First post, by TomJeffersonJones
I thought I had the Tie Fighter Collector's CD-ROM running perfectly in Dosbox 0.74, I'm using the official release version available from Dosbox.com. Running the flight-engine at 640x480 with a dynamic core and cycles on auto or max gives me perfect, and I mean perfect performance in flight and during cut-scenes, concourse and briefings.
But, under those settings, certain multi-turret ships like platforms, escort shuttles, cargo ferries and container transports, corvettes etc, do NOT fire their turrets at all, except in rare instances like during their death-roll when there are a lot of explosions on screen. Fighters and mines seem to function fine. Interestingly enough, large cap-ships DO fire their turrets and missiles as is normal.
If I fix or limit the cycles to about 70,000 these malfunctioning turreted objects will target and fire normally. The further I limit the cycles, the more often they fire and the range at which they begin firing seems longer. The problem is, at 60,000 cycles and below, the playability starts to suffer. 60-70,000 cycles is playable in battle, but there is a lot of chop when something big blows up. Increasing the cycle limit to 80, 90 and 100,000 starts to eliminate this, but the increase in fluidity results in the turreted ships mentioned above firing less and less, which unbalances the game.
At 75,000 cycles platforms for example will fire when I fly towards them in cockpit view, but will actually stop firing if I view them from a side window or in the threat display, presumably because the rendering load is decreased causing the game to speed up....
The Tie-Fighter CD is a popular game around here, I believe - so I thought I'd appeal to the community for suggestions. I've tried many different cycle settings, tried the normal core which slows the game down to unplayable levels, tried different emulated vga machines, all emulated cpu types, surface, ddraw, and opengl outputs, different full and window resolutions, filters and scaling settings, different priorities and different cpu cores. I've also tried replacing the game's DOS4GW with DOS32A.
The problem is no better with any of those settings....no worse either (aside from the settings greatly slow the game or keep it from launching.)
My current .conf is listed below....My goal is full fluidity w/ the flight engine set at 640x480, with proper turret behavior. atm it seems like there's an inverse relationship there. Playing the thing at 65-70000 cycles is fine, but like I said, large objects exploding cause the FPS to suffer noticeably, frameskip doesn't seem to help this any either.
The game is completely fluid at all times under max or auto cycles.
I installed the game through Dosbox 0.74 and am playing it with the same mountings I used during the installation. Installation went without a hitch, and I'm running the game with the CD in the drive during play.
the essentials of my system:
Opteron 165 @2.4ghz
2gig RAM
Win XP pro
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[sdl]
fullscreen=true
fulldouble=false
fullresolution=original
windowresolution=original
output=ddraw
autolock=true
sensitivity=100
waitonerror=true
priority=higher,normal
mapperfile=mapper-0.74.map
usescancodes=true
[dosbox]
language=
machine=svga_s3
captures=capture
memsize=16
[render]
frameskip=0
aspect=true
scaler=normal2x
[cpu]
core=dynamic
cputype=auto
cycles=auto limit 65000
cycleup=10
cycledown=20
[mixer]
nosound=false
rate=44100
blocksize=1024
prebuffer=20
[midi]
mpu401=intelligent
mididevice=default
midiconfig=
[sblaster]
sbtype=sb16
sbbase=220
irq=7
dma=1
hdma=5
sbmixer=true
oplmode=auto
oplemu=default
oplrate=44100
gus=false
gusrate=44100
gusbase=240
gusirq=5
gusdma=3
ultradir=C:\ULTRASND
[speaker]
pcspeaker=true
pcrate=44100
tandy=auto
tandyrate=44100
disney=true
[joystick]
joysticktype=2axis
timed=false
autofire=false
swap34=false
buttonwrap=false
[serial]
serial1=dummy
serial2=dummy
serial3=disabled
serial4=disabled
[dos]
xms=true
ems=true
umb=true
keyboardlayout=auto
[ipx]
# ipx: Enable ipx over UDP/IP emulation.
ipx=false
[autoexec]
mount D: E:\ -t cdrom
mount C: C:\Dosgames\Tie
d:\
Tie
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If any has a suggestion thanks in advance!
yours, in nostalgia
TJJ
