To check wether or not I was wrong about the bad performances on Pi3 of the new dosbox cores in 5.26 betas, I realized the following tests :
First tests with Duke Nukem 3D as it is one of those rare games which allow to display FPS counter by typing DNRATE in game
So here are the results :
lr-dosbox on latest 5.26 beta: no cracking in sound, counter displays 4-6 FPS, game is very slow, frameskip seems to be very heavy
dosbox-x on latest 5.26 beta: no cracking in sound, counter displays 9-10 FPS, rarely up to 15 when nothing happens on screen, game is slow, not as slow as on lr-dosbox, frameskip again very heavy
regular dosbox on 5.25 : sound is cracking in menu and ingame, counter displays 40-45 FPS, game seems to run normal speed (with sound cracking), no visible frameskip
I also tried Master of Magic on all three cores, which doesn’t any fps counter however the results are telling :
lr-dosbox : sound in introduction and menu is heavily cracking
dosbox-x : sound in introduction and menu crack a lot, noticeably less than in lr-dosbox, but still a lot
regular dosbox in 5.25 : no sound cracking at all
In addition, windows 3.1 games don’t run at all in both lr-dosbox and dosbox-x. as most of those games requires specific configuration in a dedicated dosbox.cfg for the game, this is also proof that the dosbox.cfg file of the game is not correctly taken into account and some configgen code / transcriptor is required to have a good lr-dosbox / dosbox-x integration
So in essence removing dosbox regular core makes dos games unplayable on pi3 and likely on pi4 (not much more powerfull, likely not enough to cancel this heavy fps drop)
Suggestion :
- keep the two new cores and upgrade their configgen integration (i’ll be happy to do it) as they are interesting for further evolution and both offer access to the extended instructions set of dosbox-svn
- reintegrate regular dosbox core for its very good performances and good handling of configuration