Not sure if it will help, but I tend to stick with "cycles=max 80%". That way I hope I leave a little head-room for sound-processing while still allowing the CPU emulation to run almost full speed.

is an EEE PC simply not powerful enough to play games over 10 years old?

Format the harddrive, install msdos and feel the power!

Bobly wrote:

Are the problems I'm facing due to settings in the game or is an EEE PC simply not powerful enough to play games over 10 years old?

Intel Atom is not a C2D, it's not a desktop replacement CPU.

DOSBox requires a poweful CPU. (for demanding games)

I thought Fate of Atlantis runs fine in ScummVM?

Age of a game isn't a factor in difficulty of emulation. Pong is over 30 years old and it takes a lot of sweat for today's CPUs to emulate that one.

Oh and if you can, try not to use the OPL emulation on slow cpus - those will get extremely choked by that.

What's your output= set to? Play with that also

play Fate of Atlantis in ScummVM instead

My Eee900 can run Dark Forces quite well and that's a very demanding DOS game for DOSBOX because of self-modifying code it uses. It also runs Star Trek A Final Unity well and that's SVGA. On the other hand, the Crusader games run pretty choppy.

My bro has a Acer Aspire One that has the Atom CPU. It runs DOSBOX about the same as the 900 MHz Celeron M in the Eee900.

He was running Google Desktop on his Aspire One and that caused problems with ddraw output I believe. Try surface output.

play Fate of Atlantis in ScummVM instead

Unless you want decent adlib of course.

Doh! I hadn't actually noticed that ScummVM was cross-platform, might have to install that as well as dosbox, though I'll still not to be able to get other classics like Pizza Tycoon to play ^^

I'll try leaving some of the CPU for audio processing and see if that helps though I think I might just have to accept that the Atom was definitely not made for emulating DOS and stick to SNES ^^

Edit: max 90% didn't help, made it run faster and loop the credits for some reason but the sound was still choppy 😀

Have you played around with the buffers in DOSBox.conf?

Do you have a windows dual-boot on that machine? (To compare DOSBox performance & audio quality)

Must be an issue with your machine. Atlantis works fine for me (Aspire One WinXP), even with normal core.
The Atom cpu runs at 800 MHz by default to save energy (that's its main purpose after all) and is dynamically overvlocked to 1.6 GHz if the cpu is stressed. You might want to try a tool like cpu-z (don't know if there's a Linux version) to check cpu core speed while running DOSBox.

And you should update your drivers.

Just to give you an idea of how fast (well - sort of...) DOSBox runs on the Atom without sound getting choppy, here are some numbers:

Doom timedemo demo3: 2592 realticks (~486DX 66 according to http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/misc/doombench.html)

Max cycles w/ dynamic core (ykhwong's build):
DOS shell: ~22500
Realms of Arkania 2: ~19000-20000
Fate of Atlantis: 30000-35000
Doom: 25000-30000
Screamer: ~45000
Duke Nukem 3D: ~46000

Sounds like its more of an DOSBox/Ubuntu issue, maybe to do with the default sound drivers or something, for now anyway ScummVM is able to run Indiana as well as Goblins so I'll give them a spin and try and see if I can get Pizza Tycoon to run acceptably with different settings.

My CPU clocks to 1600MHz when stressed automatically so that isn't the issue (just tested it, running dosbox raises it to 1600)

It's annoying because if it wasn't for the audio issue it's perfectly playable, but the glitchy audio just makes for an awful gaming experience, I guess the last resort would be to disable audio 😒

There are other threads about bad defaults in the ubuntu/whatever linux
audio drivers, so fiddling with their settings or using a different audio
driver should help.

I think the problem is related to ubuntu.

I have an atom based eeepc, too (900a). I used to have sound problems under ubuntu 8.10, switching to debian lenny solved all the problems for me.