I seem to not be able to play any dos games without them starting with something like 1 fps… literally 1 FPS if I’m lucky.
This time I’m running Lakka on a HP Compaq Laptop (x64) we/ 4 Gig of RAM. I’d assume this machine would be able to run dosbox without much issue.
All I could find was this… DOSBox-SVN Performance issues
I’ll try playing around with the CPU cycles and see what happens…
What are you trying to play? Your machine should be perfectly capable. Have you had any luck changing the cycles?
The very first game I managed to get working, to my amazement was Cyberia.
Even with CPU cycles set to max, and frame rate skip set to 2, it lags in many spots.
Descent, I get the bad 1 FPS regardless of the settings I set, even with framerate skips and details down to low, it’s sad.
I’m almost about to get another HDD and install windows and see if I get these games to run on DOSbox .74-2 which seems to run games great on my desktop. Where I seem to be having some weird issues with DOSbox lvn that comes with Lakka.
The Laptops a HP Compaq 8510… mhmmm specs are pretty rough but figured it could play DOS games without issue…
Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 (2.0 GHZ 800MHz front side bus 4MB L2 cache) 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM (1GB installed myself)
Only games I’ve really tried are Doom (1+2), Quake and Tomb Raider. They all run great for me, with high CPU cycles, but my laptop is a fair bit more powerful. I take it you’re running Lakka, right now? If you want to test out vanilla DOSbox, I’d recommend trying it on Linux, over Windows. Linux will play nicer with your low-power laptop and you could even do something like booting into the live version of Linux Mint (better than Ubuntu for low power machines) on a USB stick so that you don’t need to swap hard drives.
If we can confirm that vanilla DOSbox works nicely for you, then we’ll know that it’s probably just a configuration problem, or something else specific to the libretro core.
Let me know what you end up doing and how it goes. 
Yeah can do that too, will test when I get my iODD device from work, so I don’t have to burn or flash any USB sticks.
For now I tested again DOSbos .74-2 on my Windows 7 notebook, even weaker specs, Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz, 32 bit. and it played all my games flawlessly. Albiet Descent was a bit laggy but playable unlike every DOSbox attempt I’ve thrown at lvn version, that yes, comes with lakka. So It’s precompiled.
Also for some reason, I grabbed the Shareware version of Doom 1, and it installed fine in DOSbox (LVN version on Lakka) but then after installing it says failed to start doom, probably not in the same directory (which it was) and running “doom” gives me a “game mode indeterminate”, which googling mostly says it has something to do with the game exe file not being in the dir as the WAD, which again they are, and this installer works perfectly on .74-2 DOSbox on Windows. Something seems super broken with the DOSbox version that comes with Lakka (2.2)
Huh… Do you mind sending me your retroarch-core-options.cfg file? I can use it to compare your configuration to mine (that works) and see if there’s any glaring differences. A mega/gdrive link would be fine.
Sure give me a lil bit to try and locate it, using find 
Ah! Now that I have experienced myself! The non-SVN dosbox core has a weird case sensitivity issue. The Doom installer, in my experience, creates files, such as DOOM.WAD, in upper-case, whereas doom.exe is looking for doom.wad. This isn’t a problem in DOS because DOS is not case-sensitive. Vanilla DOSbox isn’t, either, but the libretro core seems to be, for some reason. Renaming upper case files to be lower case solves the issue. I thought this was fixed in the SVN core, though.
Good to know! Sadly doesn’t seem to be the case, I’ll try that out and let ya know as for the retroarch cfg…
Thanks for the help so far!
That was it! Doom finally launched… however like every other game it’s so slowwwwwwww it’s literally unplayable, which makes no sense!!
I grabbed the doom that comes with the Lakka content downloader, and it plays doom using the PrBoom core which plays perfectly fine… this version of DOSbox still seems buggy or something.
I’ve had really bad luck with Lakka and DOSbox hahah
runing “ver” in dosbox shows it’s SVN-libretro-lfn based (reported) DOSbox 7.10
Funny I clicked the link again I shared above, and it was yours! lol
In that thread you mentioned…
Can you elaborate a lil on this? Where do you get the latest cores? What exactly do you have to do to delete the old ones?
I’d imgane I could rename the old ones instead with .bak extensions and replace with the newer ones?
Interesting after reading this thread… DooM and it's variants
I learnt some things, and amazing I was able to do the same thing, take the same WADs I was using in my DOSbox attempts, put it in a folder with the prboom.wad file, and run it using prboom without issue on Lakka. Guess DOOM was never a good trial game to use anyway… mhmm makes me wonder now… what is? But you mentioned you played Doom 1 + 2 on DOSbox without issue?
I can’t compare your config to mine right now, as I’m on the wrong PC. I’ll be able to have a look in a bit. However, at a glance, your config looks very different from how I remember mine. That and the bug your experience lead me to believe that your core version may be significantly out of date. Now, I’ve only used Lakka on a Raspberry Pi but, assuming it’s similar, I should be able to walk you through the process of updating your cores. Do you have internet access on your Lakka setup?
I sure do! I also had nothing but failure with DOSbox on RadpPi, as you can see my previous post DOSbox on ARM builds 
The CPU Cycles Multiplier, in particular, is the difference between Doom barely managing to launch and playing through the whole of Doom II with no issues at all.
Indeed our configs are very different, (checking just the dos box settings).
Yeah if you could help me a bit on finding the latest cores an dhow to replace them, I’m sure cfg changes shouldn’t be hard? unless it’s in a locked area of the FS, which I don’t believe it is
Okay, try this in Retroarch:
That should work. Let me know!
Dang… everything is there except the “Show Core Updater”…
I already had advanced views on, and online updater enabled too, so went to lok for the core updater option under views… and nope not there…
Lakka Build 2.2
Build Date June 23, 2018 GIT build: 2a2e732
lakka devel 20180624
Sounds like that function is disabled in Lakka. You’ll have to update the core manually, which really shouldn’t be hard.