>I have a P4 mobile 2.4 Ghz notebook from dell with 1GB memory
> and the game is so so playable
IMHO on your configuration it should be ok. I have 1Ghz Athlon and it is about the border line as far as speed is concerned. Athlon processors are better for DOSBOX (long instruction pipeline in P4 does not like CPU emulator 😀 ), but nevetheless I think your processor is far better than mine

Some suggestions:
-experimenting with cycles/frameskip (as described in DOSBOX readme)
- do not use any scaler (even the normal2x - or whatever is its name - slows things down noticebly)
- run with 16 bit color desktop (32 bit is slower)
- use MPU-401 for music - this usually enables (at least in my case) to run game with more cycles without sound stuttering
- try different output methods:surface/overlay/OpenGL
- full screen is quicker for "surface" (but not for OpenGL)
- some people say that "overlay" runs quicker for them

Mirek

Dik mirku, zkusim to 😊

MMoudry,
Thank you for the information about deleting the u8shapes.cmp file. Using that method, Ultima VIII is working perfectly now, though a little slow.

I have been trying to get this to work for a while and have been following this thread. I still have an old 486 with DOS 6.22 and a Soundblaster Pro that I use for DOS gaming and for some reason Ultima VIII is one of the few programs I cannot get to run on it, it just goes to a black screen instead of ever bringing up the Origin title logo. It is working fine in DosBox now. Thanks again.

Hi Xian97,
Happy that it worked things out for you. 😎

For the speed issue I found that Ultima 8 will speed up if you set framedrop to 4-8 and incerase the priority setting for the dosbox process in your task manager. The framedrop is not noticable at all in U8.

Cheers,

Mipam Moudry
Software Architect