Being someone who likes to play a lot of their games in windowed mode (especially turn based strategy games which one can easily step away from and come back to), I am having a reoccurring problem which is making life difficult.

This only seems to happen with games which use dosbox, but whenever I alt-tab away from, or defocus the game window, whenever I try to pull the game up again it either freezes up or slows down to unplayability.

Is there a way to fix this?

Have you tried going into the start menu folder for the game and changing the graphics output mode to something else? Like say Surface, Overlay, or OpenGL?

Dosbox contains cpu priority settings, there should be an entry in every particular game's .conf file under the [sdl] section. This .conf file can be easily edited with notepad or similar program (keep a backup if you wish).

Usually it'll look something like this:

[sdl]
#blah blah blah
priority=higher,normal

The first option after the [=] is supposed to be how much cpu priority dosbox gets while its the active window, the setting after the [,] is supposed to be how much priority dosbox gets when it is unfocussed (in the background).

You could try changing 'normal' to 'pause' so dosbox freezes in place when you switch away from it, but I don't know many dos games that actually like that. I even have some that pause while focused with this setting. Its not much help if you want the game to keep running in the background.

You could set it normal or higher on both sides of the [,] and just live with dosbox using the same cpu priority when its in the background.

I would guess most of GOG's dosbox configs have this set to "higher,normal" and if this is the case, then your dos game is just struggling to run in the background of whatever else you're doing.

One other config setting you can try is setting cycles=auto. Dosbox will try and self manage the speed of the cpu emulation.

Thanks a lot, I think setting the cycles to auto instead of max fixed it up!