First post, by SquallStrife
- Rank
- l33t
So I'm one of the lucky ones that got his Raspberry Pi embedded Linux system last week. 😀
Of course the first thing I tried was DOSBox. First I tried 0.74, then CVS, both compiled from tarballs.
The problem is the performance. It's sporting a 700MHz ARMv6, which I thought would be enough to run Commander Keen 4 at full speed. And it seems to be...
...until the screen starts panning, then the framerate stutters. If Keen is moving around, firing off his raygun, everything is sweet. But if you try to start running through the stage, the framerate takes a dive, and CPU usage hits 100%. I also tried ScummVM, and experience the same issue, your character can move just fine, but if the view pans, things get sad.
I mention this, because both packages use SDL., and at the moment the RasPi only supports SDL via software-rendered directfb.
Do you reckon that performance will improve, if SDL could be made to output using some GPU accelerated method, perhaps thru OpenGL ES?
Second question, does DOSBox use much floating-point arithmetic? There are two Linux builds for the RasPi, one that's complete but only has software floating-point support, and one that's incomplete but has hardware floating-point support.
I couldn't see any difference between the two in terms of DOSBox performance, however, this could be due to the SDL/directfb issue.
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