Check your DirectDraw/Direct3D acceleration. Also check the Hardware Acceleration slider in your video properties.

Finally try different output= options in dosbox.conf.

Ok...hardware accel is maxed, where would I check the direct3d and directdraw settings? I use Nvidia 7300 gs graphics card, and it's set for max quality, which is the way it has always been, even when I wasn't having this issue. Which output options would you recommend? Keep in mind that once I have a game loaded, it plays fine, it's just the matter of DOSBox itself taking forever to load itself up.

Run "dxdiag" in your "Run" and then I think you click on "display", on the bottom there should be DDraw/Direct3d buttons which should be enabled.

Try booting your computer in safe mode and executing DosBox and see how fast it loads there.

Ok...that opened up a whole other can of worms. My system won't boot in safe mode for some reason, keeps rebooting after loading mup.sys (an infamous driver, from what I hear). Anyhow, directdraw and direct3d are both enabled, I did the little tests on the dxdiag, everything seems to be working fine...if you can't think of anything else, I may just try to do an upgrade install and see if that changes anything.

Did you update your DirectX?

DirectX is current, as is everything else. Lemme give you a play by play here...
I click on the DOSBox icon, and the status window pops up, saying it's loading settings from DOSBox.conf, etc. My whole system halts at this point. My CPU usage surges to 100% during this process, and after about ten seconds or so, the main DOSBox window will pop up, but remains blank as my system continues to be bogged down for another ten seconds. Then the usual text and the command prompt will show up, but it will hold for another five to ten seconds before I'm able to type anything in. Loading a game takes about fifteen to twenty seconds, but once it is up and running, it runs without problems, no slowdown or anything. If I leave the dosbox window, with alt-tab or any other method, I get the same bogged down performance while switching to the new window, and again when switching back, but once back, the game will run fine.

badassb wrote:

Ok...that opened up a whole other can of worms. My system won't boot in safe mode for some reason, keeps rebooting after loading mup.sys (an infamous driver, from what I hear). Anyhow, directdraw and direct3d are both enabled, I did the little tests on the dxdiag, everything seems to be working fine...if you can't think of anything else, I may just try to do an upgrade install and see if that changes anything.

If I were you I'd look into that problem first, it's probably related. Safe mode uses a VGA driver that all video cards should be able to handle.

Yeah, it's another "new" issue, haven't had it before this reinstall...I'm gonna research it and see what I can come up with.

Traced a major problem to one of my hard drives after another reinstall...damn thing went bad, and was freezing my system up on bootup so I disconnected it and everything is working fine. Whatever the problem was that dosbox had now seems to be resolved.