First post, by Malik
- Rank
- l33t
I find that many people have reservations of Dosbox and SVGA games. Many prefer to play on real machines rather than in Dosbox.
Not to bring in another dreaded Dosbox vs Real Machine thread, I would like to bring to notice about the SVGA games playability in Dosbox.
Dosbox depends on the host CPU, and the more powerful is the host, the better the emulation of higher resolution DOS games in Dosbox.
I have been following the development of Dosbox since 2004. And now, the vanilla 0.74 still remains the main executable I use in D-Fend Reloaded. Dosbox has come a long way, and currently it's quite matured in handling DOS gaming needs.
One of the main portable system I use Dosbox on is my Dell Venue 11 Pro Tablet. It has the Core M 5Y10 processor and comes with 4GB RAM, Intel HD Graphics 5300, and runs off a 512GB Crucial m.2 SSD.
For demanding DOS games, like Quake, I use the Dynamic Core and Max Cycles.
Generally, I'm impressed with Dosbox's SVGA performance even in this Core M processor.
I just tried the Quake 1.06 shareware timedemo :
@ 640x480 resolution I got 30.6 fps,
which is very playable, even considering this mobile fanless processor.
At the default 320x200, I got 75 fps.
Other games I have played and feel smooth are Terminator Skynet and Future Shock (after installing Skynet). But I don't have the fps figures for these yet.
Non-3D intensive SVGA games like Crusader No Remorse, Little Big Adventure, etc, all run fine in even modest host system.
I guess purists will still stick to real machines, and yes, I have to agree, if one wants to play at 800x600 or 1024x768 3D DOS games, then real Pentium II or Pentium III machines are better, but if one has more powerful current gen host CPUs, I would suggest them to retry and test for themselves how well they can play these demanding games in Dosbox.
Instead of deviating to "real machine is better", I would like to keep the discussions to how well a SVGA game runs in the host system using Dosbox. Or better still, what games are dragging and unplayable in Dosbox using SVGA.
I guess anything 800x600 and above, will start to be pointless. But for 640x480, that would be interesting.
**I will update with more games and with my different systems soon.**