People still use single core computers in 2012?

leileilol wrote:

People still use single core computers in 2012?

Yes, and they also use wheels. Some of them use old game software, too. Truly a den of iniquity.

My system is dual-core. That did not stop DOSBox from gobbling enough to impair pSX's music rendering. It did not always happen -- the busier the game was, the more likely -- but almost always in battles.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

It's the same as stating that humans need air to live...
BUT a just idle dosbox shouldn't suck much power (on Windows at least, on OSX it sucks a lot of power in idle state).

Why would you want to be running Dosbox at the same time as a Playstation emulator? It's not as though you can be playing two games at the same time is is? Next you'll be telling us that you leave your car running while you ride your motorbike (assuming you own both)...

It's a good topic to remind people of, though it's not just emulators.

For instance, I normally run Distributed.net on my machine. It uses unused CPU cycles to calculate optimal golomb rulers, and is tagged as a low priority process so windows should always give up CPU to other processes if they need it. I've found however, that various emulators (PCSX2, Dolphin, etc.), typically those that make use of multiple cores, can be severely impacted by running distributed.net in the background. Thankfully, DOSBox seems to be unaffected, I'm guessing related to it still primarily being a single core app (though I think there is some code to break out some processing to a second core).

Dominus wrote:

It's the same as stating that humans need air to live...
BUT a just idle dosbox shouldn't suck much power (on Windows at least, on OSX it sucks a lot of power in idle state).

"shouldn't" is such a lovely word, but the universe is not co-operating.

Just idling on my system, it does. I have not set up an unusual configuration so I do not know what it could be.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

well if it really just idles... then why are you running it anyway? and anyway, you learnt what others have known for ages, good for you.

Reckless wrote:

Why would you want to be running Dosbox at the same time as a Playstation emulator? It's not as though you can be playing two games at the same time is is? Next you'll be telling us that you leave your car running while you ride your motorbike (assuming you own both)...

Some of us have more than one program running at once. Some of us have a standard set of programs that we normally want running most of the time. DOSBox is this sort of program for me, and it happened to be the program that interfered with pSX.

I could be viewing some notes I made about a game while I am playing the game.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Some of us have more than one program running at once. Some of us have a standard set of programs that we normally want running most of the time. DOSBox is this sort of program for me, and it happened to be the program that interfered with pSX.

I could be viewing some notes I made about a game while I am playing the game.

suuure, you could but it makes not much sense to be running two emulators at the same time, I doubt you were viewing notes about a game in dosbox while you played the game in psx...

Gene Wirchenko wrote:

My system is dual-core.

Your failure to set core affinity and a cycles that isn't max isn't really DOSBox's fault, now isn't it?

non-bug

Dominus wrote:

Some of us have more than one program running at once. Some of us have a standard set of programs that we normally want running most of the time. DOSBox is this sort of program for me, and it happened to be the program that interfered with pSX.

I could be viewing some notes I made about a game while I am playing the game.

suuure, you could but it makes not much sense to be running two emulators at the same time, I doubt you were viewing notes about a game in dosbox while you played the game in psx...

Had it worked, I could have. I usually use DOSBox -- my overwhelmingly usual usage -- to run WordStar 2000. For me, the likelihood of making notes to refer to is actually rather high. The game is rather complex.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

leileilol wrote:

Gene Wirchenko wrote:

My system is dual-core.

Your failure to set core affinity and a cycles that isn't max isn't really DOSBox's fault, now isn't it?non-bug

I really do not care that much. I solved the problem by closing DOSBox. If it really mattered, I could dig in. Maybe processor affinity has something to do with it. Maybe not. Now that I have something to try, I might do so next weekend.

I do not run DOSBox at max; I run it at 3000 cycles. That is the default IIRC.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Gene Wirchenko wrote:

Had it worked, I could have. I usually use DOSBox -- my overwhelmingly usual usage -- to run WordStar 2000. For me, the likelihood of making notes to refer to is actually rather high. The game is rather complex.

Gee...Notepad works just as well and...for some obscure reason is still included for free with Windows, use it while it lasts...
Doesn't make sense to me to run two emulators at the same time, either.

bloodbat wrote:

Gee...Notepad works just as well and...for some obscure reason is still included for free with Windows, use it while it lasts...
Doesn't make sense to me to run two emulators at the same time, either.

WordStar suits my tastes better. For one thing, it is not a GUI editor. (I have yet to find a GUI editor that works right for me.)

You like old games; I like an old editor.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Maybe not worth much compared to real world usage test but from this 30 sec test i did a idling DosBox does not look like its such a ressource hog on my Q6700 quad core (OC to 3 ghz) Running Win 7 64bit.

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MaxWar wrote:

Maybe not worth much compared to real world usage test but from this 30 sec test i did a idling DosBox does not look like its such a ressource hog on my Q6700 quad core (OC to 3 ghz) Running Win 7 64bit

Well, on my system, closing it made a big difference to pSX's performance. with DOSBox idle, pSX was effectively unusable if I wanted sound. With DOSBox closed, the music rarely stutters.

I have seen it taking 33% and such like while IDLE. Granted, this is only occasionally, but why would this happen? (It is possibly an artefact of the CPU usage measuring algorithm.) Normal CPU usage for DOSBox while idle is 0%, possibly going as high as 2%.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

leileilol wrote:

People still use single core computers in 2012?

Yes. I'm still using a Pentium 4 HT (LGA 775)as my main pc in 2012 for some light gaming (i can even play Resident Evil 5 with GeForce 6200 AGP and this crap 🤣 )
(See sig for full specs)

And i also know a lot of people using budget pcs (single core)with WinXP as their main PCs (i also run XP as my main os but i have Win7 'just in case' 😁 )

EDIT: Just tested DOSBox and pSX running at the same time in my pc and DOSBox idles at 3% cpu 😕

sebaz_ri wrote:

EDIT: Just tested DOSBox and pSX running at the same time in my pc and DOSBox idles at 3% cpu :confused:

Me, too. Sometimes, I also have to close Firefox. Maybe, I have too much going in the background. Among other things, I do have an idle SQL Server 2008 Express instance.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Maybe it's not the CPU that's the problem when running two emulators. If you run DOSBox in an output mode other than surface, such as Overlay or OpenGL, then the two emulators could be competing for GPU resources.

IIRC, also, if you have any program running in DOSBox, even if it's just an editor that's sitting there waiting for input, unless it calls the DOS Idle IRQ when it's idle (pre-1990 DOS programs and even many later ones do not do that) it will use some CPU - or even a whole CPU core if DOSBox is set to cycles=max. Most DOS programs were simply not written with any kind of multitasking in mind. Even a few DOS TSRs can hog CPU when presumably idling in the background.