Planet Strike runs slowly when cycles are on auto

joncampbell123 / dosbox-x

DOSBox-X fork of the DOSBox project

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Planet Strike runs slowly when cycles are on auto #4372

Open BridgeHeadland opened 1 year ago

BridgeHeadland commented 1 year ago

Question

When I run Planet Strike in DOSBox-X, with cycles on auto, it runs (according to my calculations) 10 times slower than it normally would. Is it normal?

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rderooy commented 1 year ago

This works as designed. As documented cycles=auto simply means programs are set to 3000 cycles, unless they enable "Protected Mode" (feature of 386+ CPUs). If they do then cycles=max is used.

Even though Blake Stone: Planet Strike is a rather late DOS program, it apparently does not use Protected Mode (e.g. via DOS/4GW), so it will be capped to just 3000 cycles by default.

See https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Performance

Also see https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Blake_Stone:_Planet_Strike