Regarding SS Enhanced:

Okay - oddly enough, the 640x480 resolution is only marginally slower than the 320x200 one. The 800x600 res crashes DOSBOX.

You are running regular 0.65 build, right? Can you try that [800x600] with ykhwong's build? I am just curious if it is something my patch fixes -- I've seen the issue in some apps (like whatvga) but I haven't seen it in games yet. That was actually expected, the issue was most likely for highres games and most of these were not playable until recently.

I'm using ykhwong's latest build for all games because of its extra features like Direct3D support. 😀 I think the 800x600 crashes because it's an external patch that needs to be run - who knows, maybe my version isn't compatible with the one it's meant for? Every other game I tried in high resolutions (Settlers 2 at 1024x768, also Afterlife and mechwarrior 2 at 1024x768) work very fine.

Jesus nice tests. Is it odd that dosbox is one of the main reasons I'd buy an extremely fast CPU? Very Happy I figure in the future I'm going to play powerful new games too + use vista, so its going to be a dream running everything on dosbox.

Believe it or not, DOSBOX was the first thing that came to mind when I read about the Conroe's performance. Since I built the system on wednesday, I've mostly been testing the demanding DOSBOX games so that says a lot doesn't it 😉. Not surprising since a lot of my favorite games were quite demanding.

how smooth does the graphics animate? and how crisp is the audio in both the cannon fodder games?

With video I take it you mean graphics? The original used to have a movie at the start but I lost my disks and can't find that version anywhere online.

And Cannon Fodder used to be very smooth already on my old AMD 64 3000+ but I'll give the games another go tonight to make sure.

updated above post and thanks for the testing..... never new there was a intro vid for cannon fodder... only ever played the demo and what i now assume is the cracked version.

how is Dungeon Keeper behaving? Just had someoe asking for this game because it ran poorly for him.

i found the easiest crash proof way to speed dungeon keeper up (windows version) is to tell it to use "windows NT 4.0" compatability mode.... get him/her to try that.

Dungeon Keeper runs extremely well - even a bit too fast in the game itself (this was also a problem with more recent computers when run natively) - the problem I had before was the map screen where the narrator explains about the land you're trying to conquer which used to stutter terribly but not anymore.

Well the animated intro is very hard to find - I can't even imagine how I lost my disks. I bet someone nicked them 😢 Cannon Fodder 1&2 was already very playable on my previous PC though, should be perfect now.

thanks for testing, I passed your findings on!

Red,

What did you do to get Skynet working? I've been trying for like 5 years seriously to get that game working in 640x480 and the only machine it works on is an old 75mhz which is too slow to do it right. I just built a W95 P2 and I think it works on there, but it errors out the monitor because it's out of range in 640x480.

So anyway, how did you get it working in Dosbox? It crashes Dosbox for me, and in straight XP it freezes at the "Detecting FPU" part. You'll be my hero if you can tell me how to do this. SKYnet is one of my favorite games *ever*

I'm using Dosbox .065 and have a Geforce 7800 GT XP Pro SP2, 2 gigs of ram, 2.53ghz p4.

try ykhwong's CVS build and/or try with varous cpu cores and sound setups (this in game setup). I suggest normal core. SVGA works in dosbox, though you will still need a fast machine to get it working at reasonable speed (e.g. core2duo).

Red, […]
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Red,

What did you do to get Skynet working? I've been trying for like 5 years seriously to get that game working in 640x480 and the only machine it works on is an old 75mhz which is too slow to do it right. I just built a W95 P2 and I think it works on there, but it errors out the monitor because it's out of range in 640x480.

So anyway, how did you get it working in Dosbox? It crashes Dosbox for me, and in straight XP it freezes at the "Detecting FPU" part. You'll be my hero if you can tell me how to do this. SKYnet is one of my favorite games *ever*

I'm using Dosbox .065 and have a Geforce 7800 GT XP Pro SP2, 2 gigs of ram, 2.53ghz p4.

First of all, are you using a ripped version or the original CD? Second of all, always replace DOS4GW with DOS32A. Other than that, the game should run fine if you use a recent CVS and use dynamic mode+auto cycles.

i agree with Sreckos and red_avatars post. skynet should be playable on your system with core=dynamic and cycles=max, but only on low resolution.

anyway, back to topic...
ive played around last days with some simulation games, that beats the crap out of my CPU!
first some voxel engine games with SVGA:
comanche 3: <10fps unplayable
shattered steel: playable but some slowdowns in heavy fights (shild hits).

US navy/marine fighter: unplayable
and grand prix 2: playable but with reduced detail.

all games tested with yhkwongs latest CVS on a athlon fx @ 2750 MHz.
@red_avatar, i whould appreciate if you could test some of these on your system...

I'll have to track down some of these games - I'll let you know when I've tested them.

We ordered the parts for the custom Core 2 Duo machines that we are building for our work PC's today. So I'll be building those sometime next week....works out well since I'll be able to evaluate the performance for myself when I build my new machine at the end of this year.

We also started ordering the Core 2 Duo laptops (D520) from Dell today. I'll see if I can run some DosBox benchmarks on those.

I'll be upgrading to an E6600 soon too, and hope to run it at 3.0 GHz. Sure, two of the main reasons will be MAME and DOSBox, even though I have a perfectly nice DOS-based system (well, minus the case). I estimate games running at mid-level Pentium performance, like a P-150 or so. At the moment they do about a 486 DX2/80 or so.

Got my work Core 2 Duo machine setup yesterday. Need to test DosBox on it!

Heh. I am jelous. 😎

Still standing with my Sempron 3000+ (2 GHz).