it is mixer /listmidi
have to try moo again then. thought it worked fine, although it does some test for the mpu-401 irq

I downloaded one of the daily-updated CVS compiles, put it into my DOSBox directory so that its new files overwrote the old ones, then reset my dosbox.conf file, and instead of using D.O.G. to run my game, instead I used DOSBox's own text-entry-based interface.
Now MOO1 does start, and does play GM music using Timidity, but there is still a super long wait at the beginning where it's just black screen. But I can put up with it. 😀

Try core=dynamic and cycles=30000

Hi MiniMax,
In a funny coincidence, those are already my settings. 😀

I have noticed that, while this black screen is occurring, I cannot immediately switch to the DOSBox window, and any commands (such as ALT-Fx, etc.) are delayed in their input. This suggests to me that the program itself is struggling for resources - but my system is fairly robust, having a dual core CPU at 2.4ghz and 6 GB of RAM, and I have no other processes running and am very vigilant of spyware/virii. So I do not know if I understand what could cause it such difficulty in running. I have also set Timidity++ to run using a much smaller Soundfont, but the problem is the same.

try
cycles=auto limit 20000

try
cycles=auto 80% limit 20000

Re: cycles settings - beware that the syntax changed between 0.72 and the CVS.

Re: delay / hang - I read back to your initial post, and this delay only occurs when you use MIDI + Timidity++ ?

Do you see anything interesting if you bring up the Task Manager? Any process eating CPU, swapping memory, ??

Tried playing with the priority settings in dosbox.conf?
Tried playing with CPU affinity in Windows?