Physical/digital bottleneck \ VOGONS

Physical/digital bottleneck

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First post, by dosquest

Posted on 2014-02-15, 02:07

dosquest Offline

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I know this all comes down to the hardware that dosbox runs on but, how much faster would an ISO image of a game that boots off the cd be than running it natively on native hardware? Take for example, dosbox playing at full CPU speed (which is what, a pIII 800mhz?) anyway, would playing a game on a comparable system, pIII 800mhzl 52x cd-rom compared to loading the ISO image in dosbox gain any real speed advantages?

Doom isn't just a game, it's an apocalypse survival simulator.

Reply 1 of 4, by DosFreak

Posted on 2014-02-15, 02:24

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Reply 2 of 4, by leileilol

Posted on 2014-02-15, 02:29

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Physical CD-ROM drive access, old computer or new, will always be slower to access than reading images...because there ain't no speed limits or long spinup times.

long live PCem

Reply 3 of 4, by dosquest

Posted on 2014-02-15, 04:31

dosquest Offline

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Thanks for confirming that. 😀 Sorry if my question made no sense, but leil got it. Ok so basically reading the (legally) ripped ISO off of a realitivly new (in the last 10 years) HD will be many many times faster than the cd drive because with a ROM drive it has to load it into ram and it is limited to the read/write speed of the laser?

Doom isn't just a game, it's an apocalypse survival simulator.

Reply 4 of 4, by Jorpho

Posted on 2014-02-17, 03:39

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...What? Reading data inherently means loading data into RAM, regardless of whether it's data stored on a hard drive or data stored on a CD-ROM. But yes, reading data from a CD-ROM is slower than reading data from a hard drive. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM#Transfer_rates .

In any case, you don't need DOSBox if you want to use an image stored on a hard drive; if you don't need CD audio, you can use SHSUCDHD, even in DOS.

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