Just bought, one of my favorite games of my childhood :) Anyway, is there a way to slow down the game a bit more. Even with slowest pace selcted in the game itself it's going pretty fast which isn't tha good. So, any wat to slow it down even more? Some dosbox ini file config? HELP! :)

In DOSBox you can manually fix it in the ini file via notepad or equivalent - I suspect it'll be named dosboxThemePark or something similar - by scrolling down to the 'CPU' section and lowering the cycles. Before doing even that though you can play around with the emulation speeds on the fly while the game is running via CTRL-F11 (slower) and CTRL-F12 (faster) to see what works best for you.

Thanks for that. I had the same issue last night. The whole game was running much faster than I remember it doing back when I was a kid. I figured it was the processor cycles but wasn't sure of how to fix it.

I'd say hit R as the first thing when you enter the game to go into hi-res mode and then try to adjust the speed by CTRL+F11 and CTRL+F12. Going hi-res slows the game down quite significantly.

Still a bit too fast on my end though. I had to lower it by 5k-7k cycles to have it run at the speed it should be. Other than that the game seems to be running great. :)

Deleted!

The CPU cycles issue in this game has always been a problem since the original release. Molyneux knew this and implemented the game speed feature which had been intended to rectify the increased speed for forthcoming new machines at the time.

Unfortunately this feature is now obsolete as modern computers have increased their processing speed dramatically since the machines available at the time of the original release.

The only workaround is to manually modify the CPU cycles configuration in the DOSBOX config file or use an emulator that has a nice GUI menu for changing the CPU type / speed (such as Boxer for Mac OS)


The speed issue was what I believed had been holding up the release of Theme Park on GOG, but I guess the decision was just made to release it anyway with some tweaks of the DOSBOX configuration file. Either that or E's Arse didn't want to distract attention from their soulless greedy micro-transaction remake for the casual gaming generation. RIP Bullfrog.

I have an i5 750 CPU and GTX 260 GPU.

Some hints:
Been playing around for an hour finally with the settings to get the speed right.

Also have the game on my 'abandonware PC', a K6 with 400 Mhz clocked down to 166 MHz. Indeed, already on this computer the normal speed is too high so I had to use a slowdown tool, AT_slow to get it about right. Runs like a charm on that machine, but I do not want to switch PCs for playing so much, so I got the GOG release.

Had the game running originally on my 486 33MHz with 24 MB RAM, wish I still had that computer, but the bios battery was irreplaceable... RiP. Anyway, from my experience already a 66 MHz CPU made this game much faster.
Remember the game as perfectly playable on my 486, with one day passing in about 4-5 seconds (realtime).
With all my background I tried to find the settings for just that.

Here's my DOSBox config file:

These settings work pretty well in SVGA mode (R-key), only the bus isn't smooth as it should be. Also the mouse scrolling is a bit choppy, but not as bad as it could be, inside one screen it is fine. I remember the SVGA scrolling always being like that. Wish the guys at GOG could fix that, but probably too much work. About 5 seconds for a day, with just VGA mode days pass faster.

[sdl]
fullscreen=false
fulldouble=false
fullresolution=1280x1024
windowresolution=1280x1024
output=Direct3D
autolock=true
sensitivity=100
waitonerror=true
priority=higher,normal
mapperfile=mapper-0.74.map
usescancodes=true

[dosbox]
language=
machine=svga_s3
captures=capture
memsize=16

[render]
frameskip=0
aspect=true
scaler=hq3x

[cpu]
core=simple
cputype=386_slow
cycles=fixed 7000
cycleup=100
cycledown=100
altcycles=6300
altcyclesmode=257

Still trying to get information about the 'altcyclesmode', possibly tweaking this could help, but so far I don't know what it does. Too warm now for try & error sessions. Hopefully someday DOSBox will be able to emulate exact MHz speeds, would make things so much easier.

Hope ths helps, though every set of hardware is different.

I haven't tried this yet but according to @ForBarterOnly, the settings we need to configure can be found if you open the app by right-clicking and selecting "Show Package Contents"

The app is by default in the Applications folder unless you chose a different location.

Then the path of the config file is:

Contents/Resrouces/Game/Theme Park

"Show Package Contents" again, then:

Contents/Resources/Configurations/Preflight.conf

Make sure that rich text is turned off in TextEdit BEFORE you open and save the file! It's best to use a simpler text editing tool like Smultron or Sublime.