There's lots of information available about speed and performance. Read the various guides on that topic. But your box may simply be too slow. Since you don't tell how you configured DOSBox, I can't tell you if there's something you can do.

I tested some of the tweaks from the guides forum. Its still extremely laggy

I use D-Fend as a frontend to dosbox, so i will be including screenshots of the config screens. if im missing one, or something should be changed, let me know
my dosbox.conf is still at the default. D-Fend does the whole profile thing for it

Also, i have a 2.2 Ghz processor with 256 RAM. Im pretty sure it can run a game from 1994

Hi Deemo,

Did you try increasing the number of cycles (last screenshot)? I'm running 10.000 cycles easily on my Pentium M 1.6 Mhz...

Regards,
Ronald

There's no way that Tie Fighter will run fast with those settings. Switch CPU Core to dynamic and try cycles settings between 10000 and 30000.

ah that fixed it! thanks alot!

for future reference: what does the cycle value mean exactly?

and thanks again !

It's how many instructions dosbox tries to emulate per millisecond - basically, the speed of the emulated CPU.