Don't play it on the PSP?

I have a similiar question, game seems sluggish. I'll post system specs first:

Intel Celeron processor 600 Mhz, 192 Mhz ram (think its pc133), 10 gig harddrive (maxtor 5400 speed), onboard video. I got the latest drivers which were made in '04. Winxp home edition sp1.
this is an old box, also a Creative sound card (basic).
Computer is a Dell Dimension L600cx.

I run Arena at about 15000 cpu cycles, any more and the music sounds distorted, and you can sorta hear the voices (guards?). The framerate is horibble, but I managed to get out of the dungeon. If I press M for map, I gotta press it for a few seconds so it "takes". So response time for commands is slow too.

Set cpu emulation to Dynamic. Cpu type to 486_slow. Memory 8 mb, got ems, xms,and umb enabled, I dont know if these are needed or not.

Graphics at 640 X 480 resolution in Fullscreen, render set to Surface, video card to svga_s3, I have scaling set to none, no skipping on framerate.

Dos set to 5.0

According to bethesda, system req.s are 4 mb ram, 386sx 25.

Ideas?

leave the cputype on auto
and change the cycles to
cycles= max limit 15000

DOSBox generally requires a P4 1.3GHz+ or Tbird 1GHz+ for actual playable functionality of 1993+ protected mode 3D games.

You'll likely want to cut the cycles to around 5000 and have the detail all the way down to walk nicely in the wilderness with the snow blowing. It should at least be playable then.

If your sound card has DOS drivers, you are better off creating a small fat32 partition and running the game in FreeDOS. You can use GParted to resize your ntfs partition.

Yeah at 600MHz you're much better off trying to run it in DOS or even a WinXP NTVDM.

What is NTVDM? I'll try the above suggestions, thank you.

OK, I set cpu type to auto, running at about 6000 cycles, should I set the core to auto too? It's on dynamic, but other than framerate issues its running better. How do I find out what FPS I have?

Frame rate is really irrelevant for old games like this. There never was any standard. Whatever feels good or works best for you is where you should have it.

Dynamic is most likely the fastest core but on rare occasions has issues with some games. You can try adjusting the output= setting to see if one works better.

This game is really horribly inconsistent with cycles needed and likes to cpu spike. Around 9000 cycles with details all the way down seems ok for dungeons. You can try cycles=max to see if it works better than the fixed value. You may just have to adjust on the fly for different areas.

Angitherias wrote:

What is NTVDM?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTVDM

Definitely set core=dynamic. cycles=max is probably a good idea too.

I also got problems with Arena.

I use 15000 cycles (on a P4 2.6 GHz with 2GB of Ram). The game has a decent framerate, but I get a variety of glitches like the music that makes some sort of ear-bleeding sound from time to time, the music that seems to lag a lot on status screen and that it becomes incredibly hard to type anything (I press the "I" key, for example and I get a full line of Is. Very annoying when I tries to map something)

My DosBOX is set at

core=dynamic
cputypes=auto
cycles=auto

Is there a way to take care of these glitches?

Thanks in advance.

cycles should be 15000