VOGONS


First post, by ben401

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After my Terminator - Future Shock issue in dynamic mode on mac, here I am again with another issue for System Shock.

Once again I've been able to test the same procedure with the same config at work on a linux machine (and the same iso and install procedure).

Playing System Shock on mac with core=auto is painfully slow whereas it works flawlessly at work. On my mac, I check the cpu consumption and there's still a LOT of place for dosbox (only consuming about 20% max, and nearly nothing running apart from it). The slowdown madness starts at the fade out of the "origin" logo, the cinematic is then soooo sluggish, only the menu asking for the name and to select the difficulties seems smooth. After that during in-game it's once again very very slow...

With the cpu=normal, the game crashes very soon during the origin logo, but I'm not sure it's relevant... (sometimes: Exit to error: IRET:Illegal descriptor type 0 [once it was 8, another one it was 12 for this value], sometimes: Exit to error: INT:Inner level:Stack segment not writable)

My work and home machines specs are quite the same, I would say a little better for the linux machine, but i think nothing that would explain such a difference of behavior between the two...

I know the dosbox team doesn't have a mac dev, so has anyone in the forum already encountered my issues, has a fix for them???

This issue appears on both the build provided on the dosbox website and my own builds...

The dynamic mode is working on mac, I've been able to complete Dark Forces using it and it was great, but there seem to be some issues remaining 🙁

Thanks in advance!

Reply 1 of 3, by MiniMax

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That core=auto settings is supposed to auto-matically switch between normal and dynamic. When comparing, it would be better to explicitely set core=dynamic.

The slowdown you see could be caused by the choice of output-mode and how that mode works with the graphics driver/card. So, try different output-modes.

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Reply 2 of 3, by HunterZ

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What cycles= setting are you using?

Reply 3 of 3, by ben401

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Thanks a lot MiniMax, changing the output from surface to opengl did the trick, it's now very very smooth 😀, I would have never thought of changing that setting! You've really made my day...

All my apologies for incriminating the dynamic core too soon! My bad...

PS: I know it didn't sound related but I tried again future shock with that new setting, no improvement though 😀