I remember that strike commander had a nasty issue with some cracks: ii didn't get past 20% power. Could it be some issue with a crack? Are you using a craked or a legal version?

Erm... the exploding ship is quite normal: that's the combat simulator, and you're supposed to enter your name and callsign, befire the "real" game starts. 😉

It's the real version. I realize now the explosion is normal. Its been a long time.. The mouse sensitivity is still an issue though. From what I've read, apparently this sluggishness didn't occur in older versions of DOSBox.. Will a joystick behave the same way as the mouse, as far as the sluggishness? I plan on hooking one up eventually..

The mouse was less sluggish in 0.65, but still somewhat erratic in non-flight screens. The different behavior in subsequent releases appears to be caused by a change in vertical retrace timing (revision 2781). The game rejects (repositions to previous coordinates) mouse movement that occurs while it is waiting for retrace in its mouse pointer drawing routine, so waiting longer results in slower and more erratic movement.

Changing the vertical retrace in current source to be similar to 0.65 brings back the previous behavior:

1 Bitu vga_read_p3da(Bitu port,Bitu iolen) {
2     Bit8u retval=0;
3     double timeInFrame = PIC_FullIndex()-vga.draw.delay.framestart;
4 
5     vga.internal.attrindex=false;
6     vga.tandy.pcjr_flipflop=false;
7 
8     // 3DAh (R):  Status Register
9     // bit   0  Horizontal or Vertical blanking
10     //       3  Vertical sync
11 
12-    if (timeInFrame >= vga.draw.delay.vrstart &&
13-        timeInFrame <= vga.draw.delay.vrend)
14-        retval |= 8;
15     if (timeInFrame >= vga.draw.delay.vdend) {
16-        retval |= 1;
17+        retval |= 9;
18     } else {
19         double timeInLine=fmod(timeInFrame,vga.draw.delay.htotal);
20         if (timeInLine >= vga.draw.delay.hblkstart && 
21             timeInLine <= vga.draw.delay.hblkend) {
22             retval |= 1;
23         }
24     }
25     return retval;
26 }

I tend to prefer the old behavior, but don't really know which is more accurate. Might be worth further investigation, though.