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The monitoring app must be returnimg faulty values. If all cores were maxed out, cpu temp would be much higher.
45°C is only slightly above idle temp. I wonder what that Androdi update did to your phone. ?It really depends on the game, and what’s happening on screen. I can run Doom at 135000 cycles, but that doesn’t work at all in Wing Commander 4, for example. Video playback is especially taxing, for whatever reason. ?♂️
You’ll have to try it out for yourself. Back on the OT though: Tie Fighter should run perfectly fine with cycles=15000, have you tried that yet?
400000 is way too much. Slowdown and sound crackling is what you get when you push cycle settings beyond yout cpu limit.
On my S9+ (Exynos), I can go up to ~100000-135000, depending on the game.Dang, that’s annoying. What happens if you set high fixed cycles? Like e.g. cycles=75000, cycles=100000, or cycles=125000?
If set high enough, Dosbox should pull enough cpu resources to stay on the performance cores, and prevent throttling.Same issue nonwtheless. If it was fine before, it’s got to be aggressive throttling introduced with the latest update.
You shoukd try Game Launcher, and see if you can improve performance.Newer Samsung phones are fine, it seems to be relates to the S8/S9 Exynos models.
You can check the benchmark section of the forum for some numbers.Keep in mind that emulation is different than running code natively. It’s like speaking a completely foreign language using only a dictionary, without any prior knowledge of that language.
A 2018 phone is more powerful than a 2008 PC, but it doesn’t have an x86 cpu, and doesn’t run DOS, so it can’t run DOS games natively.
At any rate, your S8+ has enough horsepower to run even demanding DOS games or even Win95. At least if it has an Exynos cpu, I’m not sure if the Snapdragons had already caught up back then (they have today, and are even faster, I think).
Judging by the scores in the benchmark section, you should be able to get a score of ~700 realtics in the linked Doom benchmark.In this particular benchmark, I had the aforementioned performance drops due to unnecessary performance throttling. Sometimes 610 realtics, sometimes 900. Game Tuner & root fixed this for me, but the issue remains. And it seems to be a Samsung issue with the S8 and S9 series. S10 is fine again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What you can do for testing: download the shareware 1.9 version of Doom, set it up in Dosbox, and run it with different cycles settings (cycles= max 105%, cycles=50000, cycles=100000, cycles=125000, etc.). At some point, you will get sound crackling issues, that’s when you’ve reached your cpu limit.
Run the demo with the following command:
doom -timedemo demo3and see what happens.
Again, you cpu should be powerful enough to run even Win95 games like Diablo or Commandos.
The max cycles possible depend on your device. It’s all just trial & error.
Regarding fixed vs max cycles: sometimes, especially when playing older games, fixed cycles will give yöu a better gaming experience, as cycles=max can simply be too fast. Ultima 6 or Wing Commander 1 for example become unplayable if Dosbox is running too fast. And while cycles=max will give you the best performance possible, it can also be inconsistent, because it’s relative to the cpu power assigned to Dosbox.
Expert settings are identical to what you do on PC. It’s the plain text config file.
What might be happening is that your phone’s power management loads the Dosbox process off onto one of the power saving cores of the cpu. Happened to me in the past as well, and that caused massive slowdowns. You can try to work around that with root and certain cpu tweaking apps, but that’s certainly not a valid suggestion, as it involves tampering with your phone’s brain.I’d suggest you try fixed cycles, and see what happens. Tie Fighter was designed for fast 386 or 486 cpus back in the day, so you should use these settings under [cpu]
cputype=auto
cycles=15000What these values do:
cputype=auto: leave it as it is. There are different cpu tyoes DOSBox can emulate, but the default 80386/486 cpu is fine.cycles: the amount of cpu operations executed. There’s no 1:1 value that relates to a certain cpu type, but these are some rough estimates:
2000 cycles = 80286 / 16 MHz
3000 cycles = 80386SX / 25 MHz
5000 cycles = 80386DX / 40 MHz
10000 cycles = 80486 / 60 MHz
20000 cycles = Pentium 90 MHzSomething like that. Cycles=max will run everything as fast as possible on your cpu, with no fixed value.
In my layout, absolute mouse is working fine. 🙂
Block mouse move & msmouse are already pre-configured, and auto correction is set to the game’s resolution (640×480). Not sure if on phones with lower resolution or different aspect ratio than my old S7 (1.440 × 2.560 pixels) need a different setting, but that shouldn’t be the case.
You will always need to recalibrate the mouse ingame, as the Win95 / Diablo combo can mess it up. But I automated this in the profile, too, so it shouldn’t become an issue, either.GPU rendering won’t help. Samsung’s cpu management is a mess, so it’s not unlikely they re-configured cpu throttling, to prevent heating and increase battery life, who knows? What phone do you have btw?
You can use Game Launcher or better (if still available) Game Tuner/Game Tools, to activate a higher performance profile for Magic Dosbox. There should also be a high performance option somewhere in the quick access tiles of your phone.
The cycles=120% setting will increase emulation speed, but at the expense of sound quality. Anything above 105% can lead to sound stuttering/crackling, because you’ll be running Dosbox above your cpu’s speed limits.
Frame skip, at least on modern phones, has close to zero effect on performance. I’d rather set it to 0 or 1, so you’ll get a smoother gaming experiece. There’s no point in increasing emulation speed, when on the other hand, you set video output to 10 or 15 fps.
This may surprise you, but people tend to have real jobs to earn real money, thus having limited time to update forum posts. ? I do appreciate your enthusiasm, and will update the list now, but please refrain from spamming the forum. Thank you! ?
