I'm getting really choppy audio or video (I assume one causes the other) during the movies. The intro movie is practically unwatchable. I tried talking with Hobbes, and it's also very choppy, with noticeable screen tearing, too. Is there a change I need to make to the DOSBox configuration? I'm familiar with editing dosbox.conf (dosboxWC3.conf in this case). I tried changing from ddraw to overlay and opengl, but nothing helps. I get the same performance problem fullscreen or in a window.

I checked Wing Commander CIC, but I didn't find anything that might help.

I have the same issue, but it's not too bad. I switched to D3D. It got a bit better. I didn't try anything else yet.

I'm thinking it's a codecs issue.

You could play around with the next values. Note that I haven't tried WC3 yet, but this worked pretty well for Lost Eden (Cryo-so lots of cinematics)

[cpu]
core=auto
cycles=max
cycleup=500
cycledown=20

[mixer]
nosound=false
rate=22050
blocksize=2048
prebuffer=40

Try to play around with the prebuffer setting. I use 10 on my desktop, but on my netbook 40 was better.

Thanks for the suggestion. Everything in my dosboxWC3.cfg file matched what you have above, except for prebuffer. I tried changing that from 10000 to 40, 10, and 100000, but none of that made a difference. I also tried using DOSBox 0.74 with no difference. Finally, I set the game up inside D-Fend Reloaded, so it would use my default DOSBox configuration that I use with all other DOSBox games. That also didn't help.

This is very disappointing. This is probably my number 1 favorite game ever, and it's just not working right for me. And I don't see that anyone else is reporting this problem on the forums, so I'm thinking it must be solvable!

You're not alone. I downloaded WC3 yesterday and have the same choppy audio/video problems.

Happen to me too, from time to time. Some sequences run fine, some get choppy.

Something else worked, too. I changed core=auto to core=normal. Setting it to dynamic results in the choppiness, and it looks like that's what auto was falling back to. My CPU section of dosboxWC3.conf now looks like:

core=normal
cputype=auto
cycles=max
cycleup=1000
cycledown=1000

So far, so good!

dgdgagdae...

I tried your DosBox tweak and it works for me also. So far, so good also! Thanks!

Yeah, those settings are definitely better. However, there are slowdowns whenever you take off/land/fly close to ships/kill ships up close.

Still, it's much better than choppiness every couple of seconds.

I own actual copies of the game (OS9 and dos) and can verify that the intro movie was always slightly choppy for both or rather that the audio would pop/stutter, but the rest of the game is fine. I have played with the dos box prebuffer settings before and didn't do that much.

The opening and some of the movies pop and stutter but they did that back in the day. I remember this game locking up every 5 seconds or so during the video. I will deal with it because this game is FANTASTIC. One of my all time favorites.

The main problem is this:

cycles=max

GOG tends to use max setting for cycles in most if not all of their dosbox releases. Every single dosbox game i bought on GOG has issues with choppy audio "out of the box". The solution is to find a cycles setting that works good for your system. It differs for everyone, wich is why GOG can't set it "right". You have to do it yourself. For WC3 setting cycles to anything between 50.000 - 100.000 got rid of choppy sound and ensured good framerate even inside carrier ships. The setting for this would be:

cycles=fixed 100000

EDIT: For this to help you should only change the cycles. Leave the core setting on auto/dynamic, etc.

Brilliant Hatman. That fixed it

cycles=fixed 100000

OMG you have no idea. Between this and my full screen fix I have a 100% working copy of wc3!

I think the official DOSBox site also recommends this change for optimum performance.

So I tried this:

core=auto
cputype=auto
cycles=100000
cycleup=1000
cycledown=1000

But I still get a bit of stutter in the intro video. The audio doesn't pop like it does out of the box, but you can see when the Wing Commander III title flies in that it pauses just a couple of times.

I've found that this works better for me:

core=normal
cputype=auto
cycles=max
cycleup=1000
cycledown=1000

I guess it's one of those YMMV things.