DOSBox vs. Parallels vs. Boot Camp

F

fsjws4

Bit poster
I have some old DOS games I want to run. I tried DOSBox on OS X, but the performance wasn't quite good enough. Right now, I'm running DOSBox under XP with Boot Camp. But it's a shame that I have to reboot just to run the emulator.

Has anyone tried running DOSBox under XP in Parallels? Or running DOS itself? How does the performance compare?
 
I have found running DOSBox on OS X in fullscreen mode to have a dramatic performance improvement. I have been tweaking settings still, but it does seem to help a lot.
 
Your problem with DosBox for the Mac is that it's still PPC only.

I downloaded the DosBox source and built it as an Intel only app, and saw a dramatic improvement (using the PPC version it took 90% of one CPU at the lowest settings so there wasn't much leeway for improvements, but after compiling for Intel, it runs at 10% CPU while idle). It's probably still not as good as running in Windows - the DosBox guys need some Mac programmers to help optimize it I guess. I would volunteer but I'm primarily a Java developer with only a little experience of C/C++ on Linux.

If you don't really want to attempt to build it (I had to edit one file to get it to compile, and you also need to download and compile sdl-config), PM me and I'll send it to you. I don't have a website where I can host it where I wouldn't be hit by bandwidth charges.
 
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