Just read every second word, I'm sure your point will come across.

😜

SquallStrife wrote:

Just read every second word, I'm sure your point will come across.

Sorry, couldn't resist:

"Just every word, sure point come."

or

"read second I'm your will across."

Yeah. Exactly.

😀

Ironically, because of how much more difficult it would be to talk in a non-natural way like that, doing that could very well make the episode LONGER. XP

Ancient DOS Games Episode 126 - Advanced Tactical Fighters is online!

Yup! It's time for more regular Ancient DOS Games episodes! Hooray! :D

And by some twist of irony, I decided to cover another game made by EA, having ended last year with an EA-published game. Go figure. :P

I know it doesn't come across well in the video, but ATF really doesn't feel like a proper simulation game. It's really hard to describe the specifics, but if you sit down with it having played various other flight sims and try to do anything with it, you'll instantly feel how wrong the flight model is. In fact, back when I first bought the game when it was still brand new, even my younger, inexperienced self could tell something was up, but I just sort of adapted to it because ZOMG TONS OF PLANES TO FLY AND MISSILES TO SHOOT!! 8D

I've long since stopped giving EA any money... it's hard to remember that there was once a time when they published all kinds of awesomeness, and now every time they get close to doing something awesome they butcher it with something like always-online single-player gameplay or something ridiculous like that. :P

Did you say pickle ships at the end of the episode?

Nice one Kris, didn't feel (too) long at all, enjoyed the episode!

The length of that video is about as long as I ever managed to play a flight sim game.

SKARDAVNELNATE wrote:

Did you say pickle ships at the end of the episode?

It doesn't surprise me that it does sound a little like that. I was pretty tired when I was doing the voice over stuff so I slipped up my words a bit more than usual. :P

Oh man, I love thick and large manuals. I get totally immersed in the game just by reading them. I never start a game this complex without first making sure I've read the manual once.

The last large manual I tried to read (in PDF form) was for the original X-COM. It kind of scared me off trying to even play the game until I watched some let's play videos (Kikoskia's mostly I think, which were fairly hilarious) and finally dove in. I've still never managed to beat it because of the stupid part where you have to capture and interrogate alien leaders, combined with alien spacecraft eventually overpowering my fighters. I should probably go read some in-depth FAQs and start another playthrough, but it takes such a long time to get to the late game...

Regarding the ATF game: I've never been a huge flight sim fanboy. I tend to prefer space sims, although I've never liked any more than I like the X-Wing games.

Also: If you really want to be able to watch the movies *and* get a decent framerate without exiting the game to change your DOSBox config, you could set the default cycles to 20000 and then set cyclesup and cyclesdown to a value that lets you toggle to/from a very high cycles count. It would probably require some experimentation to determine what high fixed cycles count your machine can handle.

HunterZ wrote:

The last large manual I tried to read (in PDF form) was for the original X-COM. It kind of scared me off trying to even play the game until I watched some let's play videos (Kikoskia's mostly I think, which were fairly hilarious) and finally dove in. I've still never managed to beat it because of the stupid part where you have to capture and interrogate alien leaders, combined with alien spacecraft eventually overpowering my fighters. I should probably go read some in-depth FAQs and start another playthrough, but it takes such a long time to get to the late game...

Stupid? Hardly!
That's the essence of X-COM man! 🤣 I was lucky to have an older brother that had played the game millions of times and he explained it to me gradually. These games are much more fun to me because you discover things along the way.

You should play the latest game from Firaxis, they did an outstanding job and the options and choices you have are clear cut, in sharp contrast to the original.

F2bnp wrote:

Stupid? Hardly! That's the essence of X-COM man! :lol: I was lucky to have an older brother that had played the game millions […]
Show full quote

HunterZ wrote:

The last large manual I tried to read (in PDF form) was for the original X-COM. It kind of scared me off trying to even play the game until I watched some let's play videos (Kikoskia's mostly I think, which were fairly hilarious) and finally dove in. I've still never managed to beat it because of the stupid part where you have to capture and interrogate alien leaders, combined with alien spacecraft eventually overpowering my fighters. I should probably go read some in-depth FAQs and start another playthrough, but it takes such a long time to get to the late game...

