The 200 mhz arm processor is nowhere near fast enough to get decent dosbox performance.

I kind of got that feeling after reading more about dosbox.

I kind of wonder how those people that made the emulator for running some of the lucas arts adventure games did it. I am guessing that those games are all similiar enough were they did something like porting just the engine to run the games and then allowing users to put the actual game content on the zodiac in such a way that the ported engine can use it.

So what makes dosbox so demanding anyway?

Basically the DOSBOX emulates the whole PC. SCUMM VM (running those Lucas Art's games) implements just engine for specific types of games: SCUMM based games/Monkey Island games and one more type I forgot). They do not use original EXE files...

The DOSBOX attitude allows to run all DOS programs (ideally), but it is slower.
SCUMM is quicker, but it runs just a group of similar games.

Well, if you are satified with running just PC XT games, I think it could be done on 200 Mhz processor.

Mirek

What about faster pda's like the HP iPAQ 5550 or 4150, or the Tungsten T3? Those have 400MHz cpu's and at least 64MB of RAM. The controls are probably not very suitable for gaming, but it would still be very nice to be able to play these old dos games. For Pocketpc there already exists pocketdos ( http://www.pocketdos.com ), but I don't know if there's anything for palm os.

I compiled DOSBox for the Zaurus line of PDA's. The ROM that I compiled it for is X based and the unit is very fast with other emulators. i.e. I have compiled a snes emulator based on SDL that is running full speed with sound without any frame skipping.

DOSBox runs rather slowly. Even at 400Mhz it is only getting to XT speeds. Without a FPU, I can't see it getting any faster. I have tried soft-float, xscale tuning in gcc and about every other option. It is just too heavy on the CPU.

LD

did you play with the cpu cycles frameskip variable ?

Yup, move frame skip to 3 and tried cpu cycles at 800, 1200, 1500 and 1800.

LD

Please let me know if there are any suggestions. Also, is there something in cvs that may help?

LD