false out every audio related device is a good start

Also make sure they are games that don't use protected mode. (DOS4GW/CWSDPMI/Custom extender).

None of the other "tweaks" will do that much for speed in your situation.

Also make sure they are games that don't use protected mode. (DOS4GW/CWSDPMI/Custom extender).

Oh hey, Dosfreak! How are ya?

So yeah, I was meaning to also ask about this trouble as well.

Angband, Tome, and Lindsey's Crawl all chuck me immediately out of Dosbox (I'm using a front end called Rubybox).

Now I know for certain that at one time, I had the first two of these games working before, but not anymore.

Do I need to create some sort of batch file executable thingie inside each of their respected folders for these?

If I run straight up Dosbox in Xterminal for these games I get the error
Segmentation fault

Not sure if that might mean anything,.

Well thanks for the response, hope to hear from you again.

Well, I'm only looking for a half second or so upgrade in speed every time my character moves.

Right now it's about 3 seconds per step which is pretty painful especially when I have to double back through a dungeon level in Ancient Domains of Mystery.

Here's my Dosbox configuration file using the front end called Rubybox.

Can anyone see something that I might have missed that could boost the gameplay by just a titch?

Thanks!

cpu cycles - 1600 (this might not be optimum, it's really hard to gauge such a speed in a text based game) dosbox machine - vga […]
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cpu cycles - 1600 (this might not be optimum, it's really hard to gauge such a speed in a text based game)
dosbox machine - vga
render frameskip - 0 (changing the frameskips doesn't appear to have any effect on overall movement speed)
sblaster sbtype - none
sdl fullscreen - true
sdl sensitivity - 100
bios autofire - false
bios buttonwrap - false
bios joysticktype - none
bios swap34 - false
bios timed - true
cpu core - simple
cpu cycledown - 1
cpucycle up - 1
dos ems - true
dos umb - true
dos xms - true
dosbox memsize - 4 (It seems that the lower the memsize, that faster the speed. I'm not getting this.)
gus dma1 - 3
gus dma2 - 3
gus gus - false
gus gusbase - 240
gus gusrate - 11025
gus irq1 - 5
gus irq2 - 5
gus ultradir - C:\ULTRASND
ipx ipx - false
midi device - none
midi mpu401 - none
mixer blocksize - 2048
mixer nosound - true
mixer prebuffer - 20
mixer rate - 11025
render aspect - false
render scaler - normal2x
sblaster dma - 1
sblaster hdma - 5
sblaster irq - 7
sblaster mixer - false
sblaster oplmode - none
sblaster oplrate - 11025
sblaster sbbase - 220
sdl autolock - false
sdl fulldouble - false
sdl fullresolution - original
sdl mapperfile - /usr/share/dosbox/mapper.txt
sdl output - surface
sdl priority - higher, higher
sdl usescancodes - false
sdl waitonerror - false
sdl windowresolution - original
serial serial1 - disabled
serial serial2 - disabled
serial serial3 - disabled
serial serial4 - disabled
speaker disney - false
speaker pcrate - 11025
speaker pcspeaker - false
speaker tandy - off
speaker tandyrate - 11025

I didn't try DOSBox in such a slow device yet, but there may be some generic advice/remarks.

It's about the equivalent to a 8-10 Mghz PC.

That kind of comparison is not valid. Besides pure processing "power", there are many more factors to consider when comparing the speed of systems - system architecture, graphics adapter, bus type, ram size, caches, etc. . On top of that, in this special case, you have a device that's probably not optimized for speed, but for efficiency (battery runtime). Then you have some kind of OS in "between" which probably isn't optimized for speed, too. And finally you have a DOSBox port, where no-one but the programmer can possibly say for what it's optimized or how it's coded. Who knows if all options are supported by that build. There are many, many unknowns in the equation.

Looking at your config file, there are a few things you could try:
- Reduce memsize. If you want to play text based games, what do you need 4MB RAM for? 1MB should be sufficient.
- Reduce cycles. I think the cycles setting is still too high, but that's just a guess. Setting the cycles higher than the rate the system can handle will be worse than setting cycles too low. Setting cycles too high will make the whole system (or, in your case, device) "choke". The problem is that the cycles setting is not an abolute value. It's relative to the processing power of the host system. I'd start with a _really_ low value, like 10, 50, 100, and work my way up from there.
- Increase frameskip. You don't need every frame rendered for a text based game. Set frameskip to a high number (like 10 or 20) for testing, to see the effect.
- Check if the sound is really disabled. It seems you've disabled SB sound via the config, but is the GUS really disabled? The entry in the config looks strange. Double-check the sound-related entries.

And finally, the ultimate advice: know when to stop. There's things that simply aren't possible, even if they should work in theory. (;

Try turning dosbox machine - vga to dosbox machine - cga
If they're text based this will make _no_ difference - vga and cga text modes are identical. Perhaps you might try even lower like MGA or hercules.(it might look a bit different tho ) 😜

Try turning dosbox machine - vga to dosbox machine - cga
If they're text based this will make _no_ difference - vga and cga text modes are identical. Perhaps you might try even lower like MGA or hercules.(it might look a bit different tho )

I'm quite sure that ADOM requires VGA.

I spent the better portion of a few hours trying to tweak the settings today.

This really has me going nuts.

