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Lol, no. Doesn’t seem to affect your phone. And I think I remember now that this was sort of fixed in one of the last updates with the fasterAndroidAudio command.
Anyway, even if it’s still not lightning fast, this is good enough for most of the best DOS games. ?Ok, seems we’re getting there.? Here’s another tweak: set these values in the [mixer] section:
blocksize=512
prebuffer=0This helped a lot on my Note 4, compared to the default 10 (15?).
And you can set vmemsize=8 in the [dosbox] section, which might also give a tiny speed boost.
No problem. ~4000 is what I had expected from my experience with the Snapdragon 410. If your phone can keep up that performance, you should be able to play Ultima Underworld, or Warcraft II. ?
Just keep trying. Some games run with higher cycles tham others. At some point, you’ll notice sound crackling/skipping. That’s when you’ve reached your device’s limit.
You could also try some more sophisticated cycle settings, to be more flexible, like this:cycles=auto 12000 105% limit 30000
This will run Dosbox at a minimum of 12000 cycles, with the “max 105%” parameter, and allow up to 30000 cycles (which your device can’t reach anyway, so it’s sort of an open-end value).
You’re right, Daggerfall is a demanding DOS game. But on the other hand, it’s not demanding enough to challenge modern high-end or even mid-range smartphones. As you say, your mid-range Honor 5C can run it fine, and with 1800 Doom realtics, it’s about as fast as a former high end Note 2 from 2012. ?
Yeah, it’s great. Have you tried Jedy Outcast & Academy? Both should work great on your phone, too.?
No problem, you’re welcome.?
5045 is really slow, I’m sure there can be done something about it.
– as mentioned above, set governor=performance, if your phone is rooted
– try fixed cycles. Start e.g. with cycles=12000, and increase the value in increments of 1000 until the sound becomes choppy.The SD 410 in the Galaxy A5 is very comparable to your cpu, and identically clocked. So you should be able to achieve at least something around 4000 realtics.
For future reference: should you plan to buy a new phone, and intend to use Dosbox or any other demanding emulator (Snapdragons are terrible for PPSSPP, too), look for either a Tegra K1 device, or a Samsung phone which uses their own Exynos chipset. Samsung also build Snapdragon devices, so look carefully. Both Exynos and Tegra chips are easily twice as fast as their Snapdragon equivalents at identical clock rates.
OK, that explains it, I guess. Your phone has a Snapdragon 200, which is very low end. Doom might sort of run, as well as any other 286/386 game. Wing Commander 1&2, Ultima 7, Ultima Underworld, there are many great you can run more or less well. But Daggerfall is too demanding, that sinply won’t work, sorry.
But I’ll try it on my tablet, it’s pretty much in the same league: an entry-level quad core cpu @1.3 GHz. It scores ~3900 realtics in the Doom timedemo.
Speaking of which: just follow my post above. Download the shareware version from here, unzip to your DOS game folder.
Launch Magic Dosbox. Start the Doom shareware version with the following parameters:
“doom -timedemo demo 3” (without the quotes, of course).
This will start an automated demo, which will run in slow motion on your phone. At the end, you will be dropped back to the DOS prompt, and at the top, there’ll be your result: “Scored 2134 gametics in […] realtics”. The realtics value measures how fast your phone can run the demo. Lower values are better.Daggerfall doesn’t need that much power, a 486DX2 was enough back in the day. So I guess there are three possible reasons why it’s not running properly:
1. Wrong configuration in mDosbox: you need to set cycles=max to get ideal performance
2. old/weak hardware: I don’t think your phone is too old, even my old Galaxy Note 2 (S3 hardware) is easily capable of running Daggerfall.
I strongly suspect you’re trying to run Dosbox on a Snapdragon chipset. As a rule of thumb, Snapdragon cpu’s are really bad for emulators in general.
My Note 4 (Snapdragon 805 @2.7 GHz) was barely capable of running any demanding DOS games. Snapdragons are horrible when it comes to NEON instructions, which, unfortunately, are of extreme importance for fast Dosbox emulation.The Snapdragon 410 for example, which is “powering” recent phones like Galaxy A3 or A5, as well as many Huawei and HTC phones, is a good cpu in everyday use, but it only reaches a meagre 4100 realtics in the Doom Shareware timedemo. Even my Galaxy S1 was faster 6 years ago, with a 1 GHz single core Exynos cpu.
3. Conservative kernel settings:
Again, that’s mostly a Snapdragon thing. This is because of their bullshit cpu design, that requires them to downclock the cpu whenever possible, to prevent overheating. BUt it might affect other chipsets, too. If you are rooted, you can try to tweak your kernel settings. Ideally, you’ll set the cpu governor to “performance” prior to running Dosbox. Or you try different governors, and tweak their up- and downclock values. Beware that you can damage your phone, if you don’t know what you’re doing.If you want to do some testing, download the Doom Shareware v1.9 from here. Set cycles=max in mDosbox, leave everything else at default, and run Doom with these parameters:
C:\>Doom -timedemo demo3
The resulting score shows you exactly how fast your emulated DOS machine on your phone is. You can compair it with real PCs in this list: https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/misc/doombench.html
For comparison:
A5 stock kernel settings: 4100 realtics (486 33 MHz)
A5 performance governor: 3600 realtics (486 40 MHzNote 4 stock kernel settings: 2100 realtics (Pentium 75 MHz)
Note 4 performance governor: 1400 realtics (Pentium 90-100 MHz)S7 Edge stock kernel settings: 760 realtics (Pentium 166 / AMD K6 233 MHz)
S7 Edge performance governor: 640 realtics (Pentium MMX 250 MHz)Hm, I haven’t upgraded to Nougat yet, so I can’t verify this. I have experienced a similar behaviour with Samsung SideSync, though: whenever I switch from remote control via PC back to direct control on my phone, I’m dropped back into mDosbox main menu. I thought this was related to the SideSync app switching my phone’s screen on/off, and doing some weird stuff in the background.
I’ll try my own bluetooth keyboard and gamepad.*EDIT: at least my gamepad is working fine. I can disconnect and reconnect it without any issues. I don’t have my BT keyboard with me, so it’ll take some time before I can check.
No, haven’t experienced this issue before. What exactly is happening? Magic Dosbox resets itself right in the middle of a game? Or do you enter the bluetooth menu on your device? Because that could put mDosbox into background, and depending on your devices memory, Android kills (and thus effectively resets) running apps, to free up memory. This would be especially likely if you set a large memsize in mDosbox (e.g. 128).
Or, simply put: does this also happen with other memory-hungry games or emulators?
