Hi,
I have bought the Wing Commander pack on gog.com but it has severe slowdowns during combat.
Normally the game runs smooth on 5000 cycles but to have a playable game during combat it needs sometimes 9000 cycles.
I was wondering is there a setting which can automatically throttle up the cycles when needed or is the only way manually?
You can use cycles=max limit 9000 to allow Dosbox to automatically adjust the cycles, but Dosbox will probably keep it at 9000 cycles unless your computer is really slow. Why not just set constant cycles=9000 initially and be done with it?
Yea Wing Commander is like that. Between some scenes with no enemies or debris, and scenes with destroyers and fighters the frame rate varies greatly. The best you can do is use the keyboard to change the cycles while playing.
Another option is playing the Windows version which has a constant frame rate I believe.
wrote:You can use cycles=max limit 9000 to allow Dosbox to automatically adjust the cycles, but Dosbox will probably keep it at 9000 cycles unless your computer is really slow. Why not just set constant cycles=9000 initially and be done with it?
Thanks for the replies,
I tried the cycles=max limit 9000 setting but then it runs at max speed regardless of the limit of 9000 cycles, I've tried cycles=5000 limit 9000 but that just runs everything on 5000 cycles it seems.
Anything higher than 5000 cycles is too fast for normal play or combat with few ships sadly.
I also tried fiddleling with the core=normal/dynamic settings but it doesn't seem to help.
wrote:Yea Wing Commander is like that. Between some scenes with no enemies or debris, and scenes with destroyers and fighters the frame rate varies greatly. The best you can do is use the keyboard to change the cycles while playing.
Another option is playing the Windows version which has a constant frame rate I believe.
Now I manually set the cycles, but to adjust it each time after autopiloting and after I shot down an enemy takes away from me getting into the game and it can be tricky with enemy ships around.
I know about the Kilrathi Saga version, I never bought it when new cause I already spend an arm and a leg on WC3 and didn't want another copy, now I'm reluctant to buy it because I doubt WC1 and WC2 will run on windows 7 without problems.
I guess doing it manually is the only way, thanks again for the replies.
Have you tried machine=vgaonly and cputype=386 (given these are in unpatched builds).
Have you observed lower framerates when WC1 slows down? Could you verify with FRAPS or similar, if possible? If the slowdowns are associated with the frame rate, then it may be possible to run the cycles at that higher end (~9000) rate and then "clamp down" on the cycle speed when the video is updating too frequently. There must be many parts of the code where this can be attempted.
Edit: attached a binary for testing with Wing Commander 1 and 2; it is SVN code with a feature active to "keep VGA changes". I presume this will slowdown the emulation and change the way the screen updates. It also doesn't work with EF2000, for instance, but the older Doom2 is functional. However, I have no test case, so it may be worthwhile to test the binary with WC1.
Meanwhile, I wonder whether a frame limiter could be enabled by a variable in the Normal_Loop and a global variable which stores the frame rate in the video emulation.
Edit 2: Hal has a dosbox build with memory slowdown here: Re: game speed is not constant ; I would test it against WC1.
This happened on a real PC as I remember. I had a 386DX-33 8 MB RAM Cirrus GD5426 and Pro Audio Spectrum 16. This slowdown was noticable especially during combat. By the time I upgraded to 486 I had already moved on to Privateer so never tried WC on that rig.
Standard DOSBOX 0.74 delivers the same experience playability-wise from my 386 so I doubt there's anything you could do to improve it's performance. You could make the action scenes smoother by bumping up the cycles but then the rest of the game is too fast.
The game is unplayable on anything faster than a Pentium-75 without the use of some kind of slow-down utility. Wing Commander is just one of the many, many quirky games that have trouble in DOSBOX because they also had trouble on real machines of that era.
Yeah, the Amiga version was better in this regard, but then again, it was released quite some time after the DOS original.
I find the game easier when it is slower rather than too fast. On a 386DX-40 with Cache and an ET4000 the game is definitely too fast for my liking. It is fine with several enemies, but when there is only one left you have a hard time keeping up 😀
A 386DX-33 or 25 are better suited. But again it depends. There are scenes with large ships and here the DX-40 is the way to go again.
Either way it's a compromise but I can tell you that when the game came out almost nobody had a DX-40. I played it on a 10MHz 286 with EGA. When I got a 386DX-33 Wing Commander 2 was already out.
