Normally, the Dynamic core should be the most efficient, giving you the most headroom to increase the CPU cycles. But remember, that even though you have pretty impressive rig there, if you ask DOSBox to use all the juice in that A64 for CPU emulation, something will have to suffer - and that is sound emulation.

I actually tried messing with dynamic a bit. And while the cutscenes played perfectly, when I entered in game I noticed the sound cutting out very sporadically, and noticed the game was moving very slow. Not as in low framerate, but almost like everything was moving in slow motion, and the controls were delayed. It was all very random, as one moment I'd be walking smooth, then the next I would be going extremely slow with the sound jumping in and out.

You could try DOS32A, since DOS4GW is external for Dark Forces all you have to do is place the DOS32A.EXE in the Dark Forces directory and execute Dark Forces with DOS32A "Whatever the Dark Forces.exe is".

Then try dyanmic mode again and see if it works better.

IIRC, isn't there a mod or something for Jedi Academy that includes the Dark Forces levels? It's probably nowhere near a replacement for Dark Forces but it did look interesting last time I tried it.

Finally, what problems were you having with VDMSound?

woot! 😳 How could I miss DF mod for JA. DF (actually entire DF series) is one of my favourite games...and yes it unfortunately runs too slow in dosbox. I guess the code is doing something strange, so that the dynamic core does not help much...

Checking the mod now....I understand it's not finished yet but it must look good. Thanks for the tip DosFreak 😁

Sorry I haven't replied in a while, been a bit busy. What is dos32a.exe and where can I get it? Also, once I have it, how do I run Dark Forces using it?

Is the FPU working well in DOSBox? I remember seeing a major performance difference in Dark Forces when turning the FPU on/off in the BIOS on a 486DX2/66MHz.

Sorry, I'm a bit new to DOSBOx, whats the FPU and how do I change it?

FPU - numeruc coprocessor, it works in DOSBOX, nothing you should do anything about.

Mirek

yeah...it might work better with the current cvs that has assembly x86 fpu...I gotta check it out 🤣

cdelse: there's plenty of dos32a topics already opened on the forum...

DOS32A 7.33 crashes Dark Forces. It will run for about 5 mins but eventually a bunch of illegal reads will show up and lock it up. And Dynamic core causes cutscene problems and strange jitters in gameplay. I just use DF's original dos4gw.exe (sadly) and normal core and it works perfectly. On my A64 3000+, and Gulikoza's dosbox build with timesync and D3D, I sit at around 15k-18k cycles.

BTW, Gulikoza, your timesync patch is awesome! I love having it balance cycles automatically for me 😀 It causes serious problems with X-Wing CD though (both normal and dynamic core). The game runs slowmo although cycles say 20,000 or more.

BTW, Gulikoza, your timesync patch is awesome! I love having it balance cycles automatically for me Happy It causes serious problems with X-Wing CD though (both normal and dynamic core). The game runs slowmo although cycles say 20,000 or more.

The cycles chosen by the timesynch code are too much. You should try to lower the cycle limit using CTRL-F11.

Timesync is not perfect, but it works most of the time...if anybody has a better working solution, I'm sure everyone will be happy 😜

The timesynch seems to work best with resource demanding games like BLOOD or Shadow Warrior. I only noticed problems with "non-demanding" games like Wolfenstein 3D. The problem is that the timesynch code increases the cylces until 9x% CPU usage is reached even if it is not necessary for the program/game.
I set the upper cycle limit to 60.000 cycles. When I ran SoD the timesynch code made dosbox run with > 10.000 cycles (15.000 or sth) and this was way too much so SoD ran quite slowly. When I decreased the cycle limit to 10.000 cycles the timesynch code made dosbox run with 7.000 cycles and SoD ran very well.

Anyways I like the timesynch code and I don't care if I have to adjust the cycles for certain programs/games. 😉

I got my new rig today, and while 15000 cycles was most I was able to use on my old AMD 2500+, my new AMD 64 3000+ can go to 20000 cycles easily without sound chopping. Shadow Warrior now runs perfectly with only a bit of slow down when explosions appear. That's 25% power increase - not bad.