I'm playing DQK and I find that the animations on spells like fireball is very slow. I've altered the game speed to fastest and increased the cycles in DosBox but it is still slow. Does anyone know a way to speed this up?

This same question had been asked a while ago on the Unlimited Adventures fan board, but it seems that no, there isn't a way to make Dark Queen (or FRUA, which has the same engine) run super fast in the manner of the other Gold Box games.

The DQK/FRUA engine simply appears to use a significantly different means of determining the delay loops to be used to moderate game speed compared to the earlier games; I'm presuming it's based on real time in some fashion thus resulting in the delays being fixed lengths of time for each game speed (unless you set things so slow as to make things even slower), while the older games probably based it somehow on a number of CPU cycles (hence why they can run so fast in DOSBOX).