Hit CTRL/F11/F12 until you find the proper amount of cycles needed for the game.

like i said, the cycles amout for a proper sound differs from the game speed!
the game speed's proper cycle value would be 4000, but the sound needs a value of 500 to be played correctly...
i can either play the game at normal speed but with wrong sound pitch (cycles 4000) or i can play the game with normal sound pitch but extremely slowed down game speed (cycles 500).
so what i need is a way to set the sound speed and the game speed separately...

It's not surprising why the sound is out of sync, 4000 DOSBox cycles roughly equates to a 386 @ 21 MHz. This game came out in 1983, at which time the only systems out then were the PC, XT, and PCjr, all of which ran an 8088 @ 4.77 MHz. In DOSBox terms, that roughly equates to a whopping 278 cycles. I wrote a patch and batch files to set DOSBox in terms of cpu type for just such occasions: Set cycles to specific xt/at/386/486/586 speed. Using release date, recommended/minimum game requirements, system, cpu type, which can be found at sites like mobygames.com, wiki, or hints from the games themselves, you can readily determine the needed DOSBox setting for speed sensitive, etc. types of games, and more easily set the needed speed. The batch files also list typical systems and speeds. The third page of the thread has the most recent patch and batch files.

that sounds interesting! i downloaded the setcpu folder and set5.diff
how do i get these patches and batch files to work?

It's been awhile since I've messed with the patch, it needs an update to work with current cvs. In the meantime you can do as I describe on the forth page of that thread on making static batch files.

It won't solve your problem though, which is probably you thinking the game running too slow at correct cycles.

It runs synced and discernibly correctly at 278 cycles. At 4000 it's way too fast, SpeedyJ must have speedy reflexes. Ah, I only watched the intro and demo mode, both of which run at discernibly correct speed. Actual game play it slows way down.

Try skill level 2 or 3, they seem to have correct speed. The different skill levels (1-9) have different delay counters, and the copy on Retrograde Station appears to have been hacked to have a MUCH larger delay for level 1... so someone probably did that to run the game on later/faster PCs.

@ ripsaw: skill level 2 is already too fast. btw, it seems like skill levels 2-9 have the same speed when i play it on dosbox...

They will be too fast at 4000 cycles for sure. Use 250-300 cycles. Your copy of the game could be different, but it appears to have the same general issue if you're saying 4000 cycles gives normal speed.

Yep, tried skill level 2, at 278 cycles it was running normal, albeit a little more briskly. If skill level 2 is too fast, try "underclocking," set to half, 139 cycles or 2/3, 183. etc.

well, there's no matching point where the cycle value provides for correct speed (either at skill level 1 or higher) AND correct sound.
as mentioned the sound is correct at about cycle 500, hence: i could play it with cycle 500 at skill level 1 (too slow) or skill level 2-9 (too fast).
any higher or lower cycle value will make the sound improper... 😒

well, there's no matching point where the cycle value provides for correct speed

Please READ all of ripsaw's replies.

Well, the Retrograde Station copy was hacked for play speed; so the sound code could very well have also been hacked for faster computers. I don't have a memory of how the game should sound on a 4.77mhz PC... it sounds like normal speaker bleeps and bloops to me at 250 cycles.

attached is a zip including 2 sound examples i recorded (using bigtop.img on dosbox):
bigtop_cycles461.mp3 = proper sound pitch (yet game is too slow at skill level 1, too fast at skill levels 2-9)
bigtop_cycles250.mp3 = sound is pitched down (game is way to slow at skill level 1, still too fast at skill levels 2-9)

i find two different copies of bigtop on the internet:
1.) bigtop.img (shared on various websites)
2.) start.com (shared on retrograde station, this copy is unplayable for me though: on my computer it's like 1000 times too fast or something)

As I see it, you have three choices:

1) Live with it the way it is.
2) Get a pristine copy of the game that hasn't been hacked up.
3) Do your own hacking to make the speed the way you want it.

The word value at offset 0x133f9 in the Retrograde disk image is the delay counter for level 1. This is probably the most help you're going to get with this issue, which is NOT a problem with DOSBox.

The patch is updated speedyj. "patch -p0 < set6.diff" from the dosbox source directory to apply. If you're compiling from Linux you'll just need to grab the source, from windows you'll need to setup msys first.

I have asked retrograde station this question: "Have you done something to your conversion of Big Top so that intro, demo and difficulty levels 2-9 work ok, but level 1 is extremally slow on old machines?"

The response was "No, and it works ok on my Zenith 8088 clone"

Has anyone tried this game on 8088/8086 machine? Cause my 286 has the problem.

As I mentioned before, you can fix the problem by changing the delay constant. The only way I can see a real 8088 PC using a different delay value than DOSBox would be due to hardware... somehow. The delay value is read from the disk image, not calculated.

Another mystery is the new version of Pirates! that is now on Retrograde. Old version worked fine in DOSBox, but the new version with its "improved crack" now hangs after choosing the startup options. It hangs because the INT 13 (floppy BIOS) emulation code added for the crack fails to re-enable interrupts when it is finished. How it manages to not hang on a real PC is puzzling... but I can't imagine it would have been put up if it was so obviously broken. Again, I tend to suspect some hardware behavior that leads the code down different execution paths. It is still obviously a mistake that was made in the programming of the crack; it just manages to avoid hanging on real hardware in some obscure way.