Just as the topic title states, I'm getting a momentary and quite noticeable stutter/framerate drop when collecting items with the default DOSBox/settings that come pre-loaded with the GoG version of the game. The game otherwise runs fine, and it's certainly not a game breaker, but it can make combat a little more hairy when moving around/over items while fighting. Not having trouble running other games via DOSBox, or other modern games on my core i7/660 machine - is this behavior accurate for the game, or is there some DOSBox setting I can change to fix it? Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.

I didn't experience the issue on my machine. Maybe you have to increase the Dosbox cycles with Ctrl + F12, or the game tries to read or write a file and the HDD went into standby mode before and the game waits for the success message of that operation.

That can't be the issue because by default the profile is set to "MAX" cycles, and I have no difficulty running more intense games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D on DOSBox.

Not seen this issue myself, but if it happens when you pick up items then could it be sound related? In which case, try editing the sound emulation settings. Additionally, max cycles for the CPU could be too fast on your machine, so although it might sound counter-intuitive, lowering the CPU cycles can improve the performance. With DOSBox, it's all about finding the sweet spot for your machine on the CPU cycles.

I suppose, though I have not had to edit the sound options for any other of the many games I've played in DOSBox for performance reasons, and the game otherwise runs fine, it's just when running over items that there's a slight stutter. As I said, it's not game-breaking and I've gotten used to it (played through few episodes) - thanks for trying to help though.