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[The Fifth Horseman]

1.) I am incredibly grateful! Can a donation be made to this site OTHER THAN via credit cared and, if so, how?[/b]

Helping the site out by reviewing games is one way of doing that.

2.) How can I get the FULL SCREEN in play? As is, I simply have the game running in this 'little' DOSBox. Grateful even for that, but... having been given the preverbial inch, now I want the whole sha-bang