Dragon Warrior VII - textboxes are halving my FPS in Duckstation

[MikamiFan92]

Hey all! I'm a loooong time lurker, first time poster.

As the title suggests, I'm having some issues with Dragon Warrior VII. Whenever I'm reading textboxes, the game slows to a miserable crawl
This hasn't been an issue I've had with any other game in Duckstation, let alone other emulators I've run DWVII in, in the past.
This issue is isolated to the textboxes exclusively, it seems.

If anyone has any similar experiences and might know how to lend a hand here, I'd very much appreciate that!

Thank you for taking the time to read this! <3

[PeterBrodbeck]

Hi MikamiFan92,
The issue you're describing is a known issue with Duckstation. It's caused by a bug in the emulator's implementation of the text rendering engine. The bug causes the emulator to render each character in the textbox twice, which can significantly slow down the game.

There are a few things you can try to fix this issue:
Use a different emulator. There are a few other emulators that can run Dragon Warrior VII, such as ePSXe and RetroArch. These emulators don't have the same bug as Duckstation, so they may not cause the same slowdown.
Disable text scaling. In Duckstation, you can disable text scaling by going to the Settings menu and unchecking the Enable Text Scaling option. This will make the text smaller, but it will also reduce the amount of work the emulator has to do to render it.