I have a basic knowledge of the 'Box's command parameters, and have tried the two solutions that the manual has told me, but I still cannot get any DOS game to run at a usable speed...

The computer has (from what I know):

Windows 2000
1.8 GHZ processor


The two things I have tried are Ctrl+F8 and Ctrl+F12 which boost the frame skipping and...i'm not sure what else, but the number goes up...sorry if I sound stupid. These two things dont even seem to speed it up at all.

Any possible fixes, my fellow Abandonians?

Specifically the games I am trying to run are Doom II and Super Bust-A-Move.

~Iowa~

How far are you boosting the cycles with ctrl F12?

My copy of Doom II comes with a version for DOS and also one for Win 95. Does Win 2000 have a Win 95 compatibility mode?

Ctrl+F12 should make the game faster provided your computer is powerful enough (Ctrl+F8 does so at the expense of the quality of animations). I haven't tried but Doom II is a 3D game in protected mode so I guess it will require quite a lot, and it's perfectly possible that your machine is not up to it. But there are fan-made Windows versions of Doom out there, I think ZDoom is one.

As for Super-Bust-A-Move, according to MobyGames it's for Windows?

I would guess that a 1.8 GHZ would be more than sufficient to run Doom II . Thing is you have to increase the cycles A LOT. I just played a game that came out in 96 and ran it at 20,000 cycles. Also full screen mode sometimes help speed things up. (alt enter)



Here is a link to the DOSBox webpage that talks about your problem and what you might do. Kinda technical.



DOSBox wiki

Ah well, I thought that not even the fastest machine could run such advanced DOS games. Faery Tale Adventure II is not even 3D and it runs slow in my 3 GHz. :(

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Japofran @ Feb 28 2007, 03:43 AM) [snapback]281263[/snapback]</div>

It is the DOSBox emulation not the machine that is the problem. Try setting core=dynamic and cycles=auto. If your sound is choppy try increasing the prebuffer in the mixer settings.

Thanks but I've already tried every possible optimization trick and I haven't managed. When I increase the cycles over 40,000 or so in dynamic mode it starts to go slower again. It's definitely playable, only the animation is somewhat awkward. It's the video what takes all the CPU horsepower, I've tried playing with no sound and it's virtually the same. I'm not the only one with this problem (Sourceforge link) and I guess this game has a particular problem with DOSBox, but if somebody is playing this very game (Faery Tale Adventure II) in DOSBox, please let me know how.

Disable the scalers and use DirectDraw output, (output=ddraw, scaler=none). That should decrease the CPU usage a bit.

I already tried and there's no luck. In my old computer I could run it in DOS or Win98 but it crashed sometimes, maybe its buggy nature makes DOSBox slow. Or maybe it's just the game.

Which version of DOSBox did you try? Sometimes, for specific games, it's best to use an older version of DOSBox.