I'm using DosBox to play Albion due to the limit of my Windows XP x64 to run 16-bit applications such as Albion via VDMSound. DosBox requires lot more resources and tweaking done before you can try running the game. Another thing I must mention is that I'm using experimental build (daum cafe), avaliable to download from
this site. Now you need to do some modifications in DosBox config file:
1. Set CPU type to "dynamic".
2. Set cycles to "auto" or 40000 (value highly depends on your actual CPU, e.g. the better you have the higher value you can set there).
I also like a bit blurred graphics to smooth pixels, this can be done by setting output to "opengl" and windowresolution to something like 800x600 or 1024x768. You can play around more with those values, I bet you'll find interesting results but as for me windowed mode with opengl works perfectly.
I think that's all. By the way I have original CD so I can't really tell how to run ripped versions without it, here I just simply mount my actual or virtual drive via "mount d e:/ -t cdrom -usecd 0 -ioctl" (where e:/ is path to your drive) and that's it! The game runs perfectly, everything is intact, including bugs and crashes this game have (yes, but fortunately they happen rarely, anyway save often). I hope that helps...
p.s. My CPU is AMD64 3200+, just saying it so the people would know at which system I play the game.