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Help needed with DOSBOX

Started by St_Eddie, April 22, 2019, 10:11:09 PM

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St_Eddie

I've decided to revisit one of my favourite game series from my childhood; Dark Forces/Jedi Knight.

I've installed and setup the entire series just fine but I just went to play the first game in the series, Dark Forces and oh, boy!  These graphics have not aged well.  The game runs in a 320x200 resolution which looks absolutely awful on my big old HD screen; a complete blocky mess.  There's not much that I can do to change that, of course... other than altering the DOSBOX settings to help alleviate things a little.

The game is currently running under OpenGL on normalx2 but whenever I try to run it under a different setting (for example, 2xsai or or hq3x) the game crawls to a halt and has serious graphic and sound corruption (the mouse pointer leaves a trail and the sound stutters).  I should imagine that my PC is more than capable of running such options, so could anybody advise me on where I'm going wrong?

Thanks.

Phil_A

Need to crank up your virtual processor cycles I would guess. Boot up the game and keep pressing Ctrl+F12 until it starts to smooth out, then make a note of how many cycles it's running at and add that to the "cycles" bit in your dosbox.conf. If your system is reasonably powerful you should be able to get it pretty high without any problems.

I assume you've got the aspect ratio set correctly and not stretched to full 16:9 like some kind of madman?

St_Eddie

Quote from: Phil_A on April 22, 2019, 10:39:35 PM
Need to crank up your virtual processor cycles I would guess. Boot up the game and keep pressing Ctrl+F12 until it starts to smooth out, then make a note of how many cycles it's running at and add that to the "cycles" bit in your dosbox.conf. If your system is reasonably powerful you should be able to get it pretty high without any problems.

I assume you've got the aspect ratio set correctly and not stretched to full 16:9 like some kind of madman?

Thank you for the advice.  Increasing the cycles seemed to help a lot with the performance but the graphical glitches are still there (i.e. images appearing on top of each other, such as the aforementioned mouse cursor trail).

Oh, and yes; the aspect ratio is indeed correct.  I'm still a certified madman all the same though.

EDIT: I just found out what the problem was!  I had double buffering enabled.  Disabling it has solved the issue and now the game is running flawlessly.  Yay!

madhair60

You've got it working anyway but if it helps at all, they're available to buy on GoG.com in pre-configured form; I had horrible trouble with my copies of the originals but the GoG ones worked fine.