Why is tyrian never smooth for me?

I was able to play it smoothly on my old 486, but anything else it is jerky as hell. I can't play it at all! I tried dosboxing all versions, tons of different options etc etc all to no avail.

I also tried opentyrian and its jerky the same as dosboxed. I guess its cause of the scalers? Could it be, since everything is using scalers. When I was playing on a crt @ the correct resolution things were ok.

Any ideas welcome :)

What are the specifications of your PC?

Phenom II x4 955 (3.2 GHz quad), 5770 crossfire.

Tyrian was laggy on all my pcs, it was never playable. Still is. Dunno, they must have done something. And I guess everybody else doesn't care but I do since I've played it a lot on 486 and it was quite smoother there.

I know this might sound silly but did you change the game speed from slow to normal in the game settings? You can adjust this by pressing esc once you start a level. It defaults to slow because the GoG guys forgot to have it default to normal, its no big deal but it can confuse people I'm sure.