D-TurboKiller

That updated launcher is looking pretty fantastic already. Well done! Regarding your tests, it's nice to know that OGL 3.0 actually ended up being beneficial. That's definitely a win-win situation it seems. Now PCem just needs a Vulkan renderer in the future and it'll be perfect for reducing the CPU strain. Doubtful, but who knows I already had some pretty similar settings, but I did a test as well. So here's what happened and what I found: -I switched the CPU to Pentium 133, the one I couldn't run the games at full speed. Quite important, since it's a good way to measure the speed percentage when I applied a setting. -Booted up Zero Critical, but without the CD inserted. This way the game is running, but it's stuck on a warning screen, which is great, since it's running at the same speed as the actual game: around 80% speed. -Tried out all the renderers. Lower performance in general, but regular OpenGL came close. Once again. OpenGL 3.0 stood on top. -Having the renderer now set to OpenGL 3.0 (OGL 3.0 renderer specific settings hadn't been touched yet, still the defaults), having VSync ON actually increased speed by around 2%. Now max speed is at 82%, min speed 76%. -Scale filtering set to Linear seems to be a tiny bit faster, but it's hard to tell. -Setting the output scale to 4x doesn't seem to make any noticeable difference. Maybe a tiny bit slower, but it's unnoticeable. I left it at 1x to avoid unnecessary overhead. -Placing Output stretch-mode to 4:3, then OGL 3.0 renderer-specific settings to the following: Input stretch-mode set to "None"; Input Scale set to "4x"; Shader refresh rate to "Same as emulated Display". An interesting result occurred: max speed remained the same, but min speed increased to 78%! Every other combination just slows it down, even if slightly. Interesting results, don't you think? Hopefully that helps. There is one last thing bugging me. Even using the same CPU as the one on your official release, emulation was *much* faster in my own config, and I can't quite figure it out why. I know the official one used PCem v14 and it barely ran at over 60%, but was there really that much optimization involved between versions? I can't really tell from the changelogs. Perhaps is it the fact that I'm using Windows 98 SE? Or what I suspect at the moment, the fact that I picked a different machine from yours? Maybe there's just less emulation overhead involved with certain machines? I suppose that would make sense. Could be worth a shot testing that theory.

Of course, no worries Zombeaver. I have no intention of degrading your efforts (quite the contrary!), and I apologize if I might've indicated otherwise. You've done wonderful work, regardless of what a select few might have issues with. I was pretty impressed with the extra attention to detail, like the Launcher present in the Majestic Trilogy, which was both convenient and tweakable. And not needing to switch CDs in Obsidian is just fantastic. Two thumbs up indeed! Ah, I thought the input lag was just a matter of having a low resolution, so the mouse cursor didn't have a lot of screen space to move accurately, especially in low-res games like 320x200. As for OpenGL 3.0, again that's something that worked for me in particular, but adding that setting in the Launcher would do just fine, so someone could always try that as an alternative. One last thing I'd like to add, since you've mentioned VSync. Just note that this is a GPU-specific fix and I own an AMD GPU (AMD RX 470), I don't know what the NVidia equivalent is (maybe Fast Sync). There was this game in particular called Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, and it was driving me nuts. If I had VSync off, it exhibited the worst frame tearing I've ever seen in any game, and if I left it on, the tearing was fixed, but the input lag was so bad, it was easily over *half a second* at times! What I did to finally fix the problem was, through the GPU's software settings, forcing a feature called Enhanced VSync for this specific game. Basically what it does is having the benefits of VSync but without the input lag. And yes, it did actually work: frame tearing was gone and so was the input lag! Unfortunately this isn't something you can force since it's GPU-bound, but... something to note if you're having a particular game with bad frame tearing

Well I know I mentioned Linux, but fyi I have a dual-boot solution going on (both 64-bit versions of Windows 10 and Linux, specifically Pop OS) and performance is exactly the same in both cases. It wasn't my intent for you to focus on that particular point, just the CPU and renderer I used to get around my issue. Sorry about the confusion. The OS isn't the problem here, the issue lies solely with my weak CPU. I originally bought it as an alternative to having a dedicated graphics card, which I ended up buying a couple months later anyway. But, using Linux might in fact end up being an alternate, blazing fast solution for non-Windows users, considering how surprisingly well it works with older games at times, and I've tested a few before (Fury3 was fantastic fun). It's possible OpenGL 3.0 could have higher input latency, but since both games are point-and-click adventures, I didn't notice anything in particular. I was honestly surprised how fast it was, and I do some considerable emulation; Pcsx2 in particular specifically mentions not to use OpenGL for rendering, as AMD's drivers are reportedly much slower than NVidia's, so that was extra surprising.

Hey Zombeaver, thanks a bunch for providing us with such awesome old-school goodness! I grew up with a lot of 90's games, and a lot of these still flew up under my radar. Fascinating stuff, already tried out a few! I'd like to point out a major issue regarding the games that use PCem for emulation, or at least the ones I tried so far: Obsidian and Zero Critical (from the Majestic Trilogy). So the first time I tried these out, I was getting some horrendous performance issues. Speed was over 70% for Obsidian and barely 60% for Zero Critical. It was stuttering like crazy. My CPU isn't exactly great, that's a given (actually an APU, specifically AMD A10-7850k), but I didn't have much trouble with my version of PCem v16, so I grabbed the image files from both games, installed them, applied the DVD patch for Obsidian and voila, both were working perfectly at 100% speed! So what exactly was so different with my config? I narrowed it down to two points: -The CPU on your config is *way* stronger than what's actually required. Zero Critical in particular was trying to emulate a Pentium 133 (ironically my first machine had one lol), and I already knew there's no way I could emulate that at full speed! So I downgraded it to a Pentium 75, and the stuttering was gone -Obsidian needed a little extra step, at least in my case. It was at 100% speed in many cases, but there was just as many where it'd stay above 90%, which was causing severe sound stuttering, even with the config file you posted. Amazingly, I found out that by switching the renderer to OpenGL 3.0, the game was now stutter-free Some minor differences just in case, but the machine I am emulating is marked as " [Super 7] FIC VA-503+", and I have a Voodoo 3 graphics card all set up, but I doubt that makes any difference here. Fun fact, both games were played on Linux, using Wine (specifically the Lutris version) to run PCem, as I had no luck compiling my own version, it throws up a bunch of errors, so I just went with the Windows version instead. Luckily, performance seems exactly the same. Oh, and I could *almost* run Obsidian perfectly by just using Wine, with the added benefit of having instant screen transitions... if not for the fact that the midi music would cut off every time a Quicktime movie played (so basically anytime I moved forward lol). Again, thanks so much for providing these, I have a lot to try out