divinity: Performance can be tricky. Here are some ideas:
1) The last beta I posted on this board is about 50% faster than the current release when using the recompiling dynamic core. If you are testing it as an applet make sure you are running the newest version and not a cached version.
2) There are 2 cores in the java version of dosbox, normal which is a pretty accurate reproduction of the c dosbox version and a dynamic one which is a modified version of the normal core, the jdosbox dynamic core has no relation to the c dosbox dynamic core. When the jar is running in standalone or signed applet mode the dynamic core can recompile itself into a more efficient form. This recompiling form is much faster but might explain the performance hit you see for the first few seconds since it takes time to do the recompiling (which takes places on another thread and thus will turn off your multi-core turbo mode that boosts a single core if only one thread is eating up the CPU).
3) In applet mode the default RAM size for dosbox is 8MB. So if you aren't using a custom dosbox.conf then the standalone version will use 16MB for RAM and the applet only 8MB. This would make a pretty big difference for games like Quakes.
As for using more memory in an applet, I haven't had much luck with those parameters either.
Let me know if you discover anything with .jnlp. I plan to start testing with that since there is no way with so little memory I will be able to get ReactOS to run well in an applet.
Here is an update since my last beta: I'm pretty sure I won't have a new official release before the end of the year. I got distracted with the dosbox-x patches and I kept adding more and more since then.
I have completed:
1) Ported PS/2 Mouses from Dosbox-X (but I need to work on sensitivity issues)
2) Ported QEMU's ide controller. It will boot CD's and DVD's.
3) Ported QEMU's floppy controller.
4) Found a bug in the way I ported part of the iret instruction from Dosbox which prevented NT 4.0 from starting
5) Support for some 686 instructions
6) Support for using Bochs bios
Now ReactOS and NT 4.0 work in VGA 16 color mode.
TODO:
1) To use more colors and higher resolutions for ReactOS I will need to impelement Video Bios Extension (VBE).
2) The NT 4.0 S3 driver did not like dosbox's implementation of the video card. It shows only a blank screen.
3) Fix PS/2 mouse sensitivity
4) More testing for the IDE and floppy controllers. I suspect they could use some performance improvements.
5) Finish work on the network card so that it will work with a pure Java implementation (no pcap libraries). This is a port of QEMU slirp code. This is a big project and may get pushed out to a future release.
6) Investigate the "cp: memory exhausted" error when booting JPC's linux demo.