I tried running Redguard in Dosbox as per the instructions at UESP, except I've encountered two problems:

It's really choppy at 640x480, still stutters a lot at 320x200, and the music restarts every time I move.

I'm guessing the latter would be alleviated by burning the Play disc to an ISO and working from that. I'm also assuming I might need to use some sort of command-line option (-ioctl, or something) to handle CD Audio properly.

In terms of choppiness... I'm running it on a PC that's a dual core and... honestly, I'm a complete luddite when it comes to processors, but it should be at least 4GHz in terms of CPU speed. I'm using the software mode since getting Glide working sounded sort of fiddly and I'm not sure if that would give a performance boost or a performance hit.

So, I guess what I need to be asking is this: Would Glide improve performance, and what sort of DOSbox settings do I need to be looking at?

Okay, I went ahead and set the Glide version of Dosbox up. The... 3dfx stuff seems to work, except I can't use control+F11 or Control+F12 to change the CPU cycles, for some reason, which renders the game unplayable because you have to start it with less than 20000 cycles which isn't enough. Any advice?

Using an ISO instead of the actual disc seemed to fix the music problem, in any case.

---edit---

Nevermind my keyboard is stupid and F9-F12 don't work right unless you have "Function Lock" on.

Remember that games created before multi-core processors are not capable of using more than one. At least you only have a dual-core, so you're not wasting three or five other cores this way. The same applies to hyperthreading and a lot of other performance boosts for modern CPU's - the old code just can't exploit it. In effect, you have a Pentium II of the same clock speed, minus any overheads of Dosbox.

I'm not sure if the Glide implementation moves any of the graphics load to the GPU, but again old code may treat the video card as a plain VGA adapter with nothing being accelerated by the card.

I know that software created before multi-core processors can't take advantage of it. I was more concerned about Dosbox having multi-core support or not, and it seems like it doesn't.

Anyway, new problem. Glide mode fixed the performance problems, except now, doing anything with the menus tends to crash the game. Even ACCESSING the menus will do it, although if I actually get in the menu, typically saving will cause the game to crash or something. Anyway advice for dealing with that.



DOSBox would affect this. I'm pretty sure the Glide version forces the graphics stuff onto the GPU although otherwise I'm thinking that surface and overlay mode are software rendering whereas ddraw, opengl and openglb are hardware rendering modes.

Anyway, I played around with the emulation core settings -- it was set to use Dynamic so I changed it to Normal -- but no effect.

One thing I HAVE noticed is that the music starts screwing up after a crash. Gonna try to disable the Redbook audio and see if that helps.

---edit---

Okay, wasn't that Redbook Audio doing it.