I'm playing this on my macbook pro with the mac version of pirates gold. everything seems fine other than in ship battles with the cursor keys. I find myself having to press and hold the direction buttons for awhile before the ship changes direction.

Is this normal? this makes battles very hard as the laggy response means I can't tack the enemy ship efficiently. It is strange as it is only for the movement, the space bar responds just fine for firing off the cannons.

Any help would be appreciated!

I have the same kind of computer, same problem. I regularly am having a quality game, then all of a sudden get into a gun battle and can't turn when I need to, get pummeled, sink, and quit. I'd appreciate a patch or advice; otherwise, doubtful I'd ever buy a gog game again.

I'm playing on Windows, but I also have the same problem. Turning when in battle is almost impossible, and half the time my ship ends up just sailing off the screen (and ending the battle) before I'm able to turn at all. It is unplayable.

I went back and tested my old Atari ST version of this game, and found it has no responsiveness problems. In fact, it looks pretty good and plays smoothly.

I thought the GOG version would run at least as well as my Atari ST version, so I'm pretty disappointed. It seems like I've just wasted a few dollars, and I've lost a bit of confidence in GOG.

Having the exact same problems here. The keyboard controls simply don't work.

I guess this is an isolated incident for this not to be mentioned much in this forum? Don't know why we're the unlucky ones, though.

I think I found a workaround though -- use the left mouse button and the right mouse button to turn your ship. Seems to work perfectly with no unresponsiveness. I use the mouse for ship movement and the keyboard for fighting.

Reversed, the game is unplayable. The mouse doesn't work during the fights and is unresponsive while the keyboard doesn't work for the ship. It's bizarre.

I think this is caused by lag in dosbox. If you change the graphics mode to opengl it may eliminate some of the lag. It worked for me at least.

Having this issue also.

You're right that the mouse does work for the naval battles (but not for the sword fights). So at least the game isn't -completely- unplayable, but nevertheless, I'm still a bit disappointed that it doesn't work properly.

I've decided that if I want to play Pirates! I'm probably better of just playing the Atari ST version with an emulator rather than the version I recently bought from GOG. Even aside from the problems with the controls, I'm finding the Atari version more fun than Pirates! Gold anyway; mostly because the sword fights are better.

In the sword duels in Pirates! Gold, I can't really tell what's going on. The characters just seem to be waving their swords all over the place. I can't tell the difference between a parry and an attack, or the difference between a high attack and a low attack, and half the time I can't even tell if my attacks hit or not. Under conditions like that, it's impossible for me to use any kind of coherent strategy in the duels - and so the duels are just a frustrating test of luck. Whereas in the Atari version it is very clear what's going on, and so the sword battles are a fun test of reflexes and concentration. -- But I guess GOG can't be blamed for that side of things.

I have this problem too : (

No progress with this issue?

Can confirm the bug also occurs on Linux (Ubuntu 14.04). I think this is most likely a dosbox issue.
Controlling the ship with mouse instead of keyboard helps a lot though.

I am having the same problem. Using the mouse for sailing helps, but it would be much better to not have the input problem.

This happens in my version on Windows 7 as well. GoG, any answer other than the mouse use work around?

I'm playing the Windows version and I'm running to the exact same issue. Sorry to bring this back up ... but has GOG fixed this? Can it be fixed? Controlling the ships is piss poor, at best... and in combat it devolves into 'impossible.' *sigh*

Press Ctrl + F12 several times to increase the DosBox cycles. That fixed the issue for me.

Im running on Ubuntu 16.04 and the entire game runs great except for firing cannons in a ship battle. SPACE nor the ENTER keys work for me. Any other options? The keyboard actually is a lot easier for controlling the ship during a battle.

I'm playing on 16.04 as well and I can't even get past the opening fencing duel. I've played for 10+ minutes and neither of our morales seem to change at all. Am I missing something??