(This is somewhat long...)

I'm running DOSBox under Win2K SP4 on a 3GHz P-IV. I'm trying to run X-Com Apocalypse and DOOM 2. At first X-Com wouldn't work and DOOM 2 was pretty much unplayable, so I played around with stuff for a while.

I increased the cycles from 2500 to 25000, which got me about 41% of the CPU according to the Task Manager. The performance was okay, but the sound was choppy. No amount of playing with cycles or frame skip helped.

I couldn't get the CPU utilization above 41%. Above about 30000 cycles the game got noticeably slower, but the CPU utilization wouldn't increase. I eventually discovered that I could set CPU affinity, which didn't make sense for a single-CPU machine. After a little poking around I figured out that I could disable hyperthreading in the BIOS and get Win2K to believe there was only one CPU. This resulted in 80-85% utilization under Win2K at 25,000 cycles, and somewhat better sound, but it still wasn't smooth.

Increasing the process priority to "high" with Task Manager seemed to help, as did disabling the music.

Through trial and error I discovered that lowering the cycles to 20,000 fixed the sound problems in DOOM 2 and still allowed it to run quickly when in full-screen mode. So chalk that one up as a success, though the sluggish mouse frustrates me some.

I found that, to play the opening movie in X-Com Apocalypse, I needed to change the cycles to 9 or 10,000 or the sound would get choppy. I guess they're doing something different. At any rate, once the opening movie finishes, the game bails back to the DOS prompt. I'm guessing this is due to one of the many issues with Apocalypse.

Other tests: MOO and MOM seem to work okay. Jagged Alliance plays pretty well at 9000, but the sound lags behind the action. (Launching it from Windows with VDMSound seemed to work better.)

So my questions would be:

(1) My motherboard is an Asus P4P800 Deluxe, and I'm using the built-in sound. Would switching to some fancier sound card help any? The device seems to work fine for Windows games (which is something of a first -- my past experiences with motherboard sound chips have not been great).

(2) Has anyone done rigorous measurements of performance with hyperthreading enabled and disabled? It's possible nothing changed and I'm just imagining the improvement, but it seems to me that if Win2K thinks it has a free CPU it won't hesitate to schedule things on top of games, instead of trying to make them share a little better. (But, I don't know much about hyperthreading.)

(3) Is there a way to accelerate the mouse within DOSBox? I cranked the mouse sensitivity all the way up in DOOM, but it's still too sluggish.

- Andy