Game:

Rendition (2007)

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It's time for an obligatory vQuake video with the new Dosbox-Rendition optimisations. Embedding RReady directly in Dosbox-Rendition isn't necessary for high framerates. In fact the reason embedding made vQuake run faster (and other apps slower or the same) was a matter of focus.

On the left the pre-optimisation run and on the right the new code. Audio is similarly split. There's static on the left and almost none on the right. The videos start out (almost) in sync or with a slight advantage on the left. But by the end of the run the optimised clip (on the right) is ahead.

The reason Dosbox-Rendition didn't run vQuake as well as Dosbox-Staging-Rendition was because of focus prioritisation. RReady runs in passthrough mode through a separate app (Dosclient.exe) which displays a full screen window and sends keyboard and mouse input back to Dosbox. Dosbox-Rendition does have separate priorities for in-focus and out of focus modes, but in out of focus mode there's an extra block of code which doesn't run. The HighPerformance=true switch sets the priority to the in-focus priority, runs the extra bit of code and increases dosclient's (child process) priority to match.

Dosbox-Staging-Rendition handles prioritisation much better, but even it has an extra block of code that runs when the app is in focus. In fact that's how I got custom carsets to runs at full speed with it, by running the code when out of focus (just like with optimised Dosbox-Rendition).

I'm working on embedding the changes to Dosbox-Staging-Rendition. It has to pass all the tests before I can release it.

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