How to slow down dosbox games

[dmjohn0x]

Installed Tyrian with no problems but it runs stupidly fast. Is there a way to limit its usage of my cpu or something?

[dmjohn0x]

for clarification. it runs fin in-game. but at the selection menu, it gives you maybe 1 second befor loading the arcade mode demo reel. and its difficult to stop

[Zombeaver]

Yep, drop the cycle count in the .conf file. If you open the file (you can create them directly though LB) you'll see a line for "cycles="; just reduce it to say 3000-5000 cycles. Once you load the game you can hit ctrl+f12 to increase them or ctrl+f11 to decrease them to further test. Save it once you find a good amount.

[dmjohn0x]

Thanks!

[Zombeaver]

No problem!

I highly recommend creating individual .confs per-game as a general rule. There's really not a one-size-fits-all solution for DOS games. For cycles, specifically, you can try setting it to "auto" (which it may be on already) but it doesn't always work quite right. Manual tweaking is often necessary.

[dmjohn0x]

Limiting cycles fixes the menu but causes lag in-game. Auto causes menues to run so fast they are near unusable, but game run flawlessly. =/

[Zombeaver]

Well, like I said you'll have to adjust. Use Ctrl+F12 and Ctrl+F11 to increase and decrease the cycles until it's right. If you press Alt+Enter while Dosbox is running (if it's in fullscreen) it'll go to a window and you can see the current cycle count at the top of the window.

Once you find a good amount, update your .conf accordingly.

[dmjohn0x]

I got it. 9000 cycles gives me 5 solid second on the menu which feels fine. Just .5 secs was ridiculous. And fixes fps drop. Thanks again.

My issue was i didnt know how many cycles I could go up to.

[Zombeaver]

Yep, that's kindof an issue for any of them. Some games you set your cycles to max and it'll run fine, others will actually increase the speed at which the game runs - it just comes down to how they were programmed. I've got a few games that have to go up to 100k+ cycles to run well and others that need to be around 3000, it just depends on the game.

[dmjohn0x]

Got Tyrian and Duke3d installed and running. now to figur out why Rayman just shuts dosbox down.

[Zombeaver]

You could be directed to the wrong .exe in LB, it could be the game is setup with the wrong audio driver settings, it could be that an .ini in the game folder is directed to a file in the wrong directory... all kinds of possible stuff.

I usually do a proper "install" of a game through DOSBox itself before I start importing it into LB, that way you know it's setup correctly and running before you get to LB.

[dmjohn0x]

So running the ms-dos installation makes the game run. however when I exit, it doesnt setup in launchbox and instead im asked to try reinstalling. when i instal as a directory ive already installed too, running the game crashes.

[Zombeaver]

Is LB directed to the right .exe? It could have picked up the wrong .exe (the install/setup exe) when you imported it. It just kind of guesses at what it should be named based on common names. Right-click and edit the game entry in LB and see what it's being directed to.

[dmjohn0x]

ive tried them all

[Zombeaver]

Is this for Rayman?

[Zombeaver]

I just installed Rayman from scratch from a CD image (bin+cue) and made a quick little video of it (no commentary, just going through the steps). Most of it was pretty straight forward but there were a couple of quirks to it - namely that you need to use the -freesize switch when you mount your C drive (I used -freesize 1024). This is basically indicating to the software that you have 1 GB of free hard drive space in that location. This switch isn't often necessary but it crops up every once in a while. The other thing is that it won't allow you to install it directly to a path of "C:\" or to any path if it already sees an existing folder there with the same name - so if you've already got a folder called "Rayman" in the path you mount as "C:", you won't be able to install into "C:\Rayman\" in the installer. That's why you'll see that I used a second temporary folder that I called "Rayman Install" to hold my disc image until I installed the game - at which point I just move it over. Normally I just create a folder with the name of the game, then mount that as C: and then tell the game to install directly to C:\. That won't work in this case though.

Sorry for Dosbox being in a window, but OBS doesn't seem to like recording it if it's in fullscreen (so you'll probably need to watch the video fullscreen).

The commands used were:

Mount C "[path to wherever you want Rayman installed]" -freesize 1024

Mount D "[CDrom drive letter]:\" -t cdrom

D:

dir /p

Install

 

[Jarkko Huijts]

Tyrian has been released as freeware under the name Tyrian 2000. You don't have to tweak DOSBox at all with that version.