Hi there,

i am using MorphOS on my Powerbook 5,8 with 2GB installed RAM.

I wanted to fire up DosBox to play a round of one of my most favourite racer games called Screamer.
To my suprize it runs very slow on my config and can't even run it smoothly when i select the low spec version of the game.

I disabled all the unnecessary hardware emulation in the config file of DosBox, i played around with the cpu types and cycles it won't get any better. So i'm wondering if the MorphOS hardware is just too slow to emulate a x86 pc designed to run a game which only needs a 486 and some memory or if the dosbox port is not optimized?
can it be related to the missing opengl drivers in morphos? would that increase the performance?

The funny thing is, that the setup programm of that game shows me as CPU an x86 running at 68MHz, which should be more than enough for this game.

Now maybe there are some of you who may want to test that game and give me some feedback about the performance.

> i'm wondering if the MorphOS hardware is just too slow to emulate a x86 pc
> designed to run a game which only needs a 486 and some memory or if the
> dosbox port is not optimized?

I guess the answer is a matter of perspective, given that DOSBox lacks an x86-to-PPC JIT compiler. You may want to have a look at those references:

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=32295&forum=32&start=60#672503
http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/dhrystone%20results.htm

From there you can see that the x86 CPU that DOSBox emulates on your PowerBook should be performing somewhere between a 40 MHz 80386 and a 50 MHz 80486.

> can it be related to the missing opengl drivers in morphos?
> would that increase the performance?

I doubt it. DOSBox is a 2D application. Even 3D games running within DOSBox are rendered by the (emulated) CPU. I don't know if it's technically feasible to enhance DOSBox in a way that makes it possible for 3D software running within the guest system to have its graphics rendered by the hardware-acceleration infrastructure of the host system (like is possible with WinUAE for instance).

Hi Cego

I can confirm that this game is really slow on my PB 5,9 as well, even with some DosBox config tweaking. Well, probably we will have to wait for G5 MorphOS port to be able to emulate pc a little bit faster.

I'd love to see Q ported for MorphOS ;)

i suggest using FPSE for playing old games

Andreas_Wolf,
Quote:

There's a patch for DOSBox to emulate Glide (the API used by 3dfx for its Voodoo cards) in Dosbox. I don't know whether this patch is of any use for the MorphOS version.

http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=16462

[ Edited by analogkid 10.02.2013 - 17:24 ]

I've just had a nice afternoon playing the original (and best!) Dark Forces game on MorphOS 3.1 on 1.5Ghz macmini, Very impressed at the speed of it.

Stephen: If your Mini is pulling off Dark Forces at full speed that that is great news! I just bought Soviet's old Efika board which I know will not be much use in regards to DOSbox, but later down the road when G5 support is officially added I do intend to get one of those. Considering that Dark Forces can be run at full speed on a Mini, I'm sure that the Terminator FPS and Anvil of Dawn will run just fine on the G5 as well!

Just tried the rather obscure game Normality on my 1.67 Powerbook, took a right load of fafing about to get it installed as it kept crashing and freezing the whole computer, but anyway, got it installed

works ok, but I did have to drop down to low detail or else the movement was a bit jerky, check out this video, (skip the first 5 minutes) to see the 3d environment of the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkcfNV-jkaY

Normality, what a game! :)

Update:

> DOSBox lacks an x86-to-PPC JIT compiler.

Apparently, such JIT compiler has been developed meanwhile and included in Linux and OSX builds:

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=65057
http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2019/12/and-now-for-something-completely.html
https://sourceforge.net/projects/dosbox-ppcjit/

i'll check that, i also have some hacked powersdl.library with support for additional overlay formats to allow dosbox use overlay on radeons

bah, it crashes when using dynamic cpu type

> bah, it crashes when using dynamic cpu type

Seems kas1e succeeded in getting it to work on OS4:

https://www.amigans.net/modules/xforum/viewtopic.php?forum=3&topic_id=8155
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=818437#p818437
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhiAq_giV3Y

Would be cool to get a MorphOS port of kas1e's version...

i'll try to do it today.

Ok, i got working version (thx to Piru). 22 fps in Quake1 timedemo demo1 (2.3 G5, PCie)
I'll release binaries tommorow.

@Zukow
x5000/020 with 2ghz : 17 fps. Probably x5000/040 with 2.2ghz will be around 20, and so G5 with 2.3 22. Seems all sane enough everywhere then. SDL1 version used in your tests?

EDIT: managed to get 18 fps on my x5k/020 with removing from memory all crap i have loaded on running. That with SDL2 version.

[ Edited by kas1e 22.01.2020 - 11:21 ]

Yes, it quick recompile (with only fixing most important parts) of latest sources + ppc jit diff for SDL1. I need to merge it with my older port with better path handling and some experimental overlay support (but it need special hacked version of powersdl.library as normal powersdl.library (and LibSDL) doesnt work with most popular overlay pixelformats on MorphOS)

\o/

Quote:

hi Zubow and all


Why not update PowerSDL to share with everyone or at worst between developers?

I do a lot of porting with PowerSDL and each update will be a plus for the MorphOS community.

And I'm not even talking about SDL 2.0, I asked for the sources (and I'm not the only one) but no answer ...
Why does nobody want to work on SDL 2.0 ???
Do not tell me "do it", because I am not experienced enough on the system, I started to look but I am a little inexperienced in this area, video management, thread ...

BeWorld

ok, some version for testing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z929KfWOCfvZcmuqw-9K3Dsxiq-uNt31/view?usp=sharing

overlay support hasn't been merged yet.

@zukow (or anyone else who may check morphos version)

While you at it, can you plz check on morphos that:

https://files.scene.org/get:nl-ftp/mags/hugi/hugi17.zip

(only 3mb, just unpack, and run hugi17d.exe).

On OS4 it produces that kind of color issues:

http://kas1e.mikendezign.com/aos4/dosbox/dosbox_badcolors_hugi.jpg

It happens with all games/apps which want 65k colors. That diskmag as an example, but the same issues happen in games 11th hour, TombRaider, Screamer2, Earth2140, etc.

Want to know if you have the same on morphos or not, because if yes, then it probably DOSBox endian issue, and if not, then it our SDL. The issue happens with both dynamic and normal core, so not related to jit.


[ Edited by kas1e 24.01.2020 - 05:23 ]

Seems to be endian issue as MorphOS version has the same/similar problem.

@zukow
Interestingly that seems MacOS PPC and other PPC (but not morphos/aos4) didn't have that issue:) Maybe our SDLs both share some code that has an endian thing to be fixed..

Need to try on LinuxPPC and on macOS PPC...

It should be some easy bug to fix (maybe MacosX uses RGB16 and we mostly use RGB16PC), but still for me overlay support is more important as it gives about 2 fps more.


UPDATE:
I managed to run Hugi with normal colors:
- set ambient to 16bit
- run dosbox, run hugi -> wrong colours
- alt+enter -> go to fullscreen
- alt+enter -> go to window mode -> good colors :)

something is really broken here :)


UPDATE 2:
Mac mini G4 1.42Ghz - 12 fps for timedemo demo1

[ Edited by zukow 24.01.2020 - 10:05 ]