CPUlimit to slow down wine games

[pieman711]

I've recently installed dune2000 using wine (after a lot of playing around trying to mount the iso properly!) and it almost runs fine...
My processor is far too fast for teh game and even with teh settings on minimum scrolling and icons are too fast to use properly.
I've been looking into using cpulimit (available in repos) but I cant get it to work with out a PID. To do that I need to come out of the game and use 'top' or play aroud using extra virtual desktops using "ctrl+alt+F4 to F8"
Does anyone know how to use the -e or -P options in cpulimit to get readfy to slow a ps down before it has been started?

[lykeion]

I might suggest another path:
Run it via DOSBox (I think you can set nr of cpu cycles in it)
or maybe setup a win95/win98 emulation in VirtualBox.

[cogadh]

DOSBox doesn't work for Windows games, only DOS games.

[lykeion]

DOSBox doesn't work for Windows games, only DOS games.

Yes, you are right of course. DOSBox is made to run DOS games/apps, however I found some links where people claiming to run both Win 3.x and Win95 in DOSBox:
http://www.armchairarcade.com/neo/node/1725
http://forum.dune2k.com/index.php?/t...ost__p__353251

Did a little Dune researching and found out that Dune 2000 is a remake for Windows of the old 1992 DOS game Dune II.
Also found Dune Legacy which is a remake of Dune II for Linux plus Dune 2 TGP a multiplayer remake for Win/Linux.

[cogadh]

So you are suggesting that he go out and find a copy of Windows 98 or 95 to install within DOSBox, then try to install the game within that and hopefully get it to work, just to use the DOSBox cpu settings, rather than find out how to use cpulimit correctly with an already working installation of the game within Wine? Talk about taking the long way from point A to point B.

On that subject (cpulimit), it doesn't only work with PID, you can also use a specific executable name:

cpulimit --exe <executable name> --limit 40

[lykeion]

People owning Windows games that old usually also have a CD with old Win OS too. But no I wouldn't say it was the easiest way to solve his problem, I just thought it was cool that you actually could boot old Windows versions in DOSBox.

This thread has some more suggestions on handling games running too fast in wine: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=791811

[pieman711]

Cheers for all the info. Been playing around with cpulimit a bit more. I knew about the -e and -P options of it. for some reason I can't get it to work with for example "cpulimit -e DUNE2000 -l 5" where it would wait for a program called dune2000 to run then throttle that.

"
pieman@pieman-desktop:/$ cpulimit --exe Dune2000 -l 10
Warning: cannot renice.
To work better you should run this program as root, or adjust RLIMIT_NICE.
For example in /etc/security/limits.conf add a line with: * - nice -10

Warning: no target process found. Waiting for it...
"

It should jump in as soon as it starts (it does when I use wineserver instead of DUNE2000 but that doesn't appear to affect the game speed)
Loading the game with wine pressing ctrl+alt+f4 and finding the ps id then using that with cpulimit using the -p option works but is far from ideal.

Unfortunatly another problem I've run into using my cpulimit workaround method is that now I've got the sound working it comes out quite choppy and broken, especially if i throtle the cpu to anything less than 50%.

Has anyone tried dune legacy? it says 'playable' on the sourceforge website but by no means finished!

Also looking at the thread suggested by lykeion it suggests using system-->admin-->services. I don't have that on my menus (10.04, lucid lynx) is there an alternative in this distro?

[cogadh]

Your answer is in that error message. Cpulimit requires sudo or root permissions to do its thing, so if you used sudo to run it, it should jump in when the game is actually launched with Wine like it is supposed to. NOTE: don't use sudo to run Wine itself.

[lykeion]

Also looking at the thread suggested by lykeion it suggests using system-->admin-->services. I don't have that on my menus (10.04, lucid lynx) is there an alternative in this distro?

I think it was removed in Karmic. You can use the service command to manage services:

sudo service --status-all
sudo service <service_name> stop

I think the actual name of the CPU Frequency Manager service is powernowd

And actually I thought that happyhamster's tips in that thread seemed most useful: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...43&postcount=6

Also I came to think of an applet called CPU Frequency Selector. Have you tried it? See here: http://geeksok.com/blog/2008/07/ubun...ency-selector/
It might work to set set your CPU frequency lower, but it depends on your motherboard/processor if it supports power-stepping or not.

[pieman711]

Forgot to mention that I was trying cpulimit with sudo and without and with all combinations of DUNE2000 uppercase and lower case and with .dat and .exe and without to no avail.

using the cpu freq moniter in panel says i dont support it:

You will not be able to modify the frequency of your machine. Your machine may be misconfigured or not have hardware support for CPU frequency scaling.

I think I'll have a look at dune legacy later.