So, I noticed there is an interest function in DOSBox. One can Speedup or Slowdown "cycles." I don't really know what a "cycle" is necessarily, but the general concept seems to be related to allowing the emulator to use more RAM at a given time or something.

For some games this is useful for cutting out lag. You can basically increase the cycles, and it ensures the game pretty much runs lagless, which is great! For example, increasing the cycles for Lemmings just reduces any lag, though it seems to do fine at 3000 cycles.

However, on other games, such as one I was testing out called Baby Jo in Going Home, the cycles appear to be directly related to the frame rate of the game. Meaning, I can basically speed up the game play infinitely fast (or until the threshold my computer allows).

Well, I was looking at some DOS games, just to see if cycles are mentioned in the rules to get a sense of how this is handled. Is there a way to know what the actual number of cycles is correct for a given old piece of abandonware? Anyone know where this issue has been encountered in a game and how so?

Thanks.

cycles could be related to the processor cycle speed. Like a 2.5GHz processor versus a 1.5GHz processor. other than that, i don't know anything else that could help you

So doing a digging around, it does appear to be related to processor cycles; and not only that but apparently various games also load information at different rates at different times. So there is no standard cycle speed on DOSBox, and even on a per game basis there will be slightly variances depending on the processor speeds.

It does appear some games have stipulated optimal speeds in their rules (such as Jazz Jackrabbit). I guess it's going to be up to individual game mods to explore this and determine if there needs to be a set cycle speed or not. It appears some games have internal timers which don't make it a problem at all. Other games, it was unclear to me what would be the correct cycle speed; but tbf I could always run it on an Amiga emulator, which I imagine would have more consistency given the standardized hardware.