DosBox Performance Optimization
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Does anyone have some configuration / performance tweaking tips to optimize DosBox for old and early 2.5D games circa 1993? I'm most interested in squeezing the most clock ticks out of the emulator / virtual CPU to hopefully get performance equivalent to a 486 of that era (Pentium performance would be a nice bonus, but I realize that is likely not realistic with the lack of Dynamic CPU support), however tips on general configuration and mapping for a keyboard and mouse are also appreciated. Thanks. The target hardware is a used Raspberry Pi 2 which I am re-purposing and experimenting with. Thanks.
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There is Dynamic CPU/Core support in the RetroPie dosbox.
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Really? My understanding of the dynamic CPU setting is that it transfers instructions directly to the physical processor, making it more like virtualization rather than emulation. Am I misunderstanding?
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@BuZz Basically I knew the feature was there, but in my tinkering in the past it yielded little benefit, so my assumption was it was there but disabled because it wasn't running on an x86.
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There is significant performance difference with it switched off as I remember.
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@BuZz Ok thanks, I will take another look at this feature. :-)
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@BuZz I found the following article, which seems to indicate that dynamic recompilation is indeed supported, but not available by default. Please see below.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=95421
Do you know if this is the case or not in the latest build of RetroPie? Do you think I will have to manually compile DosBox to have this feature?
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That's my post ;-)
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@BuZz Lol, wow, small world. Ok thanks for the assist.
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@BuZz Hello again. Just hoping to ask you a couple more questions. The main thing I'm hoping to accomplish is get my dad's old copy of The Elder Scrolls - Arena CD working nicely. I intend for this machine to be a gift for him when it is working nicely. I have this game from way back in the 90's, it's like the one Bethesda made freely available but with additional content. This game would run decent on a 386, and extremely well on a 486. First, is the procedure you've outlined in your post still required in the latest builds? Or is dynamic recompilation already present out of the box? Also do you, or anyone reading this have any insight into the performance I could realistically expect on a Pi2 with the safe overclock of 1 GHz? And finally, I will likely have to convert my physical copy into an ISO, does mounting ISO images work the same way as a Windows box in DosBox, or is there anything additional I need to install / configure? Thanks, any help is appreciated.
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It's included out of the box with RetroPie.
Can't advise on performance, but doom was playable on RPI2 afair.
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@BuZz Ok thanks. :-)
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@BuZz Graphically, Doom is slightly more demanding than Arena, so that gives me a fair idea of what to expect in and of itself.
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