You can use cycles=auto in your dosbox.conf (only in DosBox 0.65+). I wouldn't call this "ideal" since older games may run too fast and there will be audio/input control problems for some games.

to get the most out of games, it is good to try "auto" first. Old games need lower settings mostly. Ultima7, for example is running way too fast with auto now. You have to adjust that manually and that is not a setting one can tell you. It is too much dependent on your system.
Mostly I start with around 6000-7000 cycles and lower or raise the cycles from that one.
A good advice is to have the taskmanager in the background to see how much CPU time is used in the system tray (if your are using Windows). Once the CPU load is going into the yellow or red, you have too many cycles and there won't be any more speed gain.

Dominus wrote:

to get the most out of games, it is good to try "auto" first. Old games need lower settings mostly. Ultima7, for example is running way too fast with auto now. You have to adjust that manually and that is not a setting one can tell you. It is too much dependent on your system.
Mostly I start with around 6000-7000 cycles and lower or raise the cycles from that one.
A good advice is to have the taskmanager in the background to see how much CPU time is used in the system tray (if your are using Windows). Once the CPU load is going into the yellow or red, you have too many cycles and there won't be any more speed gain.

Yeah, I tried the auto setting and it worked at least okay, though I suspect there was some room for improvement. I have a PowerDesk toolbar that I run with gauges for CPU usage and free memory; I was just wondering if there was a formula or something I could use.

If it'll help, I'm running a 1.25GHz Athlon with 768MB RAM.

with Auto there is not much room for improvement, at least not speedwise. There might be the occasional sound glitch that doesn't occure if you get as close as possible to the red CPU load mark (in taskmanager). Oh, and best run with dynamic, only if the game doesn't like it (crashes or glitches) use the other ones.

Well just remember, using 100% CPU is only nessesary for intensive games. So you can easily set older games to lower cycles if they don't need any more to avoid any stuttering or issues that occur from "going over your limit". 😀

Any particular game you need help with?