You could try '=max' or '=auto' to 'cycles'; numeric value tends to cause stuttering.

I tried Auto, max and raised the values 20, 000 to 80,000.
And all stuttered the same. 80K seems best, less audio clicking.

Strange.. normally there should be a great difference in speed between numeric value and 'max'. This goes to conclusion that your problem is not the CPU working cycles. I noticed that your video card is Geforce. Your problem seems to converge mine (as you can see, I use 9800GT).

So, check out my thread about this here:-
DOSBox running slow with GF9

Cycles/videocard doesn't help, there seems to be some bug in dosbox with this game that it's drawing to the screen just as dosbox is updating it so you get half erased/half drawn sprites. Nothing you can do about it, use scummvm

Used to work some time ago, not? Think i remember playing it in dosbox.

Well if thats the case then I guess thats it. Hopefully this will get resolved in the next release.

Now that 0.73 is released... does anyone know if there is a solution now? Thus far, same issue with the new release.

[useless reply removed]

This has not been resolved.

Seems to work if you fix cycles to like 30000-35000.

Speculation: DOSBox's unrealistic video memory speed together with buggy double buffering algorithms in the game.

I guess harekiet already mentioned it, but ScummVM supports Broken Sword.

Thanks h-a-l-9000!!! I tried setting the cycles to 35,000, and perfect! Finally I can enjoy this awesome game!!!

I do remember trying 20K and 80K, both seemed to not work. Is wierd how 35K works.

Bump. This is inconveniencing my attempt to make a no cd installation of broken sword. Is the cause known and is there any hope of being fixed or worked around?

I've niticed that the readme file speaks of this:

1. Troubleshooting guide. […]
Show full quote

1. Troubleshooting guide.

Broken Sword requires a VESA 1.2 compatible video card with 1MB of VRAM. You

may need to install software drivers if your hardware is not VESA 1.2

compatible.

If you experience graphic corruption in the top and bottom of the display,

then you may wish to use the SAFEVIDEO option on the command line. For example,

type 'SWORD SAFEVIDEO'. This option reduces the quality of the display, but

fixes the flashing problem for older video cards.

And indeed using the switch most of the flicker vanishes... except for the cursor.

Do the 35000 cycles not work or what is the problem?

Nope.

Hi there,

First post!

To anyone still having trouble, I got the game working correctly by setting gus=false and cycles=35000. I'm using Boxer on the Mac.

1[gus]
2gus=false
3
4[cpu]
5core=normal
6cycles=fixed 35000