• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

CLI (of any DC) + DOS game > bad performance! Help!

BlackMountainCow

BlackMountainCow

Diamond Member
I got the following problem:

I'm an old fashioned games player. Thus I play lots of games (like Civilization I) under WinXP in a DOS box. But when I do that the performance of my DC CLI (DPAD, LM) drops to almost zero. :| I know that my 3200+ can very well handle Civilization I and a CLI at the same time. But I guess that I miss some settings for Windows XP Pro. Any ideas how to boost the performance for my CLIs?

Thx in advance! :beer:


Christian
 
While I don't actively participate in these projects, the one piece of advice I can give you is to try out Civ3.😛

In Seti, simply changing the setting from idle to low priority, keeps it chugging for me. No noticable negative effects on my 1.8 playing roms.
 
I've got the possibility to change the priorities of LM and DPAD but even making them higher doesn't help me. Only when I set them to real time --> but it makes playing impossible 🙁

Anybody?
 
I dont know if I can help you, but I will look around today and see what I can find. Old DOS games rule! Anyone remember Starflight?
 
I can understand the problem, civ1 is just one of those games that you can sit and play for hours without moving 🙂
Why do you have to run it from dos? I haven't played in a while but I know I've done it from windows 98 at least (no dos or anything...)

Is it possible that the game assumes that the game assumes it has full control of the computer and busy waits while there is nothing else to do?
ie:
while (nothingElseToDo) {
checkIfThereIsAnyThingElse();
}
I've noticed a couple of games that I play will take up 100% processor time the entire time they run. I haven't watched how that affects seti though. If this is the case there may be nothing you can do short of changing the way the game is written.
 
while the dos command prompt itself will not take 100% of the cpu resources, games/programs that run with dos will eat all the cpu it can. for example in my job as a database programmer i use older programs that are run on foxpro for dos and when i fire that up on my machine when i am running seti driver and cli 3.03, foxpro will take all available cpu and my seti production will drop to 0%. there is really nothing you can do. i mean if you wanna play the game you just gotta take the good with the bad. dont worry its nothing you are doing wrong on your end, it happens with dos and certain programs/games.
 
Do a google for dosbox. It a program thats emulates a full x86 computer for windows 2k/xp, linux, and open bsd. Don't know if it will work for your situation, but it fully support Civillization I with v. 0.61.
 
Thx for the help guys. I was affraid that it's due to the code that it takes all my CPU power. But I'll look into "dosbox" santar72.

Thx! :beer:😀:beer:
 
So anyone know any tricks to keep UT down (without losing performance)?
 
Back in the "good" old days with windows 3.x the pif-file could have a couple of performance-settings, and playing around with these and maybe some control-panel-settings (don't remember exactly) a dos-program running alongside something else would not eat all cpu-power. In win9x this wasn't possible any longer.

As for dos-games, the best solution is often to keep the old 386/486/pentium around to play these, since atleast in some games even a p2 is too fast... 😉 If there's a good dos-emulator it must also have the possibility to not use 100% to be usable.

As for Unreal & other win32-games that eats all cpu-power, the only solution I've got is stop playing them. 😛
Uhm, or if you've got more than one machine, play them on the slowest you're getting acceptable performance from. Atleast with older games like Unreal there's little point using the 3GHz+ machine if you've also got a 1GHz with a not too crappy graphics-card. 😉
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top