I'm curious if anyone knows what CPU cycle I can set DosBox at, so it will emulate Might & Magic as close as possible to the original speed? As of right now, all the enemies and NPCs look like they are on crack, but the main problem I have is; if I set the CPU cycles down to where it looks normal, the mouse pointer starts to skip and becomes sluggish.

I found 7000-8000 to be good.

It still seems a little fast. I wish Dos-Box could emulate a 133mhz 486. That would run pretty much every game that ever came out for DOS.

The actual number of cycles that works will depend on your CPU speed; it will not necessarily be the same on every machine. But you can experiment while playing by using the CTRL+F11 and CTRL+F12 shortcuts to lower and raise cycles.

Another thing I'd recommend is getting the latest version of DOSBox. The MM pack comes with v0.72 but there's now v0.74 available that apparently fixes (or at least improves) speed issues in some games. Grab it at dosbox.com and just install it over the version you have now. The game will still run fine, and you might find the speed issues improved.

I have DosBox v0.74, but I'm still having trouble with the games playing too fast. But if I slow any of the games down to where the enemies and NPCs don't look like they're on crack, my mouse becomes VERY sluggish.

Since every computer runs different with DosBox and the cycles, does anyone have a way to match the animations in the game with the original games? Basically, what was the original FPS of the games when they were played on an actual 486 CPU. Is there a video somewhere that I could use to compare mine with the original way the game was ran?

You can adjust the mouse sensitivity independently of the CPU cycles, by edititing the .CONF file.

You can also play the game while hardly ever using the mouse... there are keyboard shortcuts for everything and I'm pretty sure I stopped using the mouse after I got the hang of the keyboard controls because they were easier and faster.

The sensitivity settings that PetrusOctavianus mentioned are worth looking at, but you may still find that the mouse behaves oddly at low cycles.

I'm curious if this is a common problem... I think I've seen a few other posters with speed issues in Xeen but not as many as I'd expect if it was running too fast for everyone. Are there people here that find Xeen runs at normal speed without any tweaking? If so, can we figure out why it works for some people and not for others?

(I haven't tried GOG's version of Xeen yet)

Has DOSBOX ever gotten this right after all these years? This was a huge problem for me in TES:Arena about 10 years ago.

If I look at a video on youtube of MM3 on original hardware (AMIGA for instance) and adjust my cycles so that the animation speeds in say... the Blacksmith/Shop are at the same speeds as the they were in the original hardware I find that the rest of the game runs incredibly slow as well as the loading times and mouse cursor movement.

Did the game just run this sluggish back in the day on 'good' hardware for the time?

Edit: Ok here is something very interesting I discovered. If I increase FRAMESKIP (CTRL+F7 to decrease, CTRL+F8 to increase) rather than decreasing CPU cycles I can slow down the overly fast animations of animations without slowing down the game at all. I'm not sure what the range of Frameskip is (except that is starts at 0) so I'm not sure what to set it at in my config file. Interestingly, while cranking it up in down in the blacksmith's shop makes a clear difference it makes little to no difference with the innkeeper who still flips his book pages way too fast...

Edit 2: Using SVN Daum dosbox is the fix since it has Vsync support. Just set it to 20, or at most 25 to limit your framerate and you can enjoy smooth gameplay with animations that are at the appropriate speed.