Really needing help on gameplay's speed

[Addison]

Greetings everyone!

First post so I'm hoping that this will be a good experience for me. :)

I have a N800 Nokia Internet Tablet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800) that's capable of running Dosbox .72.

Here's a screenshot of it while playing ADOM.
http://img70.imageshack.us/img70/9851/adomyf5.png

Dosbox on my tablet runs at a speed equivalent to an 8 - 10 mhz 8086 computer. So yeah, it's pretty gutter but don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. This honestly is one of the coolest things to have on a handheld system.

The thing is, ADOM is apparently a processing giant so I'm looking for any way to maximize my Dosbox configuration file.


Right now, if I start the game, I can move my character down the road and through the fields in less then one move per second.

If I'm engaged in a battle within the fields, character movement suffers at a rate of perhaps one step per 3 or 4 seconds per turn.

This is also the same once I enter a cave, no matter what enemies are on the screen at the time.

I'm really hoping to shave this 3 to 4 second character movement time down by a half second or so to make it a little more playable.

Any advice, even if trivial would be extremely welcomed!

I'm running this through a front end called Rubybox, but someone should be able to understand my settings.

Please respond back if you have any suggestions whatsoever. :)

Here's my configuration:


cpu cycles - 1600 (this might not be optimum, it's really hard to gauge such a speed in a text based game)
dosbox machine - vga
render frameskip - 0 (changing the frameskips doesn't appear to have any effect on overall movement speed)
sblaster sbtype - none
sdl fullscreen - true
sdl sensitivity - 100
bios autofire - false
bios buttonwrap - false
bios joysticktype - none
bios swap34 - false
bios timed - true
cpu core - simple
cpu cycledown - 1
cpucycle up - 1
dos ems - true
dos umb - true
dos xms - true
dosbox memsize - 4 (It seems that the lower the memsize, that faster the speed. I'm not getting this.)
gus dma1 - 3
gus dma2 - 3
gus gus - false
gus gusbase - 240
gus gusrate - 11025
gus irq1 - 5
gus irq2 - 5
gus ultradir - C:\ULTRASND
ipx ipx - false
midi device - none
midi mpu401 - none
mixer blocksize - 2048
mixer nosound - true
mixer prebuffer - 20
mixer rate - 11025
render aspect - false
render scaler - normal2x
sblaster dma - 1
sblaster hdma - 5
sblaster irq - 7
sblaster mixer - false
sblaster oplmode - none
sblaster oplrate - 11025
sblaster sbbase - 220
sdl autolock - false
sdl fulldouble - false
sdl fullresolution - original
sdl mapperfile - /usr/share/dosbox/mapper.txt
sdl output - surface
sdl priority - higher, higher
sdl usescancodes - false
sdl waitonerror - false
sdl windowresolution - original
serial serial1 - disabled
serial serial2 - disabled
serial serial3 - disabled
serial serial4 - disabled
speaker disney - false
speaker pcrate - 11025
speaker pcspeaker - false
speaker tandy - off
speaker tandyrate - 11025


So yeah, again, if there's anything I can gut out in this configuration that would help with overall speed, however little, please post a response.

This is the only game I'd like to have playable on my tablet.

Thanks ahead!

[Laukku]

So, your tablet can't handle more than 1600 cycles? DOSBox needs a pretty fast computer to run decently. I have played ADOM in DOSBox with a PC in the past, and it played really slow with the initial number of cycles (>1600). I usually raised the cycles to 10 000-20 000 and it then ran decently.

[gut]

There is a line in your adom.cfg file that can speed things
up a bit:

Base_Delay_Factor = 1

I forget if 0 works, but try that also.

[Grey]

DOSBox can be a bit CPU intense. ADOM on the other hand should run fine on a low-end processor - pity you can't do it natively. The only suggestion I can make is to try an older version of DOSBox. The modern version is great, loads of features etc, but is way more than you need to play ADOM. Even very old versions of it should handle the game and run faster for you.

Looks damn cool though. Even with 3/4 seconds for a move in the wilderness it'd still be fun. Just play classes like druids and rangers that can evade wilderness encounters easily :P

[Nezur]

Your "cpu cycles" value seems to be too low. 1600 instruction cycles per millisecond are equal to 1,6 MHz whereas your tablet runs at 400 MHz (or 330 MHz on OS2007) according to Wikipedia. Raise the value gradually to find out the optimum speed or alternatively set it to "auto". Too high a speed will slow the game down.

http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Dosbox.conf

[Addison]

Well, after fumbling around an hour our two here and there, I managed to actually double the original speed I had previously.

Now my character can take a step about once every two seconds.

I can't imagine anyone else finding this to be acceptable, but for myself, I'm incredibly pleased. :D

I just pretend that I'm playing the game in real time, so the slow speed doesn't bother me as much.

Just a few more questions though.

I found this for download even though the link is currently broken:
http://www.adom.de/adom/download/linux/adom_0.99g15-2_i386.deb

My tablet runs on an OS system called maemo, installing programs on this requires a .deb file.

Would this .deb file work for such a device?

If not, is it possible to compile ADOM for the Nokia Tablet if it compiled easily right out of the box?

Finally, are there any additional tweaks in the ADOM options file besides the Base_Delay_Factor?

It looks as though every time my character takes a step, I get a quick flash of the cursor right next to the speed value on the bottom status info.

If ADOM is trying to completely redraw the entire screen after every step, this is probably why the tablet can't handle such a load.

Well, turning up the cycles definitely did help even though I'm not understanding why.

If trying to play something that uses Soundblaster, I can't get cycles any higher than 600 before the sound begins to studder on most games.

So I'm definitely setting cycles faster than what it should be able to handle, but it seems to be working much better doing it this way.

Well, thanks for all the great responses.

Hope to hear back on some of my questions. :)