omfg you don't like Ultima 7?
I mean, sure, I liked Ultima 5 the best of all, but Ultima 7 was really good, the last of the great role playing games. Ultima 7 part 2 was really good too, and I kinda bundle them together as one long game.
I didn't like Ultima 7 at first either, because I used to like jotting down notes and such. With the mouse point and click it was a lot easier. But it was still a lot of fun and the storyline and challenge made it one of those games I'll never forget. You could "touch" almost everything in the game, there were tons of sub-plots and quests, references to the old ultimas, tons of dialogue.. I mean, the game is huge.
But yea, if you want to play U7 on a modern PC, you wouldn't use DOSBox anyways, you'd use Exult. Exult uses the U7 or U7-2's data files and plays the game flawlessly, and in my opinion, quite a bit better then the original. They even fixed a bunch of bugs in the original. Honestly, with Exult the game is a lot of fun and I urge you to play it through, without hacks or cheats. When the end of the game comes, you'll want more. I promise..
But *anyways*.... I don't quite follow the need for someone to get "33Mhz" from DOSBox. There's far too many factors to even begin to think about how fast/slow it should run a game.
First you have your unique system, with your own speeds of ram, cpu, video, etc etc, running in a multitasking OS. So like, your setting for "33Mhz old 486 pc with a trident video board" (if you ever found such a setting) would be completely different from mine or anyone else's.
Then you want to match it to a speed of an old PC, which was running a single-task OS, completely different everything - not to mention the fact that not all 33Mhz 486's were created equal either. When you look at it that way, there's no way to do it.
Even getting the timing right on a Commodore 64 emulator, which mind you was a .97Mhz machine, is impossible and uses a lot of CPU cycles trying to get it "close enough."
So I just think, run the game. If it runs too fast, slow down the emulator. If it runs too slow, speed it up. No biggie really.
About VDMSound, it's worked for me in varying degrees for some things, but for the most part stuff just doesn't like to run in a Windows NT/2k/XP dos box. There's a lot of reasons - video modes, EMS/XMS memory, "off-limits" cpu and memory calls, etc. DOSBox overcomes these things with a fully emulated environment, and I've had awesome success with it. However, this full emulation comes at a performance cost. For me, it's not a big deal since the stuff I use it with are fairly old games. You know, Prince of Persia, The Incredible Machine, Dune 2, etc.
And to add to this already too-long post: If any of ya'll had a GUS and miss the old GUS music sound, grab yourself a copy of twsynth and MIDI Yoke. twsynth is a modification of timidity which uses GUS patches. It's sweet playing these games with the same music I remember. And one thing I just don't understand is how good the GUS sounded compared to even my new soundblaster with 100MB soundfonts..
