try
priority=higher,higher
or
priority=normal,normal

I might have exaggerated about the music being full speed, but it is much better sounding when dosbox has no focus. I tried various priority settings and found no change in the behavior I described in my OP.

Occasionally when switching focus to and from the program, audio craps out like crazy and doesn't recover. I have a feeling it is something more sinister dicking around with the programs "state" when switching from focused and not focused rather then what priority it is running as.

Okay more peculiar, keyboard input seems to affect it, hold a arrow key on the main menu and it changes speed >.> I dunno whats causing it but it seems pretty fucked up.

last edit for this post:

When it is slow CPU usage = 0%
When it is fast CPU usage = 10%~

Maybe the "max" setting doesn't work well with i7's?

================
Manually setting cycles to 80,000 speeds the game right up with there still being 0% CPU usage and the variation in performance no longer happens when switching focus of DOSBox. This is a good result.

turn off vsync in your nvidia control panel

But then I would get screen tear...

you don't know what you will get if you don't check it...

nevertheless i have a question to delelopers as i notice simmilar behaviour with my winxp on phenom4cores:

when not focued game uses 2-6%
when focued about 12-15%
my 1 core can do 25% so that is not a problem but i think franpas i7 can only do 12,5% on one core. So if there is some core detection in dosbox i think it detects i7 as 4cores while it should as 8 cores.

There is no core detection.

Anyways, DOSBox behavior seems erratic for me, sometimes BLOOD won't run full speed and will run abysmally slow while other times it runs perfect, CPU Cycles doesn't affect the erratic behavior/result. Same with Milo The Fuel Run, it acts erratic for no real reason as far as I know.

Something I did notice however is that CPU Usage isn't reliable in DOSBox's situation.

At my place max cycles often results in the cpu setting itself in power save mode. So schedulers can't be trusted either at times. Might have nothing todo with this problem though

franpa can you try vsync off as i said?!

Devs why there is such a big difference between cpu usage when focued and notfocused?

It would likely relate to how Windows handles programs not in focus and in focus. Setting a static # of cycles to emulate minimizes the problem.

if you check gulikozas build that has cycles counter you will notice that cycles are divided by 2 if you unfocus.

btw game works properly for me on both winxp and win7-64 with nvidia and phenom.

There is sth wrong with cpu usage detection in both windows as they show only half of core used when cycles=max. And when i manually rise fixed cycles they finally reach 100% core usage but with really high amounts of cycles and game is already way slowed down.

So I suppose dosbox doesn't properly handle cpu usage detection with this game with i7 cpus. I think we should ask gulikoza to check this game as he has i7 too.

I think dosbox is not probing cpu usage fast enough for very fast cpus. (and windows is probing even more rarely for his cpu usage display). And this game makes very thin and high spikes of cpu usage.

On my i7 I see the cpu usage go down when unfocussing the dosbox window, yet the music plays faster. This behavior does not occur when using fixed cycles (50000).

can you check what happens if you lower cycles from max with ctrl-f11. Is there any % that finally makes focused game work with proper speed? Try to go down even to 5%.

Yeah, 5-10% seems about right (don't know the game though), although the speed of the music varies quote a bit then. Fixed cycles is better.

I'm seeing the same problem as franpa. But I wouldn't worry too much...the game is obviously very cycle sensitive. Sometimes it won't start if dosbox is already at max cycles (the cycles rise very fast to about 450-500K) and hangs at sound detection. I guess they calibrate some loop when the game is loading and then assume cpu speed won't change. That was usually the case at the time 😀
Fixed cycles make it work without problem.

Yes fixed cycles will fix the music and stuff but sometimes, not often, even with fixed cycles the games will either run terribly or perfectly, usually perfectly.

I ran BLOOD multiple times @ 60,000 cycles and 70,000 cycles settings and restarted DOSBox between each attempt, sometimes the game ran like there was severe frame skipping and other times it ran smooth as silk. The introduction video after starting a new game of the first episode always played fine however with only sometimes being extremely minor hiccups.

As far as I know, nothing was happening in the background like a scheduled virus scan (though that IS possible)

wasn't your hdd working when it was terrible? is your hdd loud enough so you hear it?

my HDD's are silent or not heard over the noise of the fans which are also very silent.