Running U4 in Dos Box with the Ultima Patcher used to add VGA/music. The NPCs are vibrating like mad. All other animations seem to run at the correct speed. Well the water does anyways I haven't traveled much. So I slow down using CTRL-F11 and the NPCs animate normally but the water is almost still.

Just wondering if there is a way to fix this inconsistency?

That may not be an inconsistency in the original game. I haven't played it in a while but I seem to remember the water animating much slower than the rest of the game. I'll try and look into it.

::EDIT::
Quick question: Are you using the GOG version of U4 or one of the other free options found around the 'net? (There are actually legal downloads besides GOG, just want to get my setup as close to yours as possible.)

Hi, it is the GOG version. I installed Ultima 5 and noticed it animates very nicely on its own.

Although I don't know how much patience I have for either of these games these days, U5 is much more friendly/developed, which is no surprise. In spite of that U5 is where I started the series on the C64 back in the day so it has more relevance to me. U4 I installed as a curiosity more than anything.

Hit Alt-F to turn on frame limiting. See Readme.txt in the game folder for other useful features added by the VGA patch.

Okay, I tested it and running at about 500 cycles (the default set by GOG) seems to run everything properly. The water is slow but it looks correct to me. Also, hitting Alt-F, as suggested by jkiiskinen, seems to do the exact same thing.

When using the VGA/music patch and its frame limiter, setting DOSBox cpu cycles to auto works better for me than setting to any fixed cycle value. Like this:

[cpu]
core=auto
cputype=auto
cycles=auto
cycleup=10
cycledown=20

This may not work for all host machines, but it's worth trying to see if it improves things.

Yeah that'd be my suggestion too. The only thing was, when I ran it "out of the box" it was set to 500 cycles by GOG. Using the VGA patch, for some reason, set it to 8000 cycles. Reducing it to 500 again, or hitting ALt-F, fixed the animation for me. However, the water is a lot slower than the NPC animation regardless of which option I choose.

Yeah, that's how it is for me as well. I actually kinda like the slow water myself, the faster type of constantly moving diagonal lines can get pretty annoying after a while. So maybe it was meant to be like this, everything else seems to be running at correct speed anyway.