Are you kidding? Screamer 2 & Rally are perfectly smooth at highest details at hi-res for me 😜

Really? I had to lower the detail in both to get good speed in SVGA modes. I have an Athlon64 3400+, 1 Gb RAM and a ATI Radeon X700 video card.

What about "Comanche 3"? I posted some SVGA pics a while ago, but I've ended playing in VGA, as it is far more smooth.

Comanche 3 is perfect too. The AMD 64 3400+ is nothing compared to a Conroe E6600 though - it's easily 3 times faster for Dosbox - *and* has two cores.

You'd make a good Conroe salesman... but I don't even want to think the cost of a similar system. Apart from those titles I mentioned everything is smooth playing down here anyway.

I have many, many reasons to upgrade to a Conroe. This will cinch it. From this point forward folks, it's all gravy.

Robert

It cost me about $1000 to upgrade - that includes a new motherboard (one of the best), 2Gb of high-performance memory and of course the CPU (which I had for 8 months now and still hasn't come down in price, so good deal 😉 ). I sold my old mobo, CPU and memory for $450 so that makes it a cheap $550 for a system that is 4-5 times faster than my old one.

So the dosbox was programmed to use the two cores of dual core micros, that is wonderful. I didn't know that.

VisitntX wrote:

So the dosbox was programmed to use the two cores of dual core micros, that is wonderful. I didn't know that.

It's not.

Nah it just uses one - but even one core is very powerful for Dosbox.

I know it, i was sarcastic. Sorry. He. Really i have made test and isn't too much diff between one core cpus and two cores cps if the programs aren't prepared for that. But who knows, maybe better config in mother and other hardware make it runs better.

The advantage of having a second core is that Windows Vista uses the second core for its processes while Dosbox uses the first - from what I observed anyway.

Well finally someone with a good point. It Is like a 20% or 25% of more resources for dosbox, right?

Not unless your system is constantly eating processor resources.

Well, it's easily 5%+ depending on what processes you got running. For example, I may very well be downloading files while using Dosbox, or chatting in MSN, having a browser window open which has a flash file somewhere playing (ads, tssk). Usually I have about 10% on one core. Also I used to get glitches while playing mp3s in Winamp while playing Dosbox games (I love playing Road To Hell while playing Doom for example) but with the second core taking care of this, this is no longer an issue. In fact, I never have any sound glitches anymore because sudden spikes will be compensated.

I see where is the gain. I will have to make some test with dual core chips and vista.

Hi There !
Did enybody test Carmageddon`s performance ?

It's kind of playable on my P4M 1,6Ghz Centrino laptop, splat pack is slightly worse. Should be great on a Conroe I suppose...

I'll throw in another suggestion: the DOS port of ZSNES. I tested it last week and works sweet in my Athlon64 3400 when it comes to 2D games.

But when I tried "F-Zero" or carts with built-in co-processors, like "Super Mario Kart" it was kinda slow.

Carmageddon runs sweet, but when you run it in hires the game isn't playable cuz is very slow.

Comanche 3 is perfect too. The AMD 64 3400+ is nothing compared to a Conroe E6600 though - it's easily 3 times faster for Dosbox - *and* has two cores.

When I read it more than a month ago it sounded like an overstatement, but I could not find any Dosbox benchmarks so I decided to do some myself. On Monday I built my Conroe-based rig, so the time has come.
I don't have any K8-based systems so I compared Conroe to the old K7 thoroughbred machine, I think the K8 is in-between.

Both systems are overclocked, though one can easily calculate clock-to-clock ratio from the results (there won't be a wide error margin). System specifics:

Old rig named "Redwing"
AMD Athlon XP Thoroughbred 2100+ 2222HMz (11*202MHz)
Asrock K7S8X-E, BIOS: 2004.09.15, memory: performance mode
2*512MB Infineon DDR-400 (2.5-3-3-5)
Gigabyte Radeon 9600pro (513/662MHz)

New rig named "Mushi"
Intel Core2 Duo E6420 Conroe 3200MHz (8*400MHz)
Gigabyte 965P-DS3P, BIOS: F5
2*1024MB GeIL Ultra DDR2-800 (4-4-4-12, "fast" preset)
MSI Geforce 8600GT (540/1400MHz)

1* Dosbox * Ykhwong 0.70.2007.04.10, 1920*1200, D3D, SimpleAA shader, dynamic core, cycles=auto
2test                               axp2.22       c2d-3.2g      3.31g
3------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4AI_BENCH                           2202 pt       3919 pt
5Blood 640x480, startpos           19-20 fps     44-48 fps    46-50fps
6Quake1, 320x200, timedemo 1       37.0 fps	    98.0 fps
7Quake1, 640x480, timedemo 1       17.3 fps	    34.6 fps

The "3.31g" setting is still experimental, I haven't run all the benchmarks there. In AI_BENCH (a demo engine test with a spinning torus in 640*480) the Conroe is 26% better clock-to clock, in blood its advantage is 60% clock-to-clock, and it's 2.3x faster, which means a beautifulllly playable 640*480 Blood!
The biggest difference is in the 320*200 Quake test, where the core2 advantage is 84% normalized. I'd say it's impressive.