First post, by MobyGamer
- Rank
- Member
Hi all, I've finished all milestone work on a new project and would like to get some feedback and testing, if you have some spare time. While I've loved DOSBox for years, especially its ability to "dial" the speed realtime, I've always been frustrated that DOSBox is not (and never can be) cycle-accurate. I never know exactly what kind of machine I'm emulating (286-12? 386-33? etc.) and just have to trust that "lots of cycles" is good enough for the game I'm trying to run.
To address this, as well as other deficiencies in other 1980s benchmarks that have always bugged me, I designed a new benchmark called TOPBENCH. The three main features of TOPBENCH are:
- Scores and timings are gathered from real systems and recorded into a local database. You can compare any two systems to see how they stack up against each other, as well as the current system. (This answered a lot of questions for me, such as exactly how much speedup do you get from an NEC V20/V30, or how wait states affect speed.)
- A "realtime benchmark" mode runs the benchmark continuously and shows you which system in the database most closely matches current performance. This allows you to "dial" DOSBox cycles up and down and see what kind of machine you are most closely emulating.
- All source is fully available (most importantly, the actual assembler metric code and score rationale are fully open, so that when you see a "Score" of "43", or a "3DGame" metric timing of 2314us, you can research exactly what that means). This is meant to help emulator authors (MESS, PCEM, etc.) compare their cycle-exactness to real systems.
TOPBENCH can run on any system that runs DOS, but it is meant for 486s and lower as the metrics are all written in 16-bit realmode assembly (which was deliberate, so that comparisons could be made all the way back to the original IBM PC). Website is http://dosbenchmark.wordpress.com where you can grab the binary+database, browse the source, learn about other 1980s DOS-era benchmarks, etc.
Before I go bothering the folks in the DOSBox forums, I'd like just a little bit more testing and, hopefully, more system entries to add to the database. I've already gotten a lot of help from the vintage-computer forum guys, but I'd love any comments, criticisms, suggestions, etc. from you guys as well. Let me know!