Fast doesn't have anything to do with it. Compatibility does, both in the guest and the host.

I have no idea where your pulling this 1999 figure out of and why you think the "majority" of DOSBox users are changing the frequency from 22050 to 44100hz.

I can't remember the last time I messed with those values.

44khz audio in dosbox and other cool tricks

Well for one thing, certain onboard AC'97-based audio chipsets get upset if the mixing rate isn't 48000Hz due to poor resampling from the driver's end.

The numbers are but an average or global number. Ofcourse there will be computers which aren't compatible with 44100 Hz after 1999, and there will be those who are before 1999, but like I said, the majority of computers became compatible with 44100Hz sound (like almost all computers running either Win98 or WinXP where the OS is able to playback CD and DVDs.

@leileilol: As far as your computer is concerned, might be an issue with your computer, or because it's a very old sound processor. Most computers I know have integrated sound cards that work just perfect. In the past I had an integrated AC'97 sound card on my MSI motherboard, and needed to set the value to SBPro, not SB16. Still changing the values to 44100 worked on my pc; so I'm sure it's an issue on your pc and certainly not all pc's.

Why would anyone want to run Dosbox on an old computer anyways? You're serious about running a computer before 1999 with XP or Vista?
If Linux then I can't say anything about it, but it doesn't make any sense to run P3 computers or P4 with lower than 1Ghz speed cpu's on XP or Vista.

ProDigit wrote:

@leileilol: As far as your computer is concerned, might be an issue with your computer, or because it's a very old sound processor. Most computers I know have integrated sound cards that work just perfect. In the past I had an integrated AC'97 sound card on my MSI motherboard, and needed to set the value to SBPro, not SB16. Still changing the values to 44100 worked on my pc; so I'm sure it's an issue on your pc and certainly not all pc's.

It's actually a driver issue, as leileilol already mentioned (nor did he say that it was his system that exhibited this problem). My moms laptop had it for instance... it distorted anything that wasn't played at 48kHz until I updated the driver. This is fairly common, unfortunately.

ProDigit wrote:

Why would anyone want to run Dosbox on an old computer anyways?

You never know... The thing is, however, that DOSBox is quite CPU heavy. While no PC will have trouble using DOSBox to run Alley Cat, it's quite a different thing to run a multimedia title from the late 1990s. That can make some modern PCs struggle and having less audio data to process will help. There are also ports of DOSBox on much less powerful devices, like the S60 version.

Personally, yes, I run DOSBox only at 48kHz and never noticed any compatibility problems. That's not to say they don't exist though (nor that running at 22050Hz would fix them).

I'd meant with my prev post, users with older than the now 12 years old pentium computers, will most likely prefer running Windows 98 and the whole OS DOS, which runs better on those machines, instead of running it simulated.
44,1kHz does not really decrease performance too much. More likely due to unoptimized virtualization some DOSBOX games may stutter, but that's a CPU issue, not a soundcard issue.

I've ran some tests, and with tweaking DOSBOX games run great on a P3 800Mhz Celeron M processor, and even better on the Intel Atom processor.

I think DOSBOX could optimize for low profile computers like cellphones in the future. Nvidia came out with a terga platform with 4cores running at 2 GHZ, each core about 75% as fast as a core2duo processor of that same speed!
That is some serious stuff...
Not serious for desktops, but serious for cellphones, with a TDP of < 8W, was unthinkable before!

But for those machines to be powerful enough DOSBOX needs to do some threading, even if they would just separate the graphic display and sound from the actual kernel.
I think it would be fairly easy to split DOSBOX in 2 or 3 threads.
Just like Openttd, it might be that it's not possible to split the threads easily or balanced. If DOSBOX is an app using only a single thread, it might be possible to reduce that thread from the above 2 instances, making it possible to run upto 20% of the workload in a secondary thread.
The freed 20% of the first thread might make it possible for the first thread to process faster and more.

I am so happy that every now and then an expert arrives to tell us what dosbox needs.

🤣, yeah, mister bullshit is in the house!

ProDigit, I guess if you'll code a good threaded version of DOSBox, the developers will be more than happy to accept your code.