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First post, by abyss

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I was running quake with 10 thousand cycles and 10 frameskip and 16 mb. It was a bit slow but still good.

Reply 5 of 22, by collector

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abyss wrote:

I play space quest and police quest games with 10 frameskip and late dos games with 10 frameskip.

Why? These games are very undemanding. They all should run fine without any frameskip on all but the oldest machines.

Reply 8 of 22, by abyss

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I play doom with 4500 cycles and 10 frameskip. I play quake with 10 frameskip and 6000 cycles. I can go up to 7500 cycles. I wasplaying duke nukeem 3d and it was running a bit slow with under 7500 cycles and 10 frameskip. It was still playable. quake alsoruns a bit slow. Is their any solution to my problem. They still run at playable speeds.

Reply 13 of 22, by collector

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abyss wrote:

What is a masochism. A 500 mhz computer still has some usefullness. I could start using the 2.66 ghz computer to play games.

Dictionary.com. Why torture your self with trying to use DOSBox on such an ancient machine? The purpose of DOSBox is so we don't have to have such an antique sitting around to play our old games. Just install DOS on it and be done with it.

Reply 14 of 22, by abyss

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10 frameskip and 6000 cycles is enough to play quake with dosbox 0.70. A bit slow but still playable. I can also run duke3d but once again it's a bit slow but still playable. I can only use 7500 cycles. Is their a way for me to get quake running at full speed with dosbox.

Reply 15 of 22, by DosFreak

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Boot into real MS-DOS as the host OS on your computer.
Use GlQuake or of the many other quake ports.
Smoke some really good reefer.
Play Quake in DosBox on your faster computer.

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Reply 16 of 22, by `Moe`

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Hey, I really dislike this slow-machine-bashing. After all, 2 years ago I was running DOSBox on a 333MHz machine. Playable. Frameskip 10 was needed, sure, and I play strategy games, not action games, but nevertheless, it was a working and usable gaming setup. Many killed aliens in X-Com, treasures discovered in Eye of the Beholder, fame gained in Darklands, and so on... The worst problem was hard drive size (really, modern OSes should implement the "-freesize" mount option 😀 )

Well, of course I wouln't have dreamed of running Doom on that box, it was slow enough with a native doom port.

Reply 17 of 22, by abyss

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I already got bored of duke nukeem 3d. It is not a very fun game. I am really getting bored of quake. It got boring fast. wolfenstein 3d has gotten boring quickly. I think i should stick to platform games. Doom is still fun.

I was just playing tomb raider 1. No i was not using the nude platch. The game was running a bit slow but was still playable at 6000 cycles and 10 frameskip on my computer. I had the graphics at low and sound blaster for sound. I have the game running at playable speed.

Reply 18 of 22, by ErikGG

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Hey, I really dislike this slow-machine-bashing. After all, 2 years ago I was running DOSBox on a 333MHz machine.

I must concurr, it is great to have people try out older machines to run DOSBox and games on them as IMO these machines tend to show more drastic changes in speed when optimizing programs.

Take for instance the optimized dynamic core. Running it on a P4 on a 3,2GHz won't show any "big" improvement as it is well, ... fast. When doing this "test" on a lower cycles machines, things tend do be more pronounced.

But to slow down this parade, this isn't always true as some opcodes or opcode constructions tend to have bad (slow) consequences on a higher end machine. On of wich are the string (assembler) functions, as some basic assembler instructions constructions as a simple jump and inc could be faster then a string opcode.

Anyways, I always tend to test my optimized applications on lower end machines with small cache mem and low cycles. Just to see if the work pays off.

And well a four years back I too had a 333MHz Celleron.

Erik.

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Reply 19 of 22, by collector

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It's one thing to be using an old PC if that is your only machine, but he said that he has a 2.66 GHz computer, too. Eric might have a valid point about testing optimizations, but for game play, either run it natively on the old machine or in DOSBox on the new one.

Using DOSBox on the old PC for simple game play is rather masochistic when he has the other two other options.

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