Stunts on mobile

[Overdrijf]

That's right, you heard it here first: you can now get a traffic ticket for driving while you drive.

I've been meaning to try this for some time since I noticed Dosbox exists for Android. (Only testing Android. Don't have acces to a suitable Apple device.) There isn't a single official port, but there are several companies with their own port, most with a free and a payed version. There also appears to be at least one other emulator, which I ignored on the grounds that I don't want to be learning a new typing based program on my phone. I downloaded several of the free versions of Dosbox, gDosBox, IDosBox and Freebox, and after trying them a little bit went ahead with Freebox (by Fishstix) because they immediately showed me a good joystick that could work for Stunts. So here are my results:

The good:
-The game runs!
-Every feature can be accessed.
-The ingame joystick support recognizes the emulated joystick.
-Manual transmission works with the joystick (the two buttons are essentially space and enter)
-The aspect ratio is kept reasonable, seemingly going for a 640x480 feel rather than stretching to phone size.
-The sound works.
-You can add custom tracks, cars etc.
-Replays can be saved, and you can call on a keyboard for naming them while the game is on joystick mode. (The back button of the phone opens the replay menu.)

The bad:
-DosBox eats a lot of power. Eventually the program ran sort of smooth enough with the internal settings on low (except the simulation speed) and an emulation speed of 6000 calcs/second with a frame skip of 4. On the PC the general rule of thumb is you use at least 7000/second, preferably 20.000, and frameskip isn't really used. As a result the game isn't quite smooth enough for serious racing. But I could probably get the hang of it enough to get some reasonable mobile experience out of it.
-This Dosbox port automatically loads your downloads folder as its disk, meaning over time stray downloads will build up between the dozens of files Stunts uses to run. (You can probably run the game from a subdirectory or something, but I haven't gotten that far yet.)
-Stunts wants to calibrate your joystick when you switch to that setting (keyboard and mouse is the default on startup, but it works well enough to get to the menu), try to do this correctly, or you'll be stuck only making corners in one direction.
-I'm suddenly really bad at this. O god where is that car going?! Although honestly I'm not as bad at it as I'd thought I'd be. I can totally find the straight line on the straight. Most of the time.

So, yeah, it was a fun experiment. I own at best a mid range phone with a 1.5GHz CPU and 2GB of RAM. (Where are the days you could run Stunts on 1/10th of that?) so for a device two generations or so ahead this could actually work well.

[dreadnaut]

Getting ready for the live race, I see

[Overdrijf]

That was my motivation to finally get to trying this out, yes.

(Though even that way I'd probably still not be available at the right time, even if the emulator worked flawlessly and I'd get all the files in the right places on a sharp clock. But I like a good excuse to try something every now and then.)

[Daniel3D]

I've been playing stunts on my mobile with magic dosbox. I noticed no issues but maybe I don't play long enough. I mapped the arrow keys because the joystick is only available in the paid version.

It handles fine. But I sometimes miss a key because I can't feel them. So fun to play but not for serious driving.

UPDATE: 25-12-2020
It does drive good. Even with 3000 cycles.

Code Select Expand


[dosbox]
machine=svga_s3
memsize=16
#Amount of video memory in megabytes (0-8).
#  The maximum resolution and color depth the svga_s3 will be able to display
#  is determined by this value.
#  0: 512k (800x600  at 256 colors)
#  1: 1024x768  at 256 colors or 800x600  at 64k colors
#  2: 1600x1200 at 256 colors or 1024x768 at 64k colors or 640x480 at 16M colors
#  4: 1600x1200 at 64k colors or 1024x768 at 16M colors
#  8: up to 1600x1200 at 16M colors
#vmemsize=2
#Amount of video memory in kilobytes, in addition to vmemsize
#vmemsizekb=0

[render]
frameskip=2
aspect=false

[cpu]
core=dynamic
#valid cputypes (Ykhwong SVN):
#  a)auto
#  b)386
#  c)486
#  d)pentium
#  e)386_prefetch
cputype=auto
cycles=3000

[mixer]
androidFasterAudio=true
blocksize=1024
prebuffer=10
rate=22050

[midi]
mpu401=none
#mpu401=intelligent
mididevice=mt32
mt32.romdir=/storage/emulated/0/
mt32.thread=on
mt32.analog=0

[speaker]
pcspeaker=true
pcrate=11025
tandy=off
disney=false

[sblaster]
sbtype=sb2
sbmixer=true
oplmode=opl2
oplemu=fast
oplrate=22050

[ipx]
ipx=false

[serial]
serial1=disabled
serial2=disabled
serial3=disabled
serial4=disabled

[dos]
xms=true
ems=true
umb=true
keyboardlayout=auto

[joystick]
joysticktype=none

[autoexec]
@Echo Off
mount c: /mnt/sdcard/
c:


[Overdrijf]

Nice!

EDIT: By the way: found an older thread on the subject.

[Daniel3D]

UPDATE:
I've been working on a Chromebook for 'work' for the past 9 months. But I recently had to pack up my laptop so my gaming options dwindled.

My Chromebook is basically a mobile phone with a big screen and (something that resembles) a keyboard.
So I installed every dosbox variation and clone I could get and ran Stunts.
Most apps are a pain to setup or are not optimised for games.
Last I tried magic dosbox again (I didn't want to because of the one game limitation in the free version)
But it straight away, no setup needed and good to.
As far as I can tell the best app to run Stunts on an android device.
A keyboard does make a world of difference though.

Thanks for reading my ramblings