Is there anyway to increase the length of time a text message appears on screen? Like when a character complains of hunger or you get snippets of text during the opening sequence that disappear after a second?

Dialogue is fine of course as you need to left click before the text changes :)

Lower Dosbox's speed. The Black Gate doesn't have any built-in speed limiter, so keeping the emulation speed down is the only way to ensure that 'barks' are readable, action doesn't happen too fast to react to, etc.

Serpent Isle has some built-in speed limits, so the emulation speed can be higher.

Thanks. Now I just have to figure out how to do that :)

In program it's ctrl+f11 or you can edit the "dosboxULTIMA7.conf" file (defaults to C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com\The Complete Ultima VII\Ultima7). Just remove the (x86) part if you're using a 32-bit version of Windows. The same process is used for Serpent Isle, just change Ultima7 to Serpent at the end. Once you have it opened just lower the "cycles" option. Drop it to 9000 or so and see if that's good, if not raise it 1000 and test again, etc.

Or play U7 in Exult, which is by far the better option.

This is true...

It's actually not that big of a deal. If you notice that a large section of the game is just gone (and you will notice it) you just need to reload an earlier save. Save every so often, and take a break every hour or two, and you'll be fine. It probably won't even happen if you quit the game once an hour.