Is anyone else having trouble with the game running sluggishly when the screen is showing a busy hospital? The frame rate seems to suffer and the game runs more slowly. If I pan the screen to a more empty area, it speeds back up.

The game isn't using many resources on my laptop, according to the taskmanager, so I don't think its stressing my computer out (I could be wrong however). I also can't seem to adjust the cycles in DOSbox like I can in some other games using CTRL-F12.

Perhaps its the display settings I'm using? Though those are the defaults...

Yeah it does happen for me too, regardless of the os used (I ran it under windows xp, 7 and under linux). I fixed it by running the hospital so well that there were no queues ;P

Seriously though - it would be nice if this got fixed, so +1.

I'm having big problems with this too, to the point that it's becoming very difficult to play. I even have it as the only thing open and have disabled Wi-Fi and so on, and it's still slow.

Same problem. Plodding along.

Here the same problem, unfortunately... It's definitely a DOSBox problem, because I've got an original CD version of TH as well and it works all fine.

Not at the computer I use to play games. Could someone try this?

- Go into the folder where you have installed Theme Hospital
- Look for dosboxTH.conf
- create a backup copy of dosboxTH.conf (just in case)
- Open dosboxTH.conf with notepad or some other text editor
- Find "Cycles=Max" or "Cycles=Auto" and replace Max/Auto with "20000"
- Save dosboxTH.conf and exit
- Run Theme Hospital, load a busy hospital and check performance,
- If TH is still sluggish use CTRL-F12 to increase cycle count
- If TH is running TOO fast use CTRL-F11 to reduce cycle count.

Tried changing the cycles and it made everything before going into the hospital really juddery (the menu screen animations and sound). When I got into the hospital itself, increasing and decreasing the cycles only served to cause the same problems.

A little bump, so GOG developers could see this :-)

I have this too -_-; I do wonder if GOG aren't just lazy and quickly throw games into dosbox and that's it. I mean half the time the games aren't set up very well and these issues that come along a bit later suggests that they don't playtest much.

I'm having the same issues. The jittery behavior and general slowness seems to persist regardless of the business of the hospital.

I've also had problems opening this full screen and problems with trying to guess the DOSBox graphical configs as well. Frustrating for a first-time GOG purchase.

Windows 7 64-bit.

Message sent to GOG Devs, let's see what they would say.

Did you try CorsixTH? http://code.google.com/p/corsix-th/

It is a new engine. Instead of running the game in DOSBox it is a new re-implementation of the game-engine. I run Theme Hospital under Linux with CorsixTH and it works just fine.

I looked into Corsix, and while being able to play in a larger, non-scaled screen is tempting, it is missing too many features for me to want to give it a try.

Hopefully TH's release on GoG spurs them to finish the project sooner.

Don't forget:

you can change the perfomance/speed ingame in the option menu!


During the beginning of the game i set the slowest speed available,
later i use the normal speed - but most time i use one step slower.