what do you mean by "game animations" ?

Game animations : animations of character movement, actions, cast spells. For example at cycles=max the game is fluent, but animations of cast spell effects are so fast that they dissapear before i can see which spell was cast.

it is like that on real hardware too.

dosbox is better cause you can adjust cycles whenever you want 😀

So what do you suggest? Use default config and adjust cycles to find a compromise between general slowdowns and accelerated animations? Are there any special config settings for this game to make it run better?

And about real hardware : i remember playing this game on pentium 3 1000 and winME and gf2go 32.
It was very fluent and animations speed was just right.

Well DOSBox is an emulator, so there'll always be cases where it's hard or even impossible to recreate the exact same experience you've had when running a game on a "real" PC.

You should definitely play around with various "cycles" value. You're aware that you can change the cycles during runtime by using hotkeys? You should use a "fixed" cycle value i guess (not "auto" or "max"). You'll find more info on cycles in the DOSBox readme. Another thing to try is to set "core=normal". This slows down emulation but could produce the result you're looking after.

EDIT: some wording

sinus wrote:

And about real hardware : i remember playing this game on pentium 3 1000 and winME and gf2go 32.
It was very fluent and animations speed was just right.

I have tried it on many computers and the rule is simple: the faster PC, the faster animiation, on 1,5Ghz under win98 its just a light speed. even on 486dx40 it is fast, 386 has nice animation but playing the game is not a pleasure.

i remember this game working perfecly on p3 1000 , memory is a mysterious thing.

Have tried different combinations of core= and cputype= and did not notice any difference. Could you provide a brief explanation of these variables and their purpose? Maybe there is a way to make the game run smooth and nice in dosbox afterall.

Not "core" and "cputype", but "core" and "cycles". Terms like "smooth", "nice" and "perfect" are subjective, so you're down to playing around with the values until you find what looks good to you. Emulation speed is also dependent on the host hardware so there'll be no "i just use what the other guy uses" solution. You'll find more info on the config options in the DOSBox readme (and the comments in dosbox.conf).

sinus wrote:

i remember this game working perfecly on p3 1000 , memory is a mysterious thing.

how exactly have you played it? what sound card? used vdmsound? some slowdown utilities? some compatibility modes?

Maybe even a differend game version

robertmo wrote:

how exactly have you played it? what sound card? used vdmsound? some slowdown utilities? some compatibility modes?

It was 6 years ago, dont remember exacly. Did not use vdmsound or slowdown utilities. Used winME dos mode. Took some time to configure winME, but as a result i could run ultima8 and blood and dark sun and other dos games without any problems.

Just tried all core= modes , no difference at all. Ended up with cycles=12000 and core=auto , it is playable.
Still do not understand what different core= and cputype= variables mean.
It is not explained in dosbox config or readme or wiki.