Qbix: I'd like to try my hand at figuring out what's wrong. Any suggestions? (Might be useful to see that beta thread, too).

Okay, it seems my suspicions were correct, although the numbers were off. The game is decompressing frames ahead of time to video memory, using paged 320x200x256. Since DOSBox 0.61, display timing has changed, unfortunately not for the better.

Other games that suffer from this are "James Bond: The Stealth Affair" a.k.a "Operation Stealth" (16-colour version -- the 256-colour version has no problems), "Turbo Outrun" (in VGA mode, fine in MCGA mode). Probably many more besides.