While playing around with the settings, I've discovered that turning up the cycles seems to help getting the game to load. But it takes about 20'000 cycles or even more, eating up all of my resources. After the loading screens, the game itself runs perfectly well at around 2000 cycles. I've tried changing every setting provided in the config with no luck. Any ideas?

Maybe you should try the turbo mode? Dunno, never tried it myself...

What I usually do in a case like this is:
cycles=max 70%
That'll give you the maximum cycles available to your system while keeping roughly 30% CPU usage free (works best with the Dynamic core).

BTW, I think there is a mistake in the readme... If I understand correctly, it implies that the % after 'max' will only work for protected mode games, and that's not the case really(fortunately).

Wow, this helped with the loading problem. Thank you! I had already tried setting cycles to max, but not in combination with core=dynamic. And the percentage helps avoiding the full CPU load at start.

The only problem remaining is that the game itself seems to run a little to fast now. I guess the perfect thing would be to set the cycles back to a fixed value after the loading process. But I've just discovered that pressing the turbo during the loading process does the trick as well.

Anyway, I'm happy now. Thanks again!

You're welcome. I guess the ultimate solution would be to use moe's ADDKEY(present in ykhwong's build), unfortunately, it doesn't work with internal DOSBox function keys, only keys that are sent to the game/app. Bummer 😖