WeeBob24 wrote on 2025-09-01, 13:20:

Hi folks, as the title says, I'm trying to run tetris (v3.12) in Dosbox. I've done so in the past with few issues. […]
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Hi folks, as the title says, I'm trying to run tetris (v3.12) in Dosbox. I've done so in the past with few issues.

But I've re-installed my OS (which is KDE Neon) and everything is running fine. Except Tetris in Dosbox. The PC runs Fortnight smoothly for example. But tetris is really slow.

It has slow response for the keyboard input
It renders with delays and catch-ups
Sometimes the blocks seem to glitch upwards (like in reverse) on the tetris game

I've used Grok AI to help, and it's given many suggestions, but they all have fairly minimal effect (e.g. cycles, output, core, frameskip, scaler etc.)

Can anyone help?

KDE desktop Enviroment uses alot of memory, maybe it is slowing it down? Found an online version of tetris from the company. The new tetris forever game plays the spectrum version too fast for me,. Does audio work fine? It used a pc speaker. Thinking about what you say is happening the graphics may be rendering slowly. you could also try dosbox-x, it has a gui.

Thanks, yeah I've tried dosbox-x - lots of setting I could adjust, but none that I've tried yet help much. Yes audio seems fine - as you say, it was just PC speaker audio from this version - I normally turn it off in the dosbox conf file.

It just seems strange that such a tiny game could struggle to run (albeit through this emulator layer) on a reasonably powerful PC.

Does dosbox-x give any performance monitoring output - it would be good to know if it's got a bottleneck somewhere.