+100 - I was just writing the same thing. DOSBox is not cycle accurate. I disassembled the code generated by Open Watcom 1.9 and it is very memory intensive. Memory accesses on real hardware are fairly expensive, and there are a lot of them. A small difference in the instruction mix and how DOSBox handles those instructions would make a huge difference in the timings under DOSBox that don't reflect what happens on real hardware.
-Mike On Wed, Jul 22, 2026 at 1:24 PM Eric Auer via Freedos-devel < [email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Jim > > According to some people writing retro-compatible games, > dosbox is probably NOT very realistic in speed comparisons. > > So it would be interesting to compare on real hardware :-) > > Regarding size, a good compiler for "small" hardware > should be able to omit unused runtime parts if possible. > > Cheers, Eric > > > ...this is emulated in DOSBox (not real CPU) but it's > > still a good comparison. > > > > It's also interesting to see the EXE size differences: > > > > IA16-GCC: 19728 Bytes (19 kiB) > > Watcom: 20544 Bytes (20 kiB) > > Turbo C++: 17510 Bytes (17 kiB) > > How about the UPX-UCL compressed size differences, by the way? > > > Turbo C/C++ was very good at keeping the EXE size small, but the > > counter is that Open Watcom meets a later C standard so probably has > > more in the runtime... > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel >
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