Frame rates / Partial fix

[HansGruber]

Some of you might have noticed that under certain circumstances you'll get choppy frame rates. In my case, it's usually when I go in for a guns kill and splash a bandit right in front of my HUD that'll get a few seconds of slow or choppy frame rates.

I think this can be fixed, at least partially, by upping the CPU speed. Once the game is open and running press CTRL+F12 to increase the CPU cycles. Start with just one or two taps of F12 and see if that helps, but I wouldn't do more than about 10 because you'll run into other problems.

Dos-Box is supposed to automatically adjust CPU cycles based on what it thinks the game needs, but I feel like sometimes it just doesn't quite get it right. The other problem is that sometimes these old games just HAD times where they would turn into a slide-show, and the choppy segments are a faithful reproduction.

The same solution can be used to smooth our other games that run slow in DOS-BOX. I think Falcon Gold has similar issues.

[damson]

Actually F-14 FD on Steam is configured to run at 18000 cycles which is indeed a bit too low. For it to automatically detect what game needs, the cycles would be set to auto (not always working as intended though).

Here's the contents of the dosbox_fleetdefender.conf file regarding cycle setttings:
cycles=18000
cycleup=500
cycledown=500

so you have fixed cycle setting of 18000 (which corresponds to CPU somewhere between 386 and 486) and each press of CTRL-F12 will increase that setting by +500 and CTRL-F11 decrease by -500.

I would recommend setting this to 40000/50000 (equivalent of fast 486 or even weak Pentium), so open the game directory, open dosbox_windows folder, open dosbox_fleetdefender.conf file with notepad, scroll down to [cpu] section and change:
cycles=18000 to cycles=40000 and save your changes.

[damson]

Note that on weaker CPU's you may hit the computational limit of your CPU and the game will start to stutter (skipping sound etc.), you can identify this by opening task manager and checking the CPU load. If one of the cores is maxed out it means that you reached the limit you could increase the DOSBox cycles. Modern CPUs should have no problem with most DOS games though. On i5 6600K @3.5Ghz I'm able to run most demanding DOS-era games (like Jane's ATF) at 300000 cycles - there is no eqivalent of processor which could run that fast in 1996. Pentium II 300 MHz would be equal to around 200000 cycles.

[Yuki Nagato]

Originally posted by damson:

Actually F-14 FD on Steam is configured to run at 18000 cycles which is indeed a bit too low. For it to automatically detect what game needs, the cycles would be set to auto (not always working as intended though).

Here's the contents of the dosbox_fleetdefender.conf file regarding cycle setttings:
cycles=18000
cycleup=500
cycledown=500

so you have fixed cycle setting of 18000 (which corresponds to CPU somewhere between 386 and 486) and each press of CTRL-F12 will increase that setting by +500 and CTRL-F11 decrease by -500.

I would recommend setting this to 40000/50000 (equivalent of fast 486 or even weak Pentium), so open the game directory, open dosbox_windows folder, open dosbox_fleetdefender.conf file with notepad, scroll down to [cpu] section and change:
cycles=18000 to cycles=40000 and save your changes.

Hey that seems useful. I think Ill try that with some other dos games

Edit: I'm realizing now I already knew how to do that... and I had already set up the cycles for all my games that run in dos.