www.dosbox.com

I installed XP specifically for a stepping-back-stone to be able to run some older games. I'm currently running 7 as my main OS, but the PC is old enough that emulation through DOSBox is too slow for my tastes.

In other words, DOSBox runs the game pretty choppy.

EDIT;
In my opinion a Pentium 4 class PC should be more than enough to emulate that era's DOS games, on paper, and from a pragmatic viewpoint.

What I think has happened is that while DOSBox has improved in compatibility, it has become less optimized (or less efficient) at running on in-between machines (way newer than DOS era, way older than current), leaving the thousands of people still running single-cores out in the cold.

That is unless there's a single-core, or Pentium 3/4, optimized build I don't know of.

Yeah, yeah, everyone and their Grandma has a multi-core... maybe, maybe not.

What I need in the end is feedback from someone who's either succeeded, or failed, at running this game on a P4 to chime in. I'm hoping there is....

A pre-emptive thanks to anyone who can help me find a speed limiter that works in XP. Because I think the problem is speed-set. I won't let me go past the "-28.0" setting. I assume that the closer to "-100" one gets the slower the timing?

And... yes. I've tried the DaggerXL port, but it's really in a way early alpha stage. It's not playable, and like most ports, it probably won't be a genuine experience.

NM.

It wasn't optimal, but these changes resulted in DosBox giving a 20-30 fps performance in dungeons.

1. Disable scaling, period... not even 'normal2x'. This was the worst setting that DosBox could be set on.

2. Change that 'surface' to 'overlay', or 'opengl(nb)'. Again, why this was set the default is beyond me...

End results? It's not the smooth 45-60 fps of native DOS, or XP, but at least it has sound without game glitches.

Daggerfall is perfectly supported on Dosbox. Some 3D games tend to be slow on P4 systems (consider upgrading, a lot has changed since then and the P4 was never very good to begin with), but increase the frameskip a little and set Daggerfall's draw distance to the minimum and you should be fine. You shouldn't expect too much compatibility running the games directly from Windows XP.

Emulover - try the DOSBox build with direct3d patch embedded. Like this build.
As example - Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny is 10 FPS with the output=ddraw and 55 FPS with output=direct3d on my test P4.