Old Sierra Adventures?

fingolfin · Post by **fingolfin** » Thu May 25, 2006 2:17 pm

Adventureguy wrote:
fingolfin wrote: Personally, I dismiss it so fast because for me it's simply not fast (lame pun intended *g*). I.e. on non-intel machines, it's got a quite serious overhead, and especially newer games are simply unusably slow with it. In particular, none of them "run" for me.
I think you could change the speed via the cycles in the DOSbox-configuration file. DOSbox is as fast as you want it to be.

Sorry. but that's simply nonsense. Yes, you can do some tweaking via the cycles config option, but obviously that can't make your computer faster. Or do you have a control on your computer which you can turn up to make your computer be as fast as you want? Well, at least none I've ever seen has such a wondrous control =).

Adventureguy · Post by **Adventureguy** » Thu May 25, 2006 9:41 pm

Oh, sorry. I misunderstood you. I thought you had DOSbox running to slow for you. I didn't know your computer wasn't fast enough for those games.

fisken uno · Post by **fisken uno** » Thu May 25, 2006 10:30 pm

fingolfin wrote:
Adventureguy wrote:
fingolfin wrote: Personally, I dismiss it so fast because for me it's simply not fast (lame pun intended *g*). I.e. on non-intel machines, it's got a quite serious overhead, and especially newer games are simply unusably slow with it. In particular, none of them "run" for me.
I think you could change the speed via the cycles in the DOSbox-configuration file. DOSbox is as fast as you want it to be.
Sorry. but that's simply nonsense. Yes, you can do some tweaking via the cycles config option, but obviously that can't make your computer faster. Or do you have a control on your computer which you can turn up to make your computer be as fast as you want? Well, at least none I've ever seen has such a wondrous control =).

Well, I don't have any problems running games like Phantasmagoria, Gabriel Knight II or LSL7 in Dosbox on my 3 GHz P4 with 1 GB RAM? The only times I've had problems with speed have been when running the same games through an emulated Win 3.1 environment. In that case VirtualPC has much better speed.

Reckless · Post by **Reckless** » Thu May 25, 2006 10:34 pm

Well, not everyone has a 3Ghz P4

It outruns my box by 1Ghz

Post by **eriktorbjorn** » Thu May 25, 2006 11:09 pm

Reckless wrote:Well, not everyone has a 3Ghz P4 It outruns my box by 1Ghz

I have managed to run I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream and The Case of the Rose Tattoo in DOSbox on my 450 MHz P3, but it was quite slow at times, even though I used the dynamic CPU core (probably not an option for Fingolfin), and adjusted both the cycles and the frameskip settings. And I gave up on trying to get Return to Zork running at any decent speed the last time I tried it.

fisken uno · Post by **fisken uno** » Thu May 25, 2006 11:23 pm

Reckless wrote:Well, not everyone has a 3Ghz P4 It outruns my box by 1Ghz

Well, in that case you ought to get one and you won't have any problems playing those good old games

Isn't it ironic? You need a fast computer to play the games that run to fast on your old P3

yup.

Reckless · Post by **Reckless** » Thu May 25, 2006 11:34 pm

he he, I didn't say what I had though did I?

Teah, it is funny that so much power is needed to run games as good as we did 'back in the day'! All emulators, interpreters and the like are just super cool and I never dismiss one over another - each have their strengths.

LordHoto · Post by **LordHoto** » Thu May 25, 2006 11:39 pm

Adventureguy wrote: I think you could change the speed via the cycles in the DOSbox-configuration file. DOSbox is as fast as you want it to be.

Haha ever tried to play Settlers 2 on a G4 system? Forget about it! It's even quite slow with dynamic core on x86 compatible systems.

fingolfin · Post by **fingolfin** » Fri May 26, 2006 8:32 am

Adventureguy wrote:Oh, sorry. I misunderstood you. I thought you had DOSbox running to slow for you. I didn't know your computer wasn't fast enough for those games.

Still not quite right

. My computer is fast enough to play those games. Just not using Dosbox, which has too much overhead when run on non-Intel systems

.

Collector · Post by **Collector** » Fri May 26, 2006 4:47 pm

For the more demanding games, x86 computers can use dynamic core, which partially virtualizes the DOSBox processor. Non x86 machines cannot take advantage of the dynamic core. For less demanding games, normal core is fine. Normal core is 100% emulated and should not have a performance penalty on non x86 boxes.

Emulation is a lot more demanding than virtualization. This is the reason that VirtualPC is so much slower on a Mac than a PC, the Mac has to emulate the virtual PC while the x86 box virtualizes it.

Conroy Bumpus · Post by **Conroy Bumpus** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 7:17 pm

I'd just like to ask, if its been mentioned already, but would The VGA versions of Leisure Suit Larry 1, Space Quest 1 and Kings Quest 1 work on ScummVM at all?

LordHoto · Post by **LordHoto** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 9:02 pm

Conroy Bumpus wrote:I'd just like to ask, if its been mentioned already, but would The VGA versions of Leisure Suit Larry 1, Space Quest 1 and Kings Quest 1 work on ScummVM at all?

I think not, they are IIRC SCI remakes, ScummVM just supports the AGI versions.

timofonic · Post by **timofonic** » Sat Jun 10, 2006 5:12 am

It's SCI, not SGI

FreeSCI exists and still "developed", but contrary to what ones say, it's nearly dead and progress quite too slow. They must work on portability stuff and others, and that slowdown the process of supporting the SCI versions a lot.

I think there must be CABAL! Devs of those engines will lose time converting the engine into one ScummVM engine, but then they will not need to fix portability stuff and only will concentrate on the engine stuff. Not forget to those great bug-hunters that attack to any bug or bad coding

Not forget that ScummVM is a lot more knowed that Sarien (now assimilated by ScummVM

) and FreeSCI, that can help in the testing process and hunting new devs for the sub-projects.

Everyone will be benefited, so please consider it for someday

Dark-Star · Post by **Dark-Star** » Mon Jun 12, 2006 11:42 am

Collector wrote:For the more demanding games, x86 computers can use dynamic core, which partially virtualizes the DOSBox processor. Non x86 machines cannot take advantage of the dynamic core. For less demanding games, normal core is fine. Normal core is 100% emulated and should not have a performance penalty on non x86 boxes.

Not quite right. DOSbox doesn't do "partial virtualization of the processor", this term doesn't make sense. DOSbox's dynamic core does is actually dynamic recompilation. Virtualization and dynamic recompilation are two entirely different things: Virtualization runs the unmodified binary on the target system and catches all problematic accesses (like using privileged instructions) to emulate them, while dynamic recompilation takes the original binary and generates new machine code on the fly, which is then run completely on the target system (it doesn't need to catch for example invalid opcodes, simply because the recompiler doesn't generate such opcodes)

Montego · Post by **Montego** » Fri Jun 23, 2006 7:52 am

Often the Sierra Games are quite slow under DOS-BOX, because Sierra had shitty Audiodriver. I used a Patch Programm called GOSIERRAV3 to Patch the Audiodriver.

There is also a patch by Sierra for the CD Games Laura Bow 2, Kings Quest 6, Space Quest 4 and Freddy Pharkas. After I used this i can here Speech under DOs-Box. Of course it is better to copy the Speech files (often RESOURCE.AUD) to HD an patch the DIR for Speech in the RSOURCE.CFG.

Sometimes you have to start DOS-Box Twice until you hear Speech but it works fine on my WinXP PC.

And make sure you have installed the inoffical Patches because of the speed fix. Then i set the CPU cycles upto 4000 in the dos-box and now every Sierra game works fine.