VOGONS


First post, by Elia1995

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

I recently wanted to play a game of my childhood (Warcraft 2) and a game of which I only had a demo version since I was a kid (Dark Legions), but BOTH of them have the same issue, hence why I discuss about both of them in the same thread.

Basically, no matter wether I play them on DOSBox, on a real retrocomputer (my Celeron build) or whatever, but everywhere I play them, they scroll excessively fast !!! I mean, they are strategic games, with the board and stuff, when I want to move to look around either with the arrow keys or bringing the cursor at the edges, they need a liiiiittle tiny touch and the screen literally FLIES to the other side of the battleground !!!

In Warcraft 2 if I remember correctly, you can adjust "speed", but it's not the speed of the scrolling apparently, just speed of how much time orcs and humans take to do things, while for Dark Legions I find no option at all (it doesn't even have sounds, if you ask me...)

in DOSBox I even tried to reduce cycles to minimum, but that makes them then UNPLAYABLE due to the huge lag 🤣 in the "real" computers although there's nothing I can do about cycles.

I am posting here and not in Marvin, because I've not tried them exclusively on real hardware, but also in my modernish computers, I'm just experiencing this issue in BOTH modern and vintage hardware, any idea ?

Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11

Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard

Reply 2 of 4, by Elia1995

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Couldn't find anything for Dark Legions in there...

Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11

Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard

Reply 3 of 4, by James-F

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

War2 scrolling is fast on my MMX 233 machine too, so I use the slowest setting in the game for small maps and click the minimap for large maps.

It depends on the emulated/real cycles.
I always run DOSBox with fixed cycles of around 40,000 to to emulate a Pentium of about 133MHz.
I use the cycle up and down shortcut keys to control the cycles in 5000 jumps, this way I can go up to 100,000 for games like Quake and 10,000 or 5,000 for games like Jill or Lemmings otherwise sound will not initialize.
DOSBox will usually run with cycles=auto/max at your full processor speed which is not accurate emulation, but so many people use that by default without learning to control the cycles properly.

core=dynamic
cputype=auto
cycles=fixed 40000
cycleup=5000
cycledown=5000


my important / useful posts are here

Reply 4 of 4, by chinny22

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

Warcraft I just learnt to use the mini map rather then scrolling, or the Battle net edition doesn't have the scroll problem.
I'm not sure about Dark Legions though sorry.