DosBox on SAM?

What sort of luck have people had getting games to run well using DosBox on SAM?

I'm experiementing with it at the moment, trying to get games like Cannon Fodder running well, with little success.

For games such as Cannon Fodder the mouse jumps all over the place (and seems to want to stay at the side of the screen!)and I get no sound. I didn't think Cannon Fodder would be too taxing on the machine!

I've been playing with all the settings in the config file, with limited success. What setting do others use in that file on the SAM?

I play Commander Keen 4 here sometimes, works just fine.
Make sure the cpu cycles are set correctly, not to high and not too low.
DOS games with sound often have to be configured first, make sure the settings in the game matches the ones in dosbox.conf, and about the mouse i have no idea.
Though there is this in the conf file:

# autolock -- Mouse will automatically lock, if you click on the screen.
# sensitivity -- Mouse sensitivity.

autolock=false
sensitivity=100

Hi all ! As I ported DosBox 0.72 on OS4, I am interested in your feedback. I have no Sam440 so except your comments I have no idea about how DosBox runs on this board.

I have to work on DosBox because even if the code is complicated, I think there is room for optimization.

So further comments are welcome !

@corto

Firstly thanks for porting Dosbox to OS4!

As for it's performance on the SAM, well, I've not had much luck so far with getting Cannon Fodder running smoothly. Have mucked about with the CPU cycles a lot and no joy.

Doom and Doom 2 run at a crawl, yet I didn't expect them to run well!

Xenon seems to run OK though!

I'm planning on trying other games in the next couple of weeks.

@tommo1975

I don't know if this is related but it might be... Are you runing LimpidClock? If you are change the priority to the lowest setting or simply quit it for testing... It slows down E-UAE and DOSBox a lot if you don't lower the priority settings...

@hotrod

Hmmmm, I've only *just* installed LimpidClock as of two days ago, after my initial testing of Dosbox and obviously before last nights second attempt..... I'll disable it tonight and re-run my tests. I hadn't considered it might be impacting things so thank you for the heads up!

btw, Heroes And Might And Magic 3.5, aviable only for WinXp ? or also was for DOs or for example for win95 ? I mean, can we play in this game over DosBox ?

ps, And some questions related to DosBox

1. How can i speed up it ? It seems very slow even on 1ghz cpu. I just try to run some diskmags which work in protected mode (dos4gw, or pmode, or kind of) and animation looks pretty slow. Like 2-3 fps only. For sure it must be not like this ?

2. I have #wrong# colours in protected mode apps. For example, if i run old demo called #second reality# which are native, 16bit stuff. Nothin bad with colours. If i run some demo/diskmag which are in protected mode, colors are messed like it used different byte order (like just endian problem when you swap graphics bytes in different way).

My question for others using Dosbox on the SAM, is what settings for sound are in your config file? I can't seem to get sound working for some games.

Hi

I've just tried Cannon Fodder with dosbox and to have sound on, I ran "install" and configured sound with interrupt 7 instead of 5.
To avoid the mouse problem, set "autolock" to "true" in "dosbox.conf". Remember that ctrl+F10 allows to get the mouse pointer outside of the box.

On my MicroAOne (G3 at 800 MHz), it takes between 45 and 50 % of the CPU power.

Recently I tried to optimized dosbox and applied some changes that could make things better from 5 to 10%. I was hoping a better improvement but the main part is really hard to optimize.
I will upload this new version soon.

Note that dosbox 0.73 is out for few days but I failed to compile it. I suppose we'd better enjoy having an improved version of dosbox 0.72.

@corto

Have you look at the recent AROS port ?

