I think I have the same problem.

Controls are very unresponsive. Any time a key is tapped (pressed briefly) there'a high chance the game won't respond to it at all. I did a little test just now: out of 40 keypresses, 12 were ignored. This applies to all keys used to control the main character.

The problem occurs in both Prince of Persia (v.1.0 and v.1.4) and Prince of Persia 2 (v.1.1). But when I tried a different game (Turrican II), everything worked fine.

I tried increasing/decreasing CPU cycles, increasing/decreasing DOSBox process priority, disabling sound in game, changing the "usescancodes" option, using different DOSBox versions, rebooting the system, and, as a last resort, reading README. Nothing helped.

DOSBox versions tried:
- DOSBox 0.74.3
- DOSBox SVN 4348
- DOSBox-X 0.83.2
- dosbox-staging-git fff26a27d8

System:
- Manjaro Linux (up to date)
- ASUSTeK Computer INC. P8P67 REV 3.1
- Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz
- 8 GB RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650

(a moderator should probably fix the topic title typo)

Could you post the sha256sum of PRINCE.EXE's ?

Prince of Persia always had terrible input lag, it's just how the game was. You had to account for it and do things like push jump well before the edge of platforms.

Akuma wrote on 2020-06-03, 08:25:

Could you post the sha256sum of PRINCE.EXE's ?

b648ce9a783f7de00ce2a61979ed096ba272f3ffe860ab5a24ebc5af62c33e76 (POP 1.0)
0b8ee44c81e3b8c614a735902b9bf6b3554dc35cf61c66b5acff093098f5cb3c (POP 1.3)
1ab921dac37987ddb5448d0117a6dfa2f41601410ceb189fa5919dd08369d5c1 (POP 1.4)
3f2a3730109a424f6eaf86a3303340fc9d8df511a3f3c6e077afafc5393644e0 (POP2 1.0)
c92298b62fc04fe66a0270fbaf082d7d7a5e37d0b5b7ed5adafccd43b26a67d7 (POP2 1.1)
Pretty much the same behavior in all of them.

jmarsh wrote on 2020-06-03, 11:13:

Prince of Persia always had terrible input lag, it's just how the game was. You had to account for it and do things like push jump well before the edge of platforms.

To do a running jump you need to push up one step before the edge, not at the edge. It's not input lag, that's how jumping is supposed to work in this game. I'm talking about a different thing.

Anyway, I went ahead and booted up FreeDOS 1.3-RC3 to verify how it works on bare metal and... the problem persisted. Which would suggest it's really the games' fault. But I played the first game (v.1.0) a lot back in the day and I'm pretty sure I didn't have any problems back then. Are my memories failing me or is the game really sensitive to what it's run on? I wish I had an old PC to verify...

jmarsh wrote on 2020-06-03, 11:13:

Prince of Persia always had terrible input lag, it's just how the game was. You had to account for it and do things like push jump well before the edge of platforms.

Interesting.... I happened to play this game recently on DOSBox SVN (can't remember which one, r4301 or r4335) and I enjoyed the game 100%. There wasn't any lag or input issue. Perhaps the time could have passed slightly faster than usual that I just couldn't beat it by 60mins without saving.