Choppy fades

The gift horse is wondering why you are staring at his mouth.


hahaha j/k...

I would imagine it is a Dosbox setting that you can fiddle with to fix. What kind of fades are we talking about? Can you give us an example?

-Cub. =o)

LOL, Cub! No, it's nothing he could have accounted for. I'm eternally grateful to him.

For instance, the interactive screen (or whatever you call the usual screen with the inventory, etc.) almost always slowly lights up and darkens after and before the cutscenes; at the end of cutscenes and embedded videos the last shot usually fades into the interactive screen. Cutscenes are rare enough to not make that too important, but the much more common action of switching between rooms fades in and out, so altogether it's a bit of a slow experience, though not entirely unplayable.

I have verified that it's not an issue of the drive itself: I transferred UAKM to my hard drive and it acted the same way.

On the top title bar of DosBox, what number is to the right of CPU-CYCLES? I think DosBox defaults to 3000, but I always thought UAKM was way to sluggish for that. If you set the CPU-CYCLES too high however, it makes the sound choppy, so you have to find a good equilibrium - I always found between 30,000 and 40,000 to be perfect. If your CPU-CYCLES aren't within this range, I suggest you try to adjust that to see if it helps your problem.

In the same folder of your DosBox executable there is a file called 'dosbox.conf'. Open this file in notepad. Scroll to the very bottom of the file. Look below the line that says '[autoexec]' and see if you see any commands involving cpu-cycles. If you don't, add the following line to the bottom-most line of the document:

config -set "cpu cycles=40000"

If a line like this already exists, simply change the number to 40000.

This ought to make everything including walking around a lot smoother and faster. The fading you're talking about should also speed up, or get smoother...

I hope this helps!!

Bests, Rockefeller

I have verified that it's not an issue of the drive itself: I transferred UAKM to my hard drive and it acted the same way.

In your first post you mention both UAKM and Pandora. In your latest post you only refer to UAKM. Is this sluggish behavior seen in both UAKM and Pandora or just UAKM?

I think PD has more efficient graphic algorithms than UAKM.


Side note:
When I started playing from the FlashDrive/DosBox version, the first thing I noticed was how much *faster* and smoother the transitions and room/location changes were compared to playing from the CD.

Have you been able to play PD or UAKM on your present computer before now? What are you comparing the slowness to?

Thanks, Rock, I'll try it.

Doc, I was only giving UAKM as an example. They both behaved in precisely the same manner. And no, I have never noticed this with my earlier installations of UAKM or Pandora.

Wonderful! Now I owe both Doc and Rock crazy money. Looks like setting 30,000 in the dosbox.cfg does the trick (40,000 caused contextual audio cues to be choppy). Haven't tried it on Pandora, but I expect similar results. Thanks again, guys.

EDIT: I am using 50,000 at Pandora and it plays well.

Interesting. I just use the default settings and it plays very fast and smooth.

I am curious to know what kind of hardware you are running. CPU, graphics card, etc. I wonder if that is the difference.

Jerry Dan wrote:Wonderful! Now I owe both Doc and Rock crazy money. Looks like setting 30,000 in the dosbox.cfg does the trick (40,000 caused contextual audio cues to be choppy). Haven't tried it on Pandora, but I expect similar results. Thanks again, guys.

EDIT: I am using 50,000 at Pandora and it plays well.

You don't owe me anything, JD ~ just happy to help! I'm glad that solution worked for ya!

Bests, Rockefeller