Your host OS does the caching way more efficient than smartdrv could ever do it.
Do you have any specific problem where hard drive accesses are relevant?

[Moved to DOSBox General Section]

I've increased the CPU speed to Max and the speed improvement improved a lot.

Just want to know whether any other cache program that DOSBox can use to increase it further.

Regards,

Jon

nope
caching programs will probably slow dosbox down as the host caching is much more efficient. (the caches are much larger!)

Sorry for bumping this, but it seems more appropriate that to start a new thread.

Not long ago I was running a game through DOSBox that had it absolutely necessary to access SmartDrive to work, because apparently the developers had thought that this would optimize performance on existing hardware back then. So I had to obtain a copy of smartdrv.exe and put it where the game could find it.

Some other games, including Bethesda's Arena and Daggerfall, are also apparently tailored to work with disk caching programmes like SmartDrive (at least, this is what the respective manuals say). In the view of this, I'd like to ask whether a programme that runs in DOSBox could actually get a performance gain from the presence of a disk caching utility if the developers originally had it in mind that the programme in question should utilize the capability of disk caching? Or will the disk caching programme slow down DOSBox nonetheless, nullifying the potential speed increase?

How about Qbix' answer just above your post? Also which game are you refering to?

Dominus wrote:

How about Qbix' answer just above your post?

It doesn't explain if the games that were originally supposed to perform better with a disk caching utility will do so when DOSBox uses host OS caching, and I don't have enough knowledge of the matter to figure it out on my own.

The game that has the use of SmartDrive hard-coded into it is Fallen Heroes. Also, the old Daggerfall demo v0.1 calls SmartDrive from the BATfile that launches the demo, and the retail versions of Arena and Daggerfall mention the use of disk caching in their respective manuals.

The shareware version of Fallen Heroes runs fine here in DOSBox 0.74 with default settings. DOSBox crashes with auto cycles, but fixed cycles (I used 20K) works.

One of the game's startup batch files loads SMARTDRV.EXE for a 2MB cache, and then the main executable periodically calls SMARTDRV.EXE to flush the cache during the game. The game developers apparently thought the game performed better with the cache on real DOS systems, but AFAICT it works fine in DOSBox without the cache. I put a dummy SMARTDRV.EXE in the path that does nothing because otherwise there is an understandable "bad command or filename" error message that messes up the screen, but that's only cosmetic.

I think drive cache is never going to be "absolutely necessary" for any game in DOSBox, although some trivial workaround like I did for Fallen Heroes might be in order in such cases. As to whether there's any difference in performance to use DOS disk cache software inside DOSBox, I suspect it's negligible (and possibly counterproductive, as Qbix suggests), but can't be sure without trying it both ways.

ripsaw8080, thanks a lot for the detailed answer!