Have you set DOSBox's CPU core to "Dynamic"? Outside of that I'm not sure what else can be done to improve the game's speed - I recall Azrael's Tear being very demanding of the system's resources, even on a real DOS machine of the time.

hello, again. thank you for your response.

i changed the core setting to dynamic but the problem remains.
i cannot understand, why is it that the game runs well when I change the resolution to medium and back to high again? and it remains that way until the game starts loading another area.

thanks again.

Don't know the game, but your PC may be too slow to run it full-speed. DOSBox is very CPU intensive. What kind of CPU do you have? I'm using an old PC with a 2.6GHz P4, and i have rather bad performance with, for example, demanding 3D-games in SVGA mode.

You should try to find out the maximum "cyles" setting your machine can handle, and configure DOSBox accordingly. To find out the max setting, start the game with DOSBox in windowed mode (you have to be in the actual game, not just the title screen). Open the Windows task manager and adjust the cycles setting in DOSBox until CPU utilization is _below_ 100%. Setting the cycles above that setting will only make your system "choke".

EDIT: according to MobyGames, this is a 1995 game with SVGA support. Forget about running it in SVGA until you have at least a Dual-Core CPU.

hello.

my cpu is a core 2 duo @ 2.13Ghz

i am not sure whether i did what you said correctly, but I "played" with ctrl-f11/f12 to change the cpu cycles and at the max or at the 95% settings, the cpu usage would not go over 40-50% even when I tried to "stress" the system by turning the camera rapidly(the game is in first person perspective).

is there a way to raise the cycles even more to see whether there will be any improvement?

is there a possibility to be a graphics card problem or incompatibility?
i've got an ATI Radeon 1900XT @ 256MB.

thank you.

No that's normal behavior with a dual cpu system in Windows.

The only way to know if this slow behavior is normal for this game is if someone else has the game and runs it in DOSBox.

To gauge the general performance of DOSBox on your system with FPS games you can download a BUILD engine game like Duke Nukem 3D and run it at different resolutions.

If the games run fine in the lower resolutions but not the higher it likely is the speed of your processor. (Assuming no other processes are eating up your cpu).

Ah, my "max cycle" instructions only work for single core systems, right. Your machine should be fast enough for demanding 3D games, i think (i don't own a multiple core machine, so this is just an educated guess).

Your error description hints towards another problem, though. Here's a few things to check/try:

- try running the game from an ISO (if the game CD-ROM is data only) or BIN/CUE (is the game is using CD-Audio) image mounted with the DOSBox imgmount command (not an image mounted with Daemon Tools or some similar tool)
- search the web for the latest game patches (patches-scrolls.de)
- change the "priority" setting in dosbox.conf to "normal,normal"
- try different "output" methods in dosbox.conf
- update your graphics card drivers
- make sure no other CPU-intensive tasks are running in the background
- switch off sound via the game's install app
- if the game is using the DOS4GW extender, try running it with DOS32/A instead

That's all i can think of right now. I think i have the game somewhere, maybe i'll check it out later (reviews sound interesting).

ADDiCT wrote:

Ah, my "max cycle" instructions only work for single core systems, right. Your machine should be fast enough for demanding 3D games, i think (i don't own a multiple core machine, so this is just an educated guess).

max cycles works fine for multiple cores, but as dosbox is single threaded only one core gets maxed out. Nothing wrong.

Quick test: game has no CDDA, runs slow as hell on my system, even when using DOS32/A. Couldn't find any patches or updates. Not much time now, maybe i'll try some tweaks tomorrow.

Note: dev site says:

But, it didn’t sell and the sequel was cancelled. I expect there have been some, but I struggle to recall any adventure games since AT – except perhaps Blade Runner which had many virtues but also stiffed. So what went wrong?

...

It ran really slowly – creating the sort of luscious 3D environments we wanted – it was originally intended to be a Myst-style pre-rendered game – required a lot of polygons.

i understand.

in any case, i will try what you've guys suggested so far and post my findings.

thank you very much for your answers.

I don't think it's possible to speed up the game much in DOSBox. Reading the text on the developer's site, it seems as if they were not very happy with the game's (technical) performance at all. DOS was not the best platform for that kind of 3D stuff - i think that was one of the reasons why MS pushed the development of DirectX in the W9x days. They realized that 3D was "the future", and they tried to make Win9x a good platform for that technology. As we can see today, the strategy worked quite well. (;