These games are clearly amateur-class stuff, so best not to expect too much from them.

Neither game makes an attempt to sync to video retrace, as they don't read the VGA status during fight sequences. They just draw and undraw the lines at a rate based on a counter, which you can speed up or slow down in the second game. With no sync to retrace, increasing or decreasing cycles changes the appearance of the flicker as a function of the variance between the game redrawing and the screen redrawing. Perhaps it looked better with the higher persistance of a CRT monitor, but I imagine it flickered there too.

As for the SB issue, I think the snag may result from SB ports that are mirrored on a real SB but not in DOSBox, but it needs more investigation.

The write to port 0x22a is apparently of no consequence. The game hangs up if it can't find a SOUND environment variable, typically used to load the CT-VOICE.DRV file. However, you can set the variable to some useless value (e.g. SET SOUND=BLAH) and the included driver will be loaded from the current directory.

that is awesome. I love the fact the problem is fixed by typing gibberish into the sound environment.

The crappy Borland line refresh I had to work around by making virtualdub blend frames.