Hey friends,

I've been trying my best to give the much-maligned Battlespire a chance, and I ran into a few snags with the doxbox configuration provided with the installer. Specifically: walking forwards actually walked slightly off-center, and walking in a particular direction (north in my case) slowed walking speed by around 50%.

I took a peek at the dosbox config, and tried out the tried-and-true fix for older games: throttling the CPU. A lot of old games perform oddly when run on a processor that's orders of magnitude faster than what was available at that time. Capping the CPU at the speed of a high-end processor from around the time of the game's release - in this case 200,000 for a Pentium II 300 - resolved these issues. [1]

Interestingly, you still seem to go off in slightly skewed direction when pressing your key bound for backwards, but this seems to be an actual game bug as opposed to a configuration one. It's not nearly as impactful, so I haven't dug into it much.

For the less-than-technically inclined:

1. Open up a file browser to the game's directory This is usually C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\Battlespire with GOG Galaxy v1, and (I believe) C:\GOG\Battlespire for the backup installer.
2. Copy and paste the file "dosbox_battlespire.conf" to create a backup. I named mine "dosbox_battlespire.conf.backup", but anything works.
3. Right click "dosbox_battlespire.conf", "Open With" and select Notepad
4. Find the line "cycles=auto" and change it to read "cycles=fixed 200000". Save and close.
5. Start (or restart) the game.

[1]: https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Performance#Emulated_CPU_equivalency

Well, if it works ... Why not give it a try?
My own Battlespire installation is fine with the GOG defaults, except that I entered my monitor resolution and changed output to opengl.

You don't get it. The OP believes he's taking the cycles down to 200000, when in fact the auto setting was probably running much lower than that already. Going over the cycles necessary for a game to run smoothly will just create problems, not solve them.

Actually I do (and did), but I was making a different point: If it helps, ... Whether it's a real or a placebo solution to "cap" DOSBox at 200,000 cycles, is beside the point - it's a perceived improvement, all that matters.
I agree that going over the cycles required has the potential to create problems.

The auto setting puts it at max 100% once the game is loaded. You can observe this behavior yourself [1].

As I state in the OP, I didn't pull it out of thin air. I looked up an actual top-end CPU from 1997 when the game was released - a Pentium II 300 - and found the appropriate cycle count on DOSbox's wiki. [2]

Anecdotally, the framerate drops after setting the cycles to a fixed 200k. The framerate is unplayable at the UESP wiki's suggested 50k cap, which is in line with a top of the line ~~486~~ early Pentium (edited) at the time of daggerfall's release (and works great for it).

[1] https://imgur.com/a/UBFhsei
[2] https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Performance#Emulated_CPU_equivalency

Over the years I experimented with the DOSBox cycles settings of games which were not running smoothly (but I don't remember which games were affected). I never increased the number of cycles to anything beyond 100,000. In all cases, I observed one of three behaviours:
- no change (or got worse), or
- performance improved until it reached a ceiling and stayed there, or
- performance improved until it reached a maximum, and then dropped again (sometimes accompanied by weird effects like crashes, freezing completely, huge and quick performance variations following no pattern, graphical distortions, ...).
In all cases the optimal performance was reached at a setting of well below 100,000.
By the way, yesterday I checked GOG's default setting of Master of Magic out of curiosity: it's 100,000.

Being no technical expert, but a person who has a long experience with trying out all kinds of DOSBox parameter manipulations, and having encountered several (for me) surprising effects, I think it's worth trying everything which doesn't cause damage to the PC (unlikely in the case of DOSBox), and, if it works, not worry about the why. I have also been successful more than once when trying settings other people recommended: It's easy to do (and to revert if unsuccesful), there are quick results, and sometimes it even helps. My only recommendation is to backup the conf file(s) before experimenting.

My bad then, but as I said, I can't since I do not own Battlespire. I'll take your screencap at face value. Yes, I read it the first time and was not trying to simply correct you, but actually help you find a better setting by yourself (hence the first clarification of not having the chance to test the game and settings myself).

You don't need to justify a DOSBox setting with "research": it either works well or it doesn't. If you tested other settings and you say the best one resulted from the 200000 cycles, that's fine. I noted that it is not common to need that many cycles at all, not that I was sure this particular game did not need them.

Staying within this game to exemplify what I'm talking about: The original requirements for it included a Pentium CPU, not even a Pentium MMX, much less a Pentium II (I played it back in '98 in a friend's PC with a P1 100 Mhz and it ran fine); but if 50000 cycles are not enough to run it in a playable way, then that throws the equivalence between number of cycles and a particular processor out the window. It is a place to start if you have no other reference, but only that.

It is much more important to know how a particular game reacts to the cycles setting. Going now to another game for an example: Going too high in the cycle count for X-Wing (original or 1994) means you end up with ships that do not hyperspace in or out when they should, hang ups and freezes when many ships are on screen (as if there was not enough processing power), etc. And note that it is well known this is an issue with how DOSBox's emulation works, not with the "game vs processor speed". X-Wing ran (and still runs) perfectly fine in my 650 Mhz Pentium III (bought in 2000) in real DOS, but trying to use the "equivalent" cycles in DOSBox in a modern PC ends in disaster.

If you believe that you have sufficiently tested in-game and didn't come up with any issues, then you should contact GOG support to let them know what you did; giving them the chance to put those settings in place for everyone, directly at the installer.