0.73 is already availible for it, maybe you can contact the author

That would be me (porter of 0.73 for AROS).
I must admit Im pretty impressed with 0.73. Fastest version yet. Ive been able to play all sorts of games at very good framerates. Played Duke3d @ between 50 and 170 or so fps (depending on activity), alien trilogy @ very good framerates (no framerate counter in this one so not sure of numbers), Rebel Assault, Destruction Derby, etc. Even tried a few dos emulators of other systems (genecyst(megadrive), hugo (pc-engine)), and they worked well too. It really has come a long way in recent years. One thing that surprised me is just how many cool old games there were/are for dos. I never noticed this before as in those years I was as Amiga only guy. Weird that Ive only found this out 15 or so years later, on an Amiga based system
Anyway, thats enough of my ranting, Ive just really been enjoying playing with this software over the last few days since I ported it. Im happy to be of assistance if I can be for a port of 0.73 to OS4.x. Im still ironing out a few bugs and tweaking AROS version, so its still fresh on my brain. Shame I dont have OS4.x these days as it'd make optimising easier (hard to tell differences when things run so fast already). Oh well, it's surely only a matter of time before I win the lottery

@corto

This is a job for you

@fishy_fis

In fact, it failed to compile because the function execlp is missing. I didn't try to fix as I already spent some time trying to optimize version 0.72.

dosbox sources lack documentation. Do you have information about core_prefetch ?

Which core did you use ? I suppose this is the dynamic x86 one ?

If you tell me that version 0.73 is faster maybe I will try again to compile it but first I want to release the improved version 0.72.

Looking deeply in the dosbox sources confirm that the x86 technology is completely irrational, what a mess !

@fishy
0.73 not have these boring problems:

1. in some apps sound works, in some not, now it's ok ?

2. wrong colours in some apps (like demos in protected mode, but i think it's cabe related to aos porting, becouse endianess stuff, swap bytes, etc). For aros nothink like that ?

3. If compare with 0.72, it's speed up a lot, or not emualtion itself ? Becouse for me, 0.72 pretty slow on 1ghz cpu (nothink about 50 fps or so, some apps just like slideshow (protected mode ones) ).

I've just uploaded my improved version 0.72 on os4depot. Will be available soon ...

Other good news, I've compiled version 0.73 this evening (a raw compilation with option -O2) and it is as good as my optimized version. That means slightly better that the initial version 0.72.

I want to duplicate my changes in the new version 0.73 with other improvements and ideas to test. So if you want to suggest some things, don't hesitate ! For specific games or demos, please send me the link where I can download them.

I am also very interesting in the performance on Sam440.

@corto

Quote:
if you tell me how I can give you speed figures, I'll be happy to do so.
Anyway, 0.72 is running Warcraft as I speak. Thanks for the work

@corto

Will you be releasing the source or a diff/patch file or similair? and yes I strongly agree, VERY good work on this!

I haven't tried dosbox since the days of .60 or older but I know I will use it... been collecting older dos collections over the last few months... heaven help me

@corto

Ok, here is links for you to show what i mean about wrong colors, and unsmooth work.

X-Ray diskmag:
http://http.de.scene.org/pub/mags/x-ray/x-ray1.zip
picture how it must be:
http://pouet.net/screenshots/4014.gif


Hugi diskmag:
http://http.us.scene.org/pub/scene.org/mags/hugi/hugi17.zip
picture how it must be:
http://pouet.net/screenshots/140.jpg

Can prepare more if you in interest to fix. I think it's amiga port related (need swap gfx data beetween, becouse of protected mode).

@kas1e
Thank you for the files, I will test them.

@Slayer
I tried to explain what I did in the readme but yes, it would be better to join the diff, I will do that in the next release (version 0.73).

@Elwood
I use the CPU docky to measure speed.

@corto

Quote:

Yes and I thought quite adequate as well, just thought I'd throw that idea out there. Always wondered why people released the source tree and not a diff or patch file against a certain revision (hardly any storage considerations) if perhaps it wasn't available elsewhere I could understand and then perhaps some people don't use these functions as a course of action...

I got into a habit of hand patching and applying diffs etc when compiling gcc bundles and compiling mudcodebases... then I started keeping my own diffs and patches when I altered codebases, so easy to keep track of what you've done etc...

anyway, I'm babbling, thanks for the generous offer