There is no such thing as keyboard sensitivity in these games. What you're probably experiencing is jumpiness as a result of not being able to simulate fast enough. Try increasing frameskip (counterintuitive though it may sound) or increasing the cycles, maybe switching to the dynamic core.

Thanks, I'll try that 😀

Guess why I never played privateer. That behaviour has already been in real DOS. Being a keyboard junkie, I still refuse to play with mouse or joystick, something wich some games simply mess up.

Play First Encounters, it has good keyboard routines, or Doom - the best keyboard handling I've ever met 😉

Indeed. When I played Privateer on my PC at the time it was on the shelves, it already had a slight problem with keybord controls - but not like this. I agree that Doom had good controls, but I remember swearing a few times when I couldn't target an enemy that was a little farther away too 😀

I have tweaked my dosbox config a little, unfortunately the game won't take the dynamic core, but the cycles tip helped a little - I had to kill all non-critical processes to free up some additional CPU time, but I top at 8000 cycles. It has improved the aim a little, enough at least to make the game playable.

Thanks for the input!

Just a thought: I had completely forgotten about the sound emulation - to speed things up even more, I turned off sound... and wow. I now top at 12000 cycles, and keyboard response is *much* better - good enough to replay the whole game 😀

Playing games withouth sound is just awful. You could lower the sample rate to, say, 11025Hz rather than disabling sound altogether.

and change the dosbox sound emulation to soundblaster pro instead of soundblaster 16.
saves some cpu power as well

I agree - without sound it's quite dull, but as I don't have the speech pack anyway, the only sounds really worth the effort are the flight environment and weapon sounds, and I can live without them if that enables me to play the game.

I have tried lowering the sample rate and reactivating the sound, but independently of the sample rate I top at 8000 / 9000 cycles, which does not give me precise enough keyboard response in flight mode 🙁

I guess it'll have to be soundless...

@qbix: thanks for the hint, that helped a little - but still not enough 😀

Which makes me think: do you have a performance optimization thread / info somewhere where I can read about the possible tweaks like using SB Pro instead of SB 16?

uhm well somewhere on the wiki it should be (labeled faq on our homepage)
futher disable scalers. (the normal2x ->none)
and try a different output type.
hmm even a different soundlbaster irq might help a bit if the game has a lousy pic programming (7->5)

Ok, I had a look at the wiki, and made the following changes:

- set renderer to overlay (Windows XP)
- no scalers
- changed to fullscreen mode
- changed sample rate to 11025
- changed irq in setup to 5
- changed to soundblaster pro

And it works like a charm 😀 I top at 11000 cycles with sound, and keyboard controls are good enough. Thanks for the input, I've been looking foward to playing this game for quite a while...!

Aeon: Just out of curiosity, what are your system specs? (especially CPU and video card)

@HunterZ: these are my specs...

OS: Windows XP Pro SP2
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (1,9 Ghz, 512 Mb Cache)
Video: Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 (128 Mb)