Stupid? Hardly!
That's the essence of X-COM man! 🤣 I was lucky to have an older brother that had played the game millions of times and he explained it to me gradually. These games are much more fun to me because you discover things along the way.

You should play the latest game from Firaxis, they did an outstanding job and the options and choices you have are clear cut, in sharp contrast to the original.

I have a friend/colleague that got into the remake. I'm waiting for it to have a really good sale with the DLC included. I can afford to wait for really good sales these days because I now have such a massive backlog of Steam/GOG/Humble/IndieGameStand/console/etc. games that I will probably never even play them all, let alone finish them. The frustrating thing about growing up is that even though I can buy a lot more games, I have so much less time to play them due to having a full-time job and a family of my own.

HunterZ wrote:

Also: If you really want to be able to watch the movies *and* get a decent framerate without exiting the game to change your DOSBox config, you could set the default cycles to 20000 and then set cyclesup and cyclesdown to a value that lets you toggle to/from a very high cycles count. It would probably require some experimentation to determine what high fixed cycles count your machine can handle.

Yes... but for sake of recording the gameplay I had to run DOSBox at 400,000 cycles. o_O;

...that might be a "tad" higher than most people can handle. ;D

Actually, the max setting really is needed for stable gameplay because the amount of power needed fluctuates wildly due to the way the game works. High fixed settings can not only make some of the more (relatively) graphically intense moments slower if the setting isn't high enough, but during the moments with minimal graphical intensity everything gets skippy as tends to happen when your cycles count is far too high for a section of a game that doesn't require it. :P

Gemini000: I must be honest, it was probably the best FUCKING episode ever 😁 No matter how long it was, or you criticized the game . Thumps up mate ! 😀

And if the next game is the one I hope it is . Then War Has Never Been So Much Fun 😉 😁 😀

Gemini000 wrote:

Actually, the max setting really is needed for stable gameplay because the amount of power needed fluctuates wildly due to the way the game works. High fixed settings can not only make some of the more (relatively) graphically intense moments slower if the setting isn't high enough, but during the moments with minimal graphical intensity everything gets skippy as tends to happen when your cycles count is far too high for a section of a game that doesn't require it. 😜

I don't think that max works the way that you're implying (intelligently changing cycles based on the needs of the emulated game). My understanding is that it instead dynamocally adjusts cycles to keep host CPU usage pegged to a specified usage percentage (or 100% if none specified). This generally means that it will operate at a slightly fluctuating high cycles count.

Of course, I could be wrong - especially in the case of unofficial SVN builds, which tend to do interesting things.

HunterZ wrote:

I don't think that max works the way that you're implying (intelligently changing cycles based on the needs of the emulated game). My understanding is that it instead dynamocally adjusts cycles to keep host CPU usage pegged to a specified usage percentage (or 100% if none specified).

Right. I didn't mean to imply max was "intelligent" about the way it handles cycles, but because the fluctuations between how little and how many cycles are needed to maintain the gameplay is so dramatic, using anything other than the max setting can cause one of three situations:

1. Cycles set low:
* Gameplay is very choppy
* Movies play back fine

2. Cycles set high:
* Gameplay is mostly OK, but when lots of stuff needs to be rendered the framerate plummets
* Movies flicker like crazy

3. Cycles set ridiculously high:
* Gameplay stutters when very little is going on, but plays just fine when there's lots of stuff being rendered
* Movies flicker like crazy

Gemini000 wrote:

HunterZ wrote:

I don't think that max works the way that you're implying (intelligently changing cycles based on the needs of the emulated game). My understanding is that it instead dynamocally adjusts cycles to keep host CPU usage pegged to a specified usage percentage (or 100% if none specified).

