Well, this is my first attempt to play "demanding" DOS games (SVGA, 3D) in DOSBOX. The game is Star Rangers from Interactive Magic, and since it is a space shooter game (no ground textures, for instance), I think it is not a too demanding DOS game.

Nonetheless, I set the cycles to max, and whenever I try calibrating the joystick from inside the game, they joystick never calibrates properly. Nonetheless, when I set cycle to a fixed number (say, cycles=35000), the joystick calibrates well.

And yes, I have tried both timesynched=true and timesynched=false, and it doesn't make any difference.

Is it because DOSBOX is trying to emulate gameport joystick, and gameport joystick is sensitive to changes in CPU cycles? See, I remember reading somewhere in a 1997 issue of CGW, that gameport joystick does not IRQ. Instead, its uses I/O poll, and consequentially, it is very sensitive to changes in CPU cycles. For example, if you calibrate your joystick, put your PC in hibernate, and then awaken your PC, the joystick will be out of whack and need to get re-calibrated.

Am I being correct so far? So is there any way to use cpu=max and get a joystick calibrated properly?

Oh, by the way, there is another minor problem:

# cycles -- Amount of instructions DOSBox tries to emulate each millisecond.
# Setting this value too high results in sound dropouts and lags. (unless timesynched is set)

When I set cycles=30000, I start getting sound dropouts and lags. When I set cycles=50000, the dropouts and lags are getting more severe. And yes, I set timesynched to true. So it seems setting timesynched to true doesn't solver the sound dropouts problem. What should I do, then? 😖

Oh, by the way, here's my complete CPU parameters:

1core=dynamic
2cycles=35000
3cycleup=500
4cycledown=20
5timesynched=true