I change so much as a little tweak, like changing cycles from 1600 to 1520, or reducing the memsize from 4 to 3, and I'm getting huge swings in performance.

I just don't get it.

And no, I'm not trying to talk about my sex life. That's a whole separate issue. 😢

We're talking anywhere from the high end of 6 seconds per step down to about 1 second per movement speed.

I'm so lost. I can't seem to maximize the options to the fullest.

I'll post again in a day or two because the suggestions I'm getting, especially from ADDiCT, means that I'm on my own from here.

Thanks for the responses. I really hope I can get this problem solved.

If anyone is willing to give me a dosbox.conf file that strips off everything to the bare essentials, please give this thread a response.

If not, I'll take my troubles and try to find the best that I can do.

Cheers! 😀

arrrgh wrote:

If they're text based this will make _no_ difference - vga and cga text modes are identical.

yeah like using 640x200 and stretched 8x8 characters isn't identical

yeah like using 640x200 and stretched 8x8 characters isn't identical

Well if they're text modes, VGA and CGA have the same 80x25 16 color text mode - please tell me if i'm going in the completely wrong direction :blush:
Edit: just remembered, if you want a stripped down dosbox.conf

1[dos]
2umb=true
3ems=true
4xms=true
5
6[autoexec]
7(your mounting stuff goes here)

dunno if that'll actually help but that's what I use for my PDA.

They definitely are different, especially you can use lots of vga registers
in the vga mode3 (palette, panning etc).

03h = T 80x25 8x8 640x200 16 4 B800 CGA,PCjr,Tandy = T 80x25 8x14 640x350 16/64 8 B800 EGA = T 80x25 8 […]
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03h = T 80x25 8x8 640x200 16 4 B800 CGA,PCjr,Tandy
= T 80x25 8x14 640x350 16/64 8 B800 EGA
= T 80x25 8x16 640x400 16 8 B800 MCGA
= T 80x25 9x16 720x400 16 8 B800 VGA

whoops, sorry. Ok, if they're not ientical they are compatible, right? A text mode game should run in both unless the game uses a vga-specific feature which is unlikely. I was just suggesting it because the video card uses lots of CPU time and a VGA card should not be nescessary for a textmode game.
Edit:Wait you'r misundertanding me. I mean CGA and VGA _text_ modes are identical or at least compstible. CGA ang VGA _grahics_ modesare worlds apart.

mode3 is textmode and supports (almost) the full vga portset for tweaks

Well, OK then. I still think that a text games like rougelikes shouldn't need full VGA but I'm probably wrong 😜 . Still give it a go Smothermunchie. If your game still doesn't work though, I really don't know, sorry.

Edit: Ahem. I stand corrected: I tried to run ADOM with CGA and it failed. However, if you use the -m switch with the Hercules graphics card it works fine! This should make it run a fair bit faster.

Well, after fumbling around an hour our two here and there, I managed to actually double the original speed I had previously.

Now my character can take a step about once every two seconds.

I can't imagine anyone else finding this to be acceptable, but for myself, I'm incredibly pleased.

I just pretend that I'm playing the game in real time, so the slow speed doesn't bother me as much.

Two things though.

What is this mode3 textmode using VGA that wd mentioned? I'm not finding any options for mode3 in the Dosbox.conf file.

Also, how do I use the -m switch for Hercules, arrrgh?

This definitely sounds promising if that would work. Gameplay would speed up tremendously if I could run it through the Hercules emulation part of Dosbox though Hercules doesn't support any coloring correct?

Thanks again for the great responses!

All of you guys rock! :happyhappy:

I'm not finding any options for mode3 in the Dosbox.conf file.

Huh??? Are you sure you know what you're talking about? Mode3 is standard textmode.

Actually, I don't have a clue as to what I'm talking about. *lol*

All I'm seeing in the dosbox.conf file for resolution is:
# scaler -- Scaler used to enlarge/enhance low resolution modes.
# Supported are none,normal2x,normal3x,advmame2x,advmame3x,hq2x,hq3x,
# 2xsai,super2xsai,supereagle,advinterp2x,advinterp3x,
# tv2x,tv3x,rgb2x,rgb3x,scan2x,scan3x.

and this

# machine -- The type of machine tries to emulate:hercules,cga,tandy,pcjr,vga.

Not seeing anything that says mode3.

Oh, and I did get it to run under Hercules but didn't see any real improvement in speed that made it worth sacrificing the coloring and font that appears under VGA.

It's quite likely that the tablet simply can't handle the necessary calculations for this game without having the constant slowdown that comes with it.

Anyway, I'm happy enough as it is. 😁

mode3 is standard textmode as used by textmode apps/games usually, int10/ah=3
nothing to switch or so

What wd means is that you don't specify "mode3" in the configuration file. Those scalers just double or triple triple the screen size so it will display well on a high-resolution LCD or CRT. The game sets mode3 in the code somewhere.

It's quite likely that the tablet simply can't handle the necessary calculations for this game without having the constant slowdown that comes with it.

Mmm, ok then. I though it would have made a difference but, whatever. Try what ADDiCT suggedted tho - I reduced my cycles from 3000 to 500 on my PDA and sped up at least 5 times! What previously was horribly jerky is now reasonable smooth - for an awe-inspiringly powerful 200mhz proccessor 🤣 Try somewhere between 5 - 50 for your kind of CPU.