Evening,

Recently joined GOG... Been playing the free version of Beneath A Steel Sky through DosBox and that seemed to be working fine... Recently downloaded Cannon Fodder which all seems to load up just fine...

And then.. disaster.. it felt as though my laptop was about to take off.. I checked my temps and the GPU was running at over 100%... Now, I'm Certain my PC isn't to crap to play Cannon Fodder! As I play more recent titles..

I Do get high temps when running some games (Civ 5, anyone) but managed to solve that via the Nvidia control panel and tweaking some settings.. Now, I'm no expert but figure that Dosbox uses the integrated graphics...?
I say this as I made the usual tweaks to make more recent games run smooth with no overheating issues but this did not solve my cannon fodder problem..

Windows 7 64bit, NVIDIA GeForce GT 520MX..

Any help would be appreciated! Very much miss these old games.

UPDATE: I'm assuming I need to edit the DosBox.cfg file.. Anyone know the specific change I need to make?

Have you tried forcing v-sync on for dosbox?

Half a year late, but I just wanted to add to what strijk said. Your GPU is in no way too crap to play Cannon Fodder it's just likely eating your GPU because it is unrestricted. If Vsync is off either in general or in a specific game then that game renders as many frames per second that it can regardless of your monitor's refresh rate.

So even if your screen refreshes at 60Hz (60 fps) Cannon Fodder could be tasking your GPU to render 10,000 frames per second. If you can force Vsync on then Cannon Fodder will be capped at the same rate as your monitor can handle and GPU usage will likely go from 100% to probably less than 1% (it is a 2D game...)

Vsync is always the first thing I look at when my PC case is getting hot because some games, regardless of age, will use as much of your resources as they can if you let them.

Dosbox should not load your GPU to 100% unless you have some heavy scaler enabled.

Dosbox for Cannon Fodder 2 (at least, haven't got 1 installed) runs at 20000 cycles. The CPU shouldn't be overloaded, even if it is a bit loaded with emulating this. As far as I know the graphics won't be rendered "as fast as possible" for Dosbox, so the whole busy GPU thing really shouldn't happen.

I had an old HP laptop who would max out GPU if you as much as mentioned OpenGL to it. It was a dual core 2.5ghz CPU, but it still ran Redneck Rampage in Dosbox a whole lot worse than the older single core 1.7ghz cpu, because the dosbox config defaulted to using OpenGL renderer. As soon as I prodded it over to using a Surface rather than OpenGL it ran a lot better.
So if you check your dosbox.cfg has output=opengl, or maybe output=overlay, try changing it to output=surface. I believe that's software and will load your CPU irregardless of your GPU's happiness with OpenGL.

Also check the scaler= line. I've found hq2x and advmame can be really heavy to pull off if your graphics processing is somewhat underpowered.

Another option I've been using for a while now, not perfect, is to create a power profile on your laptop which limits your CPU's speed (old Probook I limited to 50% max CPU and current ASUS one I'm limiting it to 1ghz. Sure this limits how fast your computer will run while running in the low-speed mode, but I found it quite useful for games like Baldur's Gate which, being a native windows game and not emulated through something limiting it's speed, would just use 100% CPU regardless. No wait for vsync option, so it'd just be busy eating up my CPU as fast as it could. The limiting of my CPU's max made sure the laptop didn't burn out because of it (I believe few laptops are designed with sustained 100% use in mind)