Hi there, there is still more time I need to spend playing to know if these are 100% the best settings. But if you're planning on playing Anvil of Dawn here are some things I recommend you change for a better experience.

1. Launch GOG’s graphic mode set up and set the mode to “DDraw” and in advanced settings tick “Keep Aspect Ratio” and “Double buffering.”

Set Scaling Engine to “2xsai” Then save settings and exit

2. Locate your Anvil of Dawn directory and open “dosboxAnvil.conf”

From there locate your [CPU] and set it to
core=dynamic
cputype=pentium_slow
cycles=16000

Save then close

3. Then open your “dosboxAnvil_single.conf”

Where it says:
c:
cls
anvil (Change Anvil to setup and then save and run the game)
exit

4. From the set up screen go to “Select Midi” and pick one of the Roland cards and hit test to make sure it works.

Save and exit.

5. Open your “dosboxAnvil_single.conf” again if you didn’t keep it open and change “Setup” back to “Anvil.”

Save and close and enjoy a faster better looking, better sounding Anvil of dawn.

Sorry if the guide is a little patronizing, I wanted to make sure everyone could follow it.

EDIT

an easier way to run setup is to simply drag the setup.exe over the dropbox.exe I'll still leave the guide as it is though since I feel the information is still useful.

On a maximum notebook resolution (1024x600) original settings are better & I prefer to play in windowed mode anyway...

Original settings: http://i39.tinypic.com/9zpq2q.png
Your settings: http://i42.tinypic.com/53pch5.png

*EDIT* Thanks for the better sounding music bit though! +rep

This is just a personal preference, but i never liked these special filters. Like Eagle, 2X, Super Kreed Sai and their ilk. They may look better in some situations, but as soon as some dithering is involved (as is in most pixel art) the result is just some horrible mess. I'm much more happy with plain old bilinear filtering, or better yet, the original blocky pixel look.

Yeah it's just a preference but, the CPU really should be set to 1600 for better frame rate.

1600 or 16000 cycles & what difference does it make, if you mind me asking? the game seems to work normally for me on a low-end notebook with Windows XP.

Doesn't this depend on your actual processor? My memory with messing with MM1 (before I discovered the fan-made text speed patch) was that the actual cycles setting is very dependent on the speed of one's processor, such that there's no one setting that will work for everyone.

16000 sorry, it makes the game run faster but be sure to set core to dynamic and cputype to pentium_slow.

That way the game won't lag when you move your mouse all over the screen. Dosbox is a 486 to early Pentium emulator if your PC can't run dosbox at 16000 then you need a new computer. You also wouldn't be reading this message if you PC couldn't do that.

That's not what I meant; I meant that someone with a faster processor might want a different setting. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the setting. I usually keep the DOSBox cycles set to auto, and only messed with it when playing MM1 because the text was going by too quickly. I learned that lowering the cycles would slow it down, but the exact setting differed for each player based on their hardware. Then I found the fan-made fix for the text speed issues, turned the cycles back to auto, and never touched it again.

Of course, when I was changing cycles I didn't touch the core or cputype settings, so maybe I was actually tweaking something different?

The cycles are usually set to max which is like auto but with a bit more punch. The type of computer you have shouldn't affect it because the cycles affects the speed of the emulated 486, not your PC.


Hope that helps.

When I launch the game (using Boxer on the mac) using the anvil.exe file, I get a message telling me to insert the CD. Anyone knows what the problem could be?

1. Tried re-installing the game into Boxer again
2. Double-checked the sound setup - Soundblaster 16 + Pro tested

thanks!

Sorry for the late reply and sorry again for not being able to help you. I don't personally use macs so I'm not sure how to help with that one.

thanks!! that setup works brilliantly!

"2xsia" has got to be a typo for "2xsai".

Personally I prefer to disable scalers and use OpenGL output to get hardware-accelerated, bilinear-filtered scaling that also isn't limited to integer multiples of the source geometry.

I'm strictly a desktop guy (no laptops) and use the 64-bit version of dosbox available here:

http://ykhwong.xo.st/

(Jan 27 2014 version of dosbox svn-daum)