I think I tried just about everything to make this game run at a bearable speed, but I still get massive slowdowns, mainly when there are floating windows on screen (which is about 95% of the time). Apparently the larger they are, the more they affect performance: the newspaper at the start of a turn can turn the game into a slideshow. This is on an AMD A64 3000+ btw.

VDMSound keeps the speed at normal level, but causes crashes at certain points (trying to build something in the colony center menu always gets it).

It's not a sound issue, because the game runs slow even with all emulation off and no sound device selected in the game's setup.

Below is my dosbox.conf file. Any suggestions to improve performance in any way, be it editing dosbox.conf, adding some patch to DosBox (0.63 btw), or figuring out what makes VDMSound crash is greatly appreciated.

[sdl]

fullscreen=false
fulldouble=true
fullfixed=false
fullresolution=0x0
output=surface
hwscale=1.00
autolock=true
sensitivity=100
waitonerror=true
priority=higher,normal
mapperfile=mapper.txt

[dosbox]

language=
machine=vga
captures=capture
memsize=128

[render]

frameskip=0
aspect=false
scaler=none

[cpu]

core=dynamic
cycles=12000
cycleup=500
cycledown=500

[mixer]

nosound=false
rate=22050
blocksize=4096
prebuffer=20

[midi]

mpu401=true
intelligent=true
device=default
config=

[sblaster]

type=none
base=220
irq=7
dma=1
hdma=5
mixer=true
oplmode=auto
oplrate=22050

[gus]

gus=true
rate=11025
base=240
irq1=5
irq2=5
dma1=3
dma2=3
ultradir=C:\ULTRASND

[speaker]

pcspeaker=false
pcrate=22050
tandyrate=22050
disney=true

[dos]

xms=true
ems=true