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Pandora: Merry Christmas on shipday, we get Warcraft 2!
Mon, 22 Dec 2008

This one is for Pickle, the eminent DOSBox for gp2x expert. This man slaved and slaved to wring every last bit of hot DOSBox action out of the little gp2x. He's been helping us out sorting out configs and fiddling to get DOSBox working on the Pandora. I asked what a good game to check would be, as I had been trying out some 'lightweights' .. he suggested WC2. Briliant I thought...Check it out..

This is a stock DOSBox (by which I mean compiled from source, with no optimizations _at all_, and not even tuning the config. Its got the wrong cycle settings and full audio enabled and installed _from my Warcraft 2 ancient CD_. DOSBox in dynarec mode though, so its working its ass off here :) The good news -- runs nearly full speed, and fully playably. I've worked through the first Orc campaign mission. USB mouse and keybord.

Aside, I also tried Wing Commander 1 -- peachy. Civilization 1 -- perfect. Wizardry 7 Crusaders of the Dark Savant -- perfect. System Shock 1 chugged it, but thats fair .. its all software math emulation to do the 3d mode, but possibly with high enough clock and optimization.. maybe. We're just scratching the surface here.

The only thing thats chuggy at all is scrolling around the screen by mousing to the edge; was that smooth back in the day? Its possible with more units it would suffer more as this first campaign is nothing, but still.. this is quite an achievement.

Pandora was set to 800MHz .. and the Panda can go higher still; I probably should've tried for 900 or more to see if it corrected that one nit, but I was too busy drooling :)

Edit

For those of us so mightily curious, here is Dune 2 running; it is also playable (though I didn't complete any levels, it seemed just fine to play.)

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