Maybe low cycles?

yeah man i had cycles set at 12000 i just set it to 3500 and it works fine thanks for the help

The problem with such old games is that the sound detection depends
a bit on the processor speed, so lowering the cycles is always a good
idea for those 😉

good to know ill keep that in mind thanks

btw im running a p4 530 model 3.0 ghz dual core... 512 mb ram... GeForce 6600 GT OCX 128 mb GDDR3 this is somewhat higher end so it might be a lot different on the cycles for anyone else with the same problem.

Just found the answer from a search. Thanks for your help, lowering cycles worked fine.

Proof that the function works ok!! <- read that speedy topic makers.

What is 10,000 cycles anyway? 10k cycles per sec (10 KHz)?

It's the amount of cpu instructions executed per second (I think) and has nothing to do with MHz values: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_cycle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHz:
"The number of megahertz refers to the frequency of the CPU's master clock signal ("clock speed"). This signal is simply an electrical voltage which changes from low to high and back again at regular intervals."

10.000 cycles in DOSBox equal something like a low-end 486 (~33-40 MHz).

Actually cycles are per tick (millisecond), so the calculation
10000cycles/msec == 10 000 000cycles/sec = 10MHz looks near,
but is quite wrong as on the one hand all instructions in dosbox
are only accounted with one cycle (on a real (old) pc complex ops
like the fpu can take several hundreds of clock ticks).
Also some operations (callback code) are not accounted at all,
which normally consist of large amounts of instructions. Basically
don't do cycles->MHz calculations 😉

Thanks for the feedback 😀

Don't beat me on my calculation. Xelsarg's equation should be valid
for a good number of games under dosbox with a decend PC.

Yeah I noticed how some older DOS games will run crap no matter the cycles, yet others that were very tough on my old PC run pretty damn well in DOSBOX regardless. So you can't even compare game speeds to those of the real retro PCs since a game that ran well on a 486 may run badly on DOSBOX yet games that only ran fine on a Pentium would run very fluently in DOSBOX.

A good lot of games use a timer, so processing power contributes to
how smooth game play is and how many details can be displayed
if the game lets you choose such settings.
If those are really old games that run crap you should note that
somewhere unless it isn't known already.

I'll give you an example: Duke Nukem 3D. It ran fine on my 486, yet DOSBOX struggles with it more (also Blood & Shadow Warrior) than games like Dungeon Keeper which was made for a Pentium. I guess it's the way the game was programmed and the way DOSBOX emulates this.

Duke3d/Blood have some aspects that are hard to emulate fast.

You could just use JDuke3D / EDuke32 for Duke Nukem 3D. I even spent much time making a launcher for it, so you don't have to launch it from command prompt / batches.

There are games that show this behaviour which don't have a port 😉

wd wrote:

Duke3d/Blood have some aspects that are hard to emulate fast.

That's what I mean - higher cycles don't mean a faster game, and because some games are emulated better than others, you can't tag a "Mhz" value on it in any case since every game will have a different performance seperate from the amount of cycles. I've seen plenty of games that should perform in a similar way since they had the same system requirements but don't.