Right. I didn't mean to imply max was "intelligent" about the way it handles cycles, but because the fluctuations between how little and how many cycles are needed to maintain the gameplay is so dramatic, using anything other than the max setting can cause one of three situations:

Right, and my confusion comes from the fact that "max" should also result in situation #3 because the net effect is that the cycle count is pushed as high as it can go without overloading the CPU.

It should be possible to find a fixed cycles count that keeps your CPU close to maximum usage, which would give very similar behavior to the "max" setting. It's just that it requires experimentation work to determine that number, and it's probably less precise than what DOSBox can come up with for you (it could also result in stuttering if background processes spike their CPU usage and you haven't left enough breathing room, but that's a separate can of worms). Once this number is determined, you can set the default cycles to 20000 and then cyclesup and cyclesdown to the difference between the high number and 20000. You can then use ctrl+f12 to toggle to the max-ish speed for non-movie mode, and then ctrl+f11 to toggle back down to 20000 cycles for watching movies.

HunterZ wrote:

Right, and my confusion comes from the fact that "max" should also result in situation #3 because the net effect is that the cycle count is pushed as high as it can go without overloading the CPU.

OK, I see where the point of confusion is now...

A quick primer on the "cycles" setting:

Fixed Settings: DOSBox will, at all times, use the cycles count indicated for processing each emulated time interval. For games that do not respond well to fluctuations in CPU speed, or games that desire a specific system speed, fixed settings are typically required... sometimes.

"auto": Tries to detect how many fixed cycles a game needs and sets itself to work at that rate, or will set "max" if it determines the number of fixed cycles required to be extremely high. I've found auto isn't the most accurate setting to use for games from the 90s, but games from the 80s typically work well with it, provided they have SOME kind of timing in place.

"max": Runs a game using as many cycles per emulated time interval as it can handle. If this amount changes because of what the game is doing, "max" does not force the game to use more cycles than it needs per time interval! The max setting also detects what the system itself can handle and won't exceed that rate either.

Here's a great example of "max" in action versus fixed cycles settings: Terminal Velocity! (Note, for best effect, play with SVGA graphics set in-game, core=dynamic, and memsize=24 since the extra memory is needed for some of TV's extra features like hi-res textures.)

Terminal Velocity with cycles=20000:
* The first story page right before starting Stage 1-1 runs perfectly fine.
* The framerate in-game is terrible.

Terminal Velocity with cycles=120000:
* The first story page right before starting Stage 1-1 will have incredibly slow and choppy music playback.
* The framerate in-game is decent.

Terminal Velocity with cycles=max:
* The first story page right before starting Stage 1-1 runs perfectly fine.
* The framerate in-game is phenomenal! :D

It's actually also possible to do some highly advanced cycles count settings by defining separate "realmode" and "protected mode" amounts, as well as setting upper limits that are not to be exceeded when using max or auto, though TBH, I often forget about this and fail to test more advanced settings when trying to find the optimal settings to use for a game. ^_^;

Gemini000 wrote:

"auto": Tries to detect how many fixed cycles a game needs and sets itself to work at that rate, or will set "max" if it determines the number of fixed cycles required to be extremely high. I've found auto isn't the most accurate setting to use for games from the 90s, but games from the 80s typically work well with it, provided they have SOME kind of timing in place.

Actually, cycles=auto is supposed to just use fixed 3000 for "real mode" games and max for "protected mode" games (generally 32-bit games requiring a 386 or higher, such as Doom). This was done to make DOSBox run well out of the box on a larger range of games, as many real mode games are CPU speed dependent, while many protected mode games are happy getting as many cycles as the host CPU can provide.

"max": Runs a game using as many cycles per emulated time interval as it can handle. If this amount changes because of what the game is doing, "max" does not force the game to use more cycles than it needs per time interval! The max setting also detects what the system itself can handle and won't exceed that rate either.

This is where I'm confused, because the DOSBox wiki states that cycles=max dynamically sets the cycles count to maintain a specified host CPU usage percentage, and there is no mention about caring what the emulated software is doing:
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Configuration:CPU
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Performance