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DosBox working at full speed (real speed of the core).

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First post, by Damas Clásicas

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Dos Freak,

Why you're so AGGRESSIVE with me?????

My post about the speed of DosBox was an absolutely NORMAL post. Why you closed it???

Please open my OLD post AGAIN and LET OTHERS say what they think.

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OLD Post:

Hi everyone:

I know DosBox is really a great tool to run many old MS-DOS programs. And I really appreciate that. But it's lacking a very important option: the capacity to run SOME MS-DOS programs at full speed.

When I say ''full speed'', I'm talking directly and literally about the full speed of the processor. When I try to explain this to other people, they asked me: why the hell you want to run OLD MS-DOS
programs at the current modern speed of processors like Ryzen or i7? They will run so fast that you cannot play with them. So, I have to explain that this option will be PERFECT only for running IA programs.

What are IA programs? Board games. Programs like Chess, Checkers, Gomoku etc. And why is the full speed so important in IA games?

The basic principle is this: the FASTER they go, the BETTER and STRONGER they will play. So, the FASTER they can calculate (in nodes per second), the BETTER they will play. It's very simple.

I have my DosBox configured like this: core=dynamic, cputype=auto, cycles=max 105%, and even with this, the speed is very far from be the BEST speed that my processor could reach.

Can someone tell me if this can be implemented? If this can be implemented in DosBox it will be even more amazing than ever! Maybe there is any special DosBox version that can do this?

Please, feel FREE to post your opinions!

Reply 1 of 4, by jmarsh

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DOSBox is an emulator so it's far slower than running a "native" program. If you've already got cycles set to 105% then that's as fast as it can go, it's not artificially limiting its speed in any way.

Reply 2 of 4, by cyclone3d

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If you want it to be faster then wait for somebody to optimize the code more.. or do it yourself.

And using ALL CAPS IN THE POST IS LIKE YELLING and is poor forum etiquette.

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Reply 3 of 4, by Damas Clásicas

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Thanks jmarsh and cyclone3d.

I thought maybe someone had some special DosBox version that had a better speed optimization to run IA programs.

Anyway, if somebody here known or has some special DosBox version that can run MS-DOS programs even faster, please don't hesitate and publish his discoveries here.

Reply 4 of 4, by Falcosoft

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First you have to understand the difference between emulator software like DosBox and virtualization software like VMware, VirtualBox etc. Virtualization software does not emulate the CPU but runs your x86/x64 software natively on your x86/x64 cores. But you cannot use virtualization software to run e.g. x86 software on ARM host or vice versa and you do not have much control over what CPU performance you would like to get in your guest environment. You only have the tools that are already given on your host platform (e.g underclocking or set power saving performance states of your host CPU).
But DosBox is different. It fully emulates x86 CPU (it can emulate even slightly different ones) so you have full control over CPU speed and you can also run DosBox on platforms using different CPU architectures (like ARM). But emulation always has performance penalty so you can never get the full speed of your host CPU.

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