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specifically, see step three.

Uhm You know that dosbox despite its name is a full pc emulator. So i think your 1.7 Ghz is way too low to play it properly.

The frameskip and cycles did help a little but not nearly adequate to the level of playability. Upon hearing qbix's reply, I decided it was time to get more info about DosBox so I forced myself to read the readme...(yes I know should have done that first).

I found a big note at the very top saying:

While we hope that, one day, DosBox will run virtually all programs ever made for the PC...we are not there yet. At present, Dos […]
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While we hope that, one day, DosBox will run virtually all programs
ever made for the PC...we are not there yet. At present, DosBox run on a 1.7
Gigahertz PC is roughly the equivalent of a 25MHz 386 PC. While the 0.60
release has added support for "protected mode" allowing for more complex and
recent programs, but note that this support is early in development and
nowhere near as complete as the support for 386 real-mode games (or
earlier). Also note that "protected mode" games need substantially more
resources and may require a much faster processor for you to run it properly
in DosBox.

Magic Carpet is indeed a "protected mode" game and most definitely needs a faster dos pc processor emulator. I say "emulator" because I have run Magic Carpet without DosBox on my Windows XP system with little flaws other that it being SUPER DUPER fast. I've been having trouble with the Moslo program

http://www.hpaa.com/moslo/

to get it to slow down and was hoping DosBox would do the trick. Oh well, maybe a newer version will support it better. Also I would love to know whether DosBox will implement netbios (network) support for these old Dos games (specifcally having Magic Carpet in mind)?

It's impossible to tell which kind of CPU DOSBox emulates at a certain cycle rate. It very much depends on the game you want to run.
On my Athlon XP 1800+ I can run Ultima Underworld perfectly well at 10000 cycles, but only at the approximate speed of my old 386/33. On the other hand, Warcraft 2 or Comanche run much faster in comparison (my guess: ~486/50 MHz).

CBench (http://www.intelligentfirm.com/bench.htm) rates DOSBox (10000 cycles) nearly as fast as a Pentium-166, but only because it provides an excellent video speed (4x the speed of a Pentium-200). Still, its real performance is rated significantly better than that of a 486-33:

Pentium-100: 1.31
DOSBox (10000 cycles): 4.60
TOSHIBA 486-33: 6.07

Although these results show how unreliable benchmark results for DOSBox are, you still get a rough idea of its performance.
I think that, if you're planning to upgrade your CPU in the future, you might be able to emulate something like a Pentium/60 and play Magic Carpet well enough (P4HT/3,2 or even better Athlon64 FX 😁!!!).

Hmm. Saying that Magic Carpet "most definitely needs a faster dos pc processor emulator" is a bit unfair based just on the observation that the game runs blazingly fast on a modern native x86 system. Let's not forget that emulating a processor and all the peripherals around it entirely in software, including an emulated sound card etc, is pretty heavy stuff. In that respect DOSBox seems to perform very nicely.

A 1.7GHz machine will have hard time with any complex emulation - like emulating the chips and peripherals of a semi-modern coin-op system, for example. If I have understood correctly, DOSBox is a true PC emulator (is it?), and if so, it performs on par with all the other system emulators out there, regarding the complexity of the target system etc. It really has very little to do with the running speed of a program on the native system.

Yes Dosbox ist a x86-Emulator + DOS ! It don't emulate only DOS !!!! That's why i love dosbox 😀 You can run Dos Games on an Apple/Amiga or a SUN/SGI-Workstation (or every other system with C-compiler and harddisk). Thats cool thing.
People which claim dosbox is too slow, should try Bochs or Dosemu. But don't howl if you are not able to config it properly 😉

Exactly! It is a really cool thing, saving the cultural heritage of the old DOS platform to the unforeseeable and platform-independent future 😀.

Definitely apologize if I said anything that would degrade DosBox. DosBox is an ingenious piece of programming art that has definitely done, still does, and will forever do wonders for everyone.

Hoever, that still doesn't change the fact that my pc is too slow to utilize dosbox to run the magic carpet game normally. So I beg people to please focus on the gaming aspect of my problem and look for solutions that might possibly work. Don't just restate the obvious fact that DosBox is great because we all know it is....even though I may not have shown it earlier due to the fact that I was frustrated with this old dos game.

As I said previously, Magic Carpet runs extremely fast on XP without DosBox. If anyone knows a good program specifically for XP to slow down dos games, I'd like to know. I've already tried SlowDos and Moslo with little success. Also if anyone knows how to get network play to work with this game that would be totally cool. It seems XP has troubles with netbios.

Again I apologize for any comments made on my part. I am just a 😕 individual after all.

I remember to have seen some checking box on advanced properties sheet of DOS programs shortcut. It's in the same place where you specify CONFIG.NT and AUTOEXEC.NT locations. I think it was something called "hardware timer compatible emulation" or such -> translated directly from Spanish so don't bitch at me.

It seems to run fine on a 450mhz p2 with 256mb ram.... with 98...