I've been using Dosbox for a few months to go back through some of my old favourite games and have to say it's brilliant. The only games I can't get to run are those with copy protected disks (Duke3D Atomic & Lemmings), but I'm not worried about that as I can get access to a real Dos machine to run those. For the rest, Dosbox is more convenient and in some cases runs them better than real dos on a semi-recent platform. Which brings me to the problem.

I am running Dosbox 0.72 on an Athlon XP2000+ with 512MB under WinXP SP3 (more details can be provided if necessary). Most games run fine, but I have a problem with Doom based games (including Doom2 & Hexen) and Duke3D (standard version). If I move forward using the cursor keys (steering with the mouse) sometimes things get stuck and I keep going forwards, the mouse stops responding and the other cursor keys give no response for up to a couple of seconds, then everything goes back to normal. This usually happens when I've held the key for a few seconds, and it also happens if I'm using another cursor key in the same way (e.g. running backwards). The problem is noticably worse if something serious is going on in the background (not that I intentionally leave it running). I can get some improvement by reducing the cycles from max and can get Doom reliable if a little jerky, but Duke3D being more demanding on the hardware doesn't improve enough to be reliable before it gets too slow & jerky to play. As a test I tried running Dosbox alongside an intensive application and found that sometimes when typing the keys would sometimes get repeated many times (10 or so) then things would return to normal for a bit. Is this simply my PC lacking the grunt to run these games properly or is there a deeper problem? I have run the games under real Dos 6.22 on the same PC, and apart from a lack of sound (neither much like the Dos mode emulation of my SBLive sound card) they run fine, so I know the problem isn't a gummed up keyboard!

Before anyone suggest I get one of the modern ports of these games, please don't. I am lucky enough to own the originals and want to get the full experience of the originals. Besides, I'm stubborn and don't like failing and really want to get these working properly in dosbox. If that means I need to upgrade to a faster PC I suppose I'd better start saving.

Thanks in advance