Dark Sun performance questions

[Bester]

I'm trying to play Dark Sun: Shattered Lands. Some GoG torrent version.

It says it's using 7000 cycles in the title bar. And I find the game a bit too slow - the music stutters sometimes, the menus take time to load, etc. Should I speed it up a bit or is it gonna make the whole game faster, too? I just want the menus to open faster. And maybe help the mouse with the input lag that it has.

Also, how do I change it anyway? These are all the settings I see:

Maybe it's some really old version of DosBox and I should update it? If so, how?

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

If you want to increase the cycles you won't be able to do it from the GoG menu. Go to Darksun folder, find file "dosbox_darksun". It's in the main folder, not Dosbox folder btw. Then change value "cycles=fixed 7000" to whatever you want.

EDIT:
Detailed info on what does this line do:
https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Dosbox....e_default.25.5D_.5Blimit_.22cycle_limit.22.5D

 

[warcrimes666]

You might try a graphical front end for dosbox, I prefer dfend reloaded:

http://dfendreloaded.sourceforge.net/

The gog settings are usually awful. You can set everything up comfortably in dfend, just point it towards the Darksun exe. Theres hotkeys to change your cycles although not accessible with the fixed command I believe. Im away from my home comp but I think with Darksun I had it at either 12000 or 15000 cycles, thats around the sweet spot. I played it when it came out on a 386 and big improvement now for the reasons you mentioned.

 

[Bester]

Spent the last 4 hours trying to set up Gravis Ultrasound for the game. I can't... Even though there's a video of some guy playing it with gravis.

 

[Bester]

Nvm, I did it. Jesus Christ... It was an IQ test I barely passed.

But now the sound is beautiful and not stuttering at all. The cycles had nothing to do with it.

 

[Bester]

For posterity, how to set up Gravis UltraSound for Dark Sun.

- Download https://alex.pc-freak.net/files/GUS/ULTRASND.zip
- Unzip the files to somewhere like C:\Games\ULTRASND
- In dosbox_darksun.conf, change "gus=false" to "gus=true"
- Go into your game's DOSBOX subdirectory and launch DOSBox.exe... It'll create a profile at C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\DOSBox\dosbox-0.74.conf ... Now close dosbox.
- Open that profile, change "gus=false" to "gus=true", save. Launch dosbox again.
> mount c "C:\Games"
> mount d ".."
> ultramid.exe
> gravis.exe
> sound.bat
> hit "no" and select Gravis Ultrasound for both sound and music... proceed, it should all be streamlined here
- Open dosbox_darksun_single.conf and change your [autoexec] section to the following:

[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.
# You can put your MOUNT lines here.
@echo off
mount c "C:\Games"
mount d ".."
d:
cls
ultramid
gravis
darksun
exit

It should now work.

The two tricks were:
- The path "ultradir=C:\ULTRASND" in .conf should be to the path not on your PC, but in your emulated dosbox. We've dealt with it.
- And DarkSun is a special case, where to detect gravis, it needs to load "ultramid.exe" and "gravis.exe" before either going into settings or launching the game. We've dealt with it too.

The result is beautiful:

 

[warcrimes666]

Very nice, its interesting to hear now. I was always adlib/sound blaster and wondered what things sounded like with the good cards. Made me think to see what it sounds like with Loom and found this site although buddy uses Roland for it:

https://speakersoundtracks.is4.site/soundtracks/

Ill give it a go next time around