Dune: The Battle for Arrakis record?

[0zymandias]

Is there some sort of world record for the last Ordos mission?

The videos I've found on YouTube are all by people who take forever to finish.

[Nyerguds]

Maybe that just means that it's normal that the mission takes forever to finish?

I honestly don't think anyone has done timed speed runs of Dune II. The fact the game speed itself is inconsistent outside your viewed area makes it rather pointless, too. (Unless you use my editor to enable the "give full CPU cycles even outside the viewed area" option on all units.)

[MrFlibble]

(Unless you use my editor to enable the "give full CPU cycles even outside the viewed area" option on all units.)

I remember trying that out in DuneX, but IIRC it resulted in noticeable game performance decrease, or maybe even unstable behaviour.

[Nyerguds]

Really? Dune Dynasty does it, though.

[MrFlibble]

I guess they reduced the CPU cycles for off-screen units for a reason, and there's probably something in the original Dune II programme architecture that doesn't allow it to take advantage of modern CPUs (or more powerful ones that DOSBox can emulate). While my knowledge of programming is insufficient to judge, I suppose that the fact that Dune II doesn't get super fast on powerful PCs (whereas some other old games from back then are known to have such an issue) suggests that there is some internal performance limit in relation to CPU cycles that was undoubtedly built in with the limitations of early nineties hardware in mind.

[0zymandias]

I don't know about any of that, but I did play against the clock with a bunch of friends back in the day, and it did a whole lot of sense. The better you played, the faster you finished. We mainly played Ordos 9 because it's the most difficult and introduces a luck factor trough aleatory prices of launchers in the star-port.

Obviously, I was by far the quickest of the bunch, which is by all of them dropped the competition once I started to consistently get below one hour. After that I basically tried to beat my own times and ended getting all of them below 20 min. All of them except Ordos 9, the level of complexity needed to do that maxed out the quite limited capabilities of the Mega Drive CPU, which resulted in a slide-show for the final attack, when your forces were assaulting both enemy bases simultaneously. The best I could ever do under those conditions was 21 min. With the emulator is another story entirely, the game plays smoothly till the end.

[Wesker]

Maybe that just means that it's normal that the mission takes forever to finish?

I honestly don't think anyone has done timed speed runs of Dune II. The fact the game speed itself is inconsistent outside your viewed area makes it rather pointless, too. (Unless you use my editor to enable the "give full CPU cycles even outside the viewed area" option on all units.)

TC seems to refer to the Mega Drive version, not the PC version.

[MrFlibble]

TC seems to refer to the Mega Drive version, not the PC version.

IIRC the SMD port was based on the PC code (at least, I think that's what the guys at the Russian romhacking forum stated, and also there are PC version leftovers in the SMD ROM), and maybe the CPU cycles thing was carried over into the port as well.

I think that can be tested empirically but I don't have the game.