Yeah, I know.  There was actually a discussion about this on
the list a month or so ago.  The problem is that calling any flavour
of the sleep() system call incurs a fairly large time overhead, so that
when it's called, there almost certainly won't be time to do the
emulation work for the frame when before it needs to be displayed --
hence the skipping.  The Barath frameskipper handles this in a fairly 
intelligent way and minimizes the impact; the DOS frameskipper does
not.  Not surprising since who cares if your game is pegging your CPU
if you're running DOS?

On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 10:09:13AM -0500, Caleb Shay wrote:
> Sure enough, disabling sleepidle makes the dos frameskipper work fine. 
> So, the next questions is, what's wrong with sleep idle?  I thought it
> was just supposed to keep your cpu from being maxed when the emulator
> isn't actually doing anything, not actually slow down emulation.
> 
> Caleb
> 
> On Tue, 2003-02-18 at 09:55, Steve Freeland wrote:
> >     This only makes sense (to me anyways) if you have the
> > sleepidle option enabled.  Is this the case?  Otherwise, there really
> > shouldn't be much performance difference between the frameskippers if
> > the game is at all able to run at full speed (ie, with -noth)
> > 
> > On Mon, Feb 17, 2003 at 08:43:43AM -0500, Caleb Shay wrote:
> > > Well, that sucks.  Since, with my CPU running 99% idle, the DOS
> > > frameskip code renders pretty much everything unplayable.
> > > 
> > > Example:
> > > 
> > > With my machine 99+% idle (according to top)
> > > 
> > > xmame.x11 -noth ssf2 -> Gives me an average of 140 fps
> > > xmame.x11 -fsr 1 ssf2 -> No skipped frames, locked at 60fps
> > > xmame.x11 -fsr 0 ssf2 -> Constantly auto-skipping 8 frames and a frame
> > > rate of 18fps
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Caleb
> > > 
> -- 
> /*---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Caleb Shay                                   "UNIX _IS_ user friendly.
> Programmer/System Administrator              It's just particular about
> Providence, RI                               who its friends are."
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------*/
> 
> 
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-- 
                    | One would think the grandeur of the universe needs
                    | no help from Walter Cronkite.  One would think
Steve Freeland      | wrong.  -- Neil Postman, "Amusing Ourselves To Death"

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