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A place to discuss and ask questions about the second part of The Elder Scrolls series
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Problem with Daggerfall on win XP

Wed Jan 14, 2009 8:10 am

Hi. My english is elementary since it's not my mother tongue.
I played daggerfall with Dosbox and Vdmsound, but Daggerfall in dosbox was so slow that i can't play and VDMS have some trouble that are moving and climbing it's,i think, because of game speed.
Most critical problems are that when i use scroll bar for buying some magics in mages guild, the game crashed without any error messages and sometimes the game is turned off without cause..
Vmware and Virtual PC, Virtual Emulator programs are not for playing daggerfall because of low performance.

my computer setting
AMD XP 2800
RAM 512MB
VGA Geforce FX5500

Means for Playing Daggerfall on Windows XP perfectly do not exist?

Wed Jan 14, 2009 11:09 pm

This is taken from the featured article on the main page.

Performance tuning

The Elder Scrolls games were notorious for their high system requirements at the time. As emulation is always considerably slower than the real thing, a very fast computer is definitely recommended---especially for Battlespire and Redguard, as they were high-resolution games.

For those for whom DOSBox is not running as fast as it perhaps should, below are various tips on how to speed up DOSBox or the relevant game, many through edits to dosbox.conf. Said tips become progressively more extreme in terms of compromise for those who really need the extra speed boost.

Enable the dynamic core explicitly by changing core=auto to core=dynamic.
Close as much software running in background as possible so that DOSBox has at its disposal as much processing power as possible.
Play in full-screen. DOSBox performs various optimizations in full-screen mode which are impossible in a window.
Enable full-screen double buffering. Change fulldouble=false to fulldouble=true.
Play from CD images instead of physical discs if experiencing periodic hanging. DOS games would often rely upon the slower speeds and trivial spin-up times of the drives of the day, accessing game data from disc more often than modern drives are designed to cope with.
Arena and Daggerfall both include a detail slider which decreases the draw distance. Turning detail down to its lowest will have a considerable impact on performance.
You may wish to manually tweak the cycles (processing power) which DOSBox attempts to emulate. Start with cycles at a fairly high number (eg. cycles=8000) and press Ctrl-F12 to increase the number of cycles, repeating until either the game runs sufficiently smoothly or DOSBox starts to use 100% CPU in the Windows Task Manager processes tab. Ctrl-F11 can also be used to decrease the cycle count if necessary. On particularly slow machines, cycles=max may yield best results.
Enable frame skipping: change frameskip=0 to a higher value, starting low. More skipped frames equates to much less work for DOSBox, at the cost of jerkier video.
In extreme cases you can reconfigure the game to play without sound or music and disable SoundBlaster emulation in DOSBox (sbtype=none).
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