Forgot to say that operating system is Windows 98 SE

One question, if I may...

Why are you trying to run DOSBox on such a slow (by today's standards) machine? And, if you're using Win 98 SE, wouldn't it be better if you used REAL DOS? It seems pointless trying to run a DOS emulator (which requires much more CPU power) when you have the chance to try the real thing.

Unless you really don't have another machine or can't afford a new one right now, you'll get better results running pure DOS instead.

Njaydg:

1) I always try to run a DOS game in real DOS first, instead of using an emulator. And most of my DOS games run perfectly well in real DOS in my machine, exception made of Dawn Patrol. Furthermore it seems that I am not the only one.
2) In the case of “Dawn Patrol” I run it (or try to run it) in Dosbox because it proved impossible to run it in real DOS in my machine. The reason -I believe- lays in that the Matrox videocard I have, doesn’t go well with the SVGA drivers of the game. As Dosbox emulates a S3 videcard which I believe is much more in line with the SVGA drivers, I use Dosbox, with very discouraging results however. By the way, the Matrox is not on the list of the SVGA videocards mentioned by the SVGATEST.EXE which comes with the game to manually adapt the SVGA drivers to the card present in the pc.

Do you have any more suggestions?

There is not so much you can actually do. Your system simply lacks cpu power. By increasing frameskip, setting scaler to none, reducing sampling rate and setting core dynamic and cycles max you could get a few frames per second. But I really doubt it will be playable then.
Try to follow the advice of njaydg and run it in real dos mode. You could boot dos mode and try things like univbe. There might be patches for that game somewhere in the net, too.

schaetzle73,

As bugs_bugger and I have said, the speed of your CPU is what's keeping you from using DOSBox to it's fullest potential, and the only way around that is getting a faster CPU.

As for trying it in real DOS, there's 2 things to consider:

#1 - Is the game compatible with your video card (check the readme)?

#2 - Have you tried using google to search for updated drivers for your video card?

Any further advice is beyond my knowledge, so maybe someone else can help out...

Dawn Patrol does not support neither Matrox, nor S3. Some unofficial builds include my SVGA patch that provides support for Tseng SVGA cards, compatible with Dawn Patrol. In fact, Dawn Patrol was one of the test games I used while working on that patch and it runs really well. It is fairly heavy game, P3 @600MHz may be a stretch, but with dynamic core the game might be just playable. I would disable sound when running on that CPU -- the game sound is not that great anyway.

To all who have helped me:

Thank you very much.
I found an update of the Dawn Patrol at 3D Gamers (http://www.3dgamers.com/dlselect/games/dawnpa … update.zip.html)

I applied the update to the original game and then run the program SVGATEST.EXE which is inside the game directory, choosing manually configuration of the SVGA driver and then I chose the universal SVGA driver. With that the game runs perfectly under Real DOS and also with sound in every part of the game. The sound is not spectacular but always is better to hear the sweet music of the machine gun than hearing nothing.

With Dosbox, as you say I need a much powerful CPU for Dawn Patrol, I decided not to use it in this case, however I have used Dosbox with some other games in the same machine with success, for example:

Red Baron
Aces of the Pacific
Aces over Europe
Pacific Strike
1942 Pacific Air War
and some others.

Thank you again.