After reading through this thread from start to finish it seems a lot of peeps are having un-necessary troubles running APOC in XP. Firstly although DosBox is a useful program it severely eats processor power, and I don't care how tough you think your machine is, it will still eat it. I use a 3.4GHz processor in an Alienware laptop and Dosbox is still using 65% of my processor resources just to tick over. So instead, for APOC anyway, I use XP to run it. Best method is to first install VDM sound if you haven't already, it can be found all over the net, just google it. Then open up your xcom folder and change the compatibility settings on xcomapoc.exe and on setup.exe to windows 95 compatibility, and 256 colours only. Then run setup.exe and choose a soundblaster card, settings as 220, IRQ 7, DMA 1. Save and exit, now to run the game, right click on the xcomapoc.exe file and select "run with VDMS". The intro video messes up but just hit enter or space to skip past it, and the rest of the game runs like a dream. The video's run in DosBox, but the rest of the game was very choppy to me, no matter how much I increased the cycles.
I hope this helps those who still aren't getting to experience this great game. I understand there are a lot of people better versed in X-Com than me as I've only ever played apocalypse, but from this stance, of playing the game as a unit in itself rather than a sequel to the previous games I feel it's a very good addictive game.
