trying dosbox-x in 2025

[samsepi0l]

I thought it would be a good idea to make a separate thread about my discovering dosbox-x. My motivation to spend time on trying this was purely because of Jake's good feedback about it. I had previously been using Dosbox ECE for probably 5 or so years.

The nicest thing (in my opinion) is it allows for save-states in ICR2. This is great, because if you do 100% races (like myself, Jake and I'm sure others) you can make them at points to go back if something stupid happens: game crashing, track warping, AI being dumb (cheating not intended). It's great also if you are racing a long race and you need to just step away for some reason.

It seems like we both feel the performance is on par with ECE as far as frame-rate and controls once things are tuned in. It honestly took me more than an hour to re-figure out how to make my mapper file to map all of my steering wheel/button commands like I had done in ECE. Frustrating but only because I forgot how.

One question I have not answered yet is- I can't figure out how to lock the 4:3 scaling in so that every time I go 'full screen' it does not try and stretch it to widescreen. There is an option to lock it at 4:3 when you go full-screen but it seems like you have to turn this on the first time you load it every time. Another thing is I like to set the graphics to a "raw" appearance so that things are sharper. I tried "pixel perfect" or "near perfect" and these look like what I'm used to seeing. The default looks a little more washed out - I can't describe it better right now. This is also something I need to re-enable every time I load it. I still need to figure out to set these 2 things up so they are enabled by default. I don't see a way to do this in the configuration file though... so I am scratching my head.

Another thing that was a temporary 'deal breaker' was that initially I thought my wheel/pedals + all of my joysticks didn't work. (BTW I have several sets of Logitech driving force gt wheels/pedals) Also several Logitech handheld controllers. This ended up being because I didn't know any better and I installed the SDL1 version when I really needed the SDL2 version. I was surprised this was not as common a problem as I think it should be.

Maybe we can all document our testing results in this thread. It will be an important topic for people who play the game often.

[sharangad]

I intend to add support for DosBox-X in a future release of RReady. It's been on my to-do list for a while. It'll probably be a patch instead of a fork.

[jxeboy]

I've spent some time figuring out dosbox-x and getting it to perform smoothly (for me)

I've found these to be the best settings in the [cpu] section (just the ones ive changed):

Code:

core               = dynamic_x86
cputype            = pentium
cycles             = max 50%

Limiting CPU cycles using the "max" and % option seems to work best for me. It prevents a lot of the issues I was having with stuttering around heavy tracks and carsets like Denver or Long Beach. I presume this just allows for more headroom and prevents large spikes at given points on those tracks. The actual % at 50 seems to work on but I might try it a little higher, like 75 because if I am started at the back of a grid with all cars in view the FPS can go down to 26 - 28 on a very complex carset.

In [joystick]

Code:

joysticktype  = 2axis
timed         = true
joy1deadzone1 = 0.00
joy1deadzone2 = 0.00
joy2deadzone1 = 0.00

The deadzone changes are necessary to get rid of the center issue

In [mapper]

Code:

joy1deadzone0- = 0.00
joy1deadzone0+ = 0.00
joy1deadzone1- = 0.00
joy1deadzone1+ = 0.00
joy1deadzone2- = 0.00
joy1deadzone2+ = 0.00
joy1deadzone3- = 0.00
joy1deadzone3+ = 0.00
joy1deadzone4- = 0.00
joy1deadzone4+ = 0.00
joy1deadzone5- = 0.00
joy1deadzone5+ = 0.00
joy1deadzone6- = 0.00
joy1deadzone6+ = 0.00
joy1deadzone7- = 0.00
joy1deadzone7+ = 0.00
joy2deadzone0- = 0.00
joy2deadzone0+ = 0.00
joy2deadzone1- = 0.00
joy2deadzone1+ = 0.00
joy2deadzone2- = 0.00
joy2deadzone2+ = 0.00
joy2deadzone3- = 0.00
joy2deadzone3+ = 0.00
joy2deadzone4- = 0.00
joy2deadzone4+ = 0.00
joy2deadzone5- = 0.00
joy2deadzone5+ = 0.00
joy2deadzone6- = 0.00
joy2deadzone6+ = 0.00
joy2deadzone7- = 0.00
joy2deadzone7+ = 0.00

Possibly this is fixed with the [joystick] section changes, but i believe this may remove some non-linearity from the controls.

[samsepi0l]

For the past week I've been playing a lot of icr2 on dosbox-x (it's too cold in Chicago to work in my shop this weekend- it's supposed to be -9F tomorrow here!) I practiced time and time again at Pavel's cleveland85 track. I had previously tested the savestate feature just messing around at Portland89 and it worked. Yesterday I qualified on pole at Cleveland (I had the BLAP set too high) but wanted to make a savestate at the end of the pace lap incase anything funny happened. I made a savestate but during the creation of the savestate dosbox-x itself crashed. (not icr2) I re-started dosbox-x and re-loaded my racesave.bin file but it crashed a few more times doing almost the exact same thing. Finally I got it to work, but I can't explain why. I then made save-states every time I pit since it was a 100% length race, all 80 laps. I ended up finishing 3rd and not needing any of the save states. After the race was over I re-loaded my latest save just to try it and it worked as expected.

I'm not sure why I had some semi-repetitive crashing but I was curious if anyone has seen this like that before?