I am playing CIV 1 in a dosbox, downside is that the game is slower than it was back when i had windows 1995 (old PC) Does anyone know why? Can I fix it?
The culprit is not CivDOS, nor Dosbox, but rather the general robustness of your computer. I too started playing CivWIN on Win95. Then Win98, W2000, XP, et cetera. Win95 is known, now in hindsight, as a fast operating system. Efficient in allocating resources, with a body of available software which was all written by a corps of programmers who were raised in an environment of computing austerity, with limited resources of flops and bytes and rams.
Moving to W98 then W2000, the game played slower, and slower, and crashed more often. Slower still in W-XP, but fewer game crashes. Then the leap to a new OS, and finally the playing of Civ1 became impossible to do, on the OS natively, as a first-level application. So, like you, i was forced to divorce the platform for playing Civ1 from the OS. My answer, for CivWIN, is a virtual machine, your answer for CivDOS is Dosbox.
Here is the part that answers your question... when i started using a VM, Civ1 played like a drugged elephant wearing snowshoes. The PC's fans would whine like banshees, and other simultaneous tasks like playing music, would chop and hiccup to the point of uselessness. How is this possible, i asked? Every time you get a new PC, it is de facto the fastest PC you have ever owned. How could a program which eats less than 1% of RAM be so slow?
The answer is that a "modern" operating system has a throng of applications and threads running in the background, which will give the illusion of immediate satisfaction whenever their parent program is launched. If you ever installed software for a camera or printer, then at least a small bootstrap app for that software is running in the background every minute of every day, even when you're not using that camera, printer, scanner, synched mobile, browser, or whatever else.
For my civving, the answer was to open a utility program which shows what apps and threads are running on the PC in its "at rest state", and trimming back on the constantly-running processes which are not needed at the moment. Certainly, your operating system comes with such a utility program too. In my case, it turns out that the OS was running a set of program threads "just in case" i ever wanted to switch the GUI to a more eye-catching pretty scheme. Which i never do.
This was eating up fully half of my system's processor cycles and 9% of system memory, which is a huge amount considering today's RAM is measured in gigabytes, not kilobytes. Thus, when a typically resource-hungry VM starts, it is starved at birth. Here, my VM also demands fully half of the processor power, leaving only crumbs to run Civ1 or simply playing an audio file.
Shutting down unused apps is your answer. When i learned which apps can be eliminated from the always-on list, some can be stopped from opening by tinkering with your PC's boot process. Others might need to be shut down by hand, after the boot process completes. I can't tell you how to do it, every case is different, but if you lighten the load on your PC, in general, then Dosbox will have more resources available to run Civ1.
It worked for me, and suddenly it is a Golden Age for playing Civ1. It's whip-snap fast, i can put on some music while i play (Beethoven's Ninth is particularly appropriate), and since i fixed the problem, i've had Civ1 only crash once inside the VM. Even that was my fault, i am always trying to do ridiculous things to push the limits of a game.
