[DOS] Games/Visually "advanced" programs spazzing out

[DeBedenHasen]

Good evening.

After setting up a DOS VM I tried to play some old games ("Defender", specifically). The game works, however, after pressing Space and therefore progressing to the main menu, the game suffers a seizure and it just keeps flicking between the scoreboard and the main menu. The game itself runs at about 500% of the normal speed. I can really only blame VirtualBox for it (sorry), as online hosting sites keep working copies of it.

Any experience with that sorta stuff?

Thanks.

[mpack]

The CPU clock is probably several orders of magnitude faster than the game was designed to expect. You could experiment with capping the CPU in the VM settings.

[DeBedenHasen]

[...]You could experiment with capping the CPU in the VM settings.

Well, that solves the speed issue, but the swapping between scoreboard and main menu is still there and unaffected. And in-game everything is lagging around (multiple bullets while there should only be one etc.).

[mpack]

VirtualBox isn't really designed to do a good job virtualizing 16 bit guests. Perhaps DOSBox would be a better fit for your needs.