The DOS version is honestly pretty bad, I'd avoid it at all costs. There was a patch for it which sometimes made things work better, sometimes didn't. I have never managed to get the DOS version working on an actual DOS PC, be it unpatched or patched. It always hangs before ever reaching the main menu. I've tried it on a socket 7 system and a Super 7 one, same results.

When using DOSBox, things are slightly better. Unpatched wouldn't work for me, but if you apply the patch it does work. I think the initial GOG version was running using DOSBox, but I guess they figured out it was kind of a turd and switched it to the Windows version (which has tons of problems on newer systems btw).

I suggest playing the Windows version through VM or even better an actual retro PC. It is far better and less headache inducing.

I honestly prefer running the dos version in dosbox, not only because i'm not in windows. It's much faster and doesn't appear to have any graphical difference. In my case, where it's either dosbox or dosbox+win95 it also avoids some annoyances of using the dosbox+win95 configuration (which i tried, and yes it does run, slowly). One strange thing about the game (both versions) is that it absolutely refuses to scale in opengl mode to a 'letterbox' with output=opengl and fullresolution=desktop. I had to use ouput=overlay (prevent resolution changes from showing the desktop) and fullresolution=original. But this makes the image slightly stretched because it fills to whole screen instead of preserving aspect ratio :\

You can also hack it p easily to not have to change cd with dosbox by mounting a dir as a cd containing the BIGCD?.BIG files (sadly, it still asks to change, but you only have to press ok).