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alinebee / Boxer

The DOS game emulator that's fit for your Mac.
http://boxerapp.com/
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Performance with GOG.com Boxer standalone code much slower than with Boxer.app #11

Closed y-lee closed 11 years ago

y-lee commented 11 years ago

This is a continuation of a bug I reported to Alun via email. As others have reported, performance with GOG.com's Fallout for Mac (using the DOS version on Alun's new standalone Boxer code) is really slow. I found that extracting Fallout.app's gamebox and running it with full Boxer is much faster. As requested, here are my performance times for going from the main menu's Intro button to Brian Fargo's name appearing:

Fallout.app

Extracted Fallout gamebox on Boxer 1.3.2

Extracted Fallout gamebox on Boxer 1.4 prerelease

Also, the background wind sound effect during Fallout.app full screen's main menu has noticeable "pops" of static, especially when the mouse pointer is moving; presumably another artifact of whatever is causing the poor performance with the fades in this scenario.

alinebee commented 11 years ago

One thing to confirm: you're not using the Smoove or Retro rendering styles in Fallout.app, are you? These can have a significant impact on performance, especially in fullscreen.

y-lee commented 11 years ago

I was indeed using Smoove, and turning it off in Fallout.app has brought the time down to 3 seconds. Sorry for the trouble, and thanks for figuring out the issue.

alinebee commented 11 years ago

Glad the problem was something already known, rather than a new performance regression per se - though the Smoove filter's behaviour is undesirable in this instance and should be improved (it should just drop frames when it can't keep up, instead of painstakingly squeezing out every single one).