashes, and very often so. Be sure to follow the rule: save early, save often. It can be annoying, but a new start only takes less than a minute.

So here we go:
These are the entries I consider absolutely crucial:

1output=ddraw
2pixelshader=none
3scaler=none
4core=dynamic
5cycles=50000
6timesynched=true
7showcycles=false
8svgachipset=s3
9videoram=16384
10nosound=false
11rate=22050
12blocksize=1024
13prebuffer=100
14
15mount C "c:\games\crusader"
16imgmount H "D:\crusader.iso" -t iso

My system:
Pentium 640, 3 GB RAM, 7800GT, X-FI

For the time being, I am hooked to Regret. But in the future I will try other hardware hogs with this very config. Cybermage and ROTH come to mind.

Ykhwong's build last update is 17th December 2005.

Well, yes, but that was not my point.
When I startet my investigaions, last update was 8th December 2005.

Meanwhile, I have updated to the newest build, and the situation hasn´t changed.
Example: Ykhwong notes to DOSBox CVS (12/17/2005):
"Fixed a bug that opengl doesn't work on nvidia vga cards."

Still, I recommend ddraw as output over, say, opengl.