When playing Quake: The Offering in DosBox, the framerate can be quite bad sometimes, like when looking in certain directions or in certain parts of the map. Staring at a wall can sometimes make the framrate better, but that's no way to play lol. I tried raising the CPU cycles, but when raised too high the game get's stuttery. 200000 cycles seems to be the sweetspot, but it's still not perfect. Is there any way to fix this issue? I haven't found any solutions online, so I assume it's a lost cause. Still, if anyone has a solution I'd love to hear it.

And yes I know I can play in Quakespasm, but there's a certain retro charm about playing in DosBox lol.

I assume you use DOS BOX for the software renderer. You could use WinQuake, also in the GOG folder.

It's always been like that for me too. Too many cycles and the game becomes too fast/ starts frameskipping.

You can play Winquake (which they forgot to include a shortcut for) but ofc that won't have music out of the box.

You can hook up Winquake to play the music easily enough, just let me know if you're interested.

I have yet to achieve any acceptable levels of performance playing Quake in DOSBox (I too am a fan of chunky pixels). Bite the bullet and download a Sourceport. Quakespasm is the most straightforward, in my opinion.

Why did they even include such resolutions as 1280x1024 in the original release? Even years later no CPU could run the game at that resolution simply because once hardware is fast enough the game bugs out and becomes a stuttering mess.

I'm running into an issue like this, as well, but I'm not running it at a high resolution, unless 320x240 is a high resolution lol Mostly, though, I'm being plagued by juttery strafing...My Quake conf file's default cycle count started out at 60000, so, I knocked it down by half, thinking that 60000 might be a bit high, but the problem persists...may have to try bumping it up...see if that helps.

I recommend not using DOSbox for Quake at all. I just couldn't get it to run satisfyingly. I made a guide on how to make it look and feel exactly like in DOS but play flawlessly using a source port here: https://www.gog.com/forum/quake_series/chunky_pixels_inside_making_quake_look_most_retro_on_source_ports (screenshot links are currently down, unfortunately)
Namely, just using Fitzquake Mark IV with the recommended settings makes that extremely easy without sacrificing anything.

I'll definitely give it a try. A little dissatisfying that Quake is the ONLY MS-DOS based game I have from GOG that doesn't work as intended...I mean, I know they include GLQuake and WinQuake. It was just far more satisfying knowing that there was the version I remember playing as a twelve-year-old when it came out. Jeez, it seems so strange to think I was that young when this masterpiece hit the shelves...buuuuuuut, as long as I can get it working properly, looking like I want it to, I'll try a source port. I do have Darkplaces, but I use that for my "pretty" Quake.

Oh, before I forget, does FitzQuake support sub-640 resolutions? I have a 16:10 TV I use, and I typically use, as I said, 320x240, as I find it to look as I remember, and the status bar fills the bottom of the screen nicely.

Edit: I think I know what my particular problem is, now that I've stewed and mulled it over (as well as played with the config file for a good twenty minutes); DOSBox is having issues throttling the game. It seems to go REALLY high frame rate in spots, and it speeds up almost exponentially. The engine can't keep up, and so the game jutters. I tried it on the slowest machine settings I could (vgaonly, 8MB RAM, 386_slow (which it shouldn't have run at all with; Quake requires at LEAST a Pentium 75)...), and it still kept suffering from what I can only call "catastrophic speed-ups"

I was also a bit disappointed as I try to play older games exactly the way they used to be, as far as that is possible. But, from my experience in the case of Quake DOSBox just isn't the right application to reach that goal.
I had exactly the same problem: However I set the cycles, it either ran very sluggishly, or it mostly ran fine, but sped up like crazy in other parts. Also, overall it just didn't feel good to control. Probably DOSBox just can't handle a full 3D game well.

Yes, the Winquake port of Fitzquake Mark IV supports 320x240. Although for me the sweet spot was at 640x480, that's how I played through it.
I'll try to upload the screenshots again this evening.

[edit]
The pictures are back up again. Notably, compare these two: 1. 2. [url=http://i.imgur.com/FgS6q8n.jpg]FitzQuake Mark IV Winquake :)

Hey, I trawled the forums for my post when Quake was first released here. THis worked for me back THEN: http://quake.wikia.com/wiki/DOSBox

However, I can't seem to access the DOSBox config settings anymore... anyone know the issue here?

Sounds like the normal behavoir of the dos quake exe file to me. Have got the same problem in the year 2000 or 2001 when I started to play Quake for the first time under Windows 98. Since then I have switched first to Winquake and later to other source ports like darkplaces etc.

It feels to me that the old dos quake exe has got no built-in fps limit, hence the mysterious sudden speed-up here and there.

If running quake under dosbox is really desired so as to experienced it in the most authentic or intended manner, then I suggest using the dos version of the excellent source port "engoo", at leileilol.mancubus.net/engoo Engoo has a internal cvar called max_fps which seems to be able to solve the issue of unexpected speed hikes.

Try adjusting host_framerate on Quake DOS its console. It's not really recommended that you do this, but setting host_framerate to 0.014 seemed to emulate original behaviour okay. Only do this if you really have to use it I suppose.

'vid_wait 1' seemed to do something (somehow, it does seem more stable), but 'com_maxfps 60' returned an Unknown command error

Edit: Yup, vid_wait 1 works like a charm; popped it into my autoexec.cfg after a couple of preliminary trials, and the game starts up with no noticeable speed-ups. Thanks, man. Never would have thought to try that.

Edit 2: The only thing vit_wait 1 doesn't seem to work with is the unreleased Mission Pack 3: Abyss of Pandemonium. It might have its own autoexec, though, so I'll have to check further.