I'm not really asking for help with this post, rather I'd just like to highlight an issue for the benefit of the developers that may have been overlooked. This issue was brought up years ago with a supposed solution, but I'm mentioning it again because the solution is suboptimal and it's impossible to run the game absolutely perfectly in mainline Dosbox.

The problem is that if cycles are set to above ~23500, the players and HUD graphics start to flicker like crazy. So why not keep the cycles to below 23500, which was the previously suggested solution? Because the game does not run at full speed all of the time at that cycle rate. When all four players are on screen, especially near the basket, the frame rate takes a hit. It needs a few thousand more cycles to smooth things out, but that takes the game into flickering territory. Also, the cycles threshold for when the flickering starts differs depending on whether the dynamic or normal core is selected. The 23500 value is for dynamic, the normal core has to be set to below 20000.

This is true of 0.74, and AFAIK the current SVN versions. The game does work properly in Dosbox-X though, so something that was changed in that build obviously affects the game.

Thanks for reading!