Does anyone else have longer delays in the intro (after starting a new game) when running the DOSBOX version, e.g. after the "Chapter 1" screen and when the game switches from displaying the first three pages of text to the screens with colorful animation? For me the music will freeze for a second or two, that is it will keep on playing the same note, and sometimes there will be some graphical glitch, just patches of pixels and colors before the actual picture is shown. Is this normal?

Maybe it's just a minor issue and I'm already prepared to see such things because on my old rig and my netbook DOSBOX often struggles, particularly with the sound emulation but sometimes also with graphics and loading times, but now I've tried to play the game on my new rig with up-to-date CPU and GPU which shouldn't have any problems with DOSBOX. And I watched a Let's Play video of the intro on youtube where the transitions were very smooth, without any glitches or loading times ...

Maybe it has the same cause though and for some reason my rig is just slower in dealing with it, so that what you hardly notice is more evident for me? I don't understand why my rig should have trouble with DOSBOX emulation though. Like I said the old ones had such issues, too, but I expected that to be a thing of the past with better CPU and GPU ...

It's possible. I should have noted also that I reconfigured the sound a lot before I started playing. For old DOS games, sound settings can often affect more than just the sound, sometimes even making the whole game stutter.

For the sound stuff I did, check this thread:

http://www.gog.com/forum/krondor_series/guide_to_betrayal_at_krondor_music_and_sound_effects_settings

Yeah, I already applied those suggestions this morning, but it didn't help a lot with the loading times and glitches. The only improvement I noticed is that I can now make out the muffled cry of the assassin, whereas before he didn't make a sound.

That's actually important; it means that you're actually getting digital sound effects in the game, whereas before you weren't. It's unfortunate that it didn't help with your loading times and such, though. You could try messing with the DOSBox configuration file but I"m not really sure which settings to try.

Oh, GOG games do come with a "graphic mode setup" utility which you could try. It's in the same start menu group as the game, and it has several options including "Surface" and "OpenGL". You could try a few of those and see if one of them helps.

Good idea! There actually are some differences between these modes, even though none of them completely deals with the issues. But with OpenGL the pauses between the screens are shorter and the graphical glitch less evident; unfortunately, for some reason it also moves the display a bit down and to the right, so that there's a black border at the top of the screen and the bottom and right side are slightly cut off ... :/

Which sound settings are you using? Going with General MIDI for music usually produces a noticeable pause-up in DOSBox compared to something like Sound Blaster.

In the case of the color flash, what have you set in the way of video? Fullscreen vs windowed, rendering mode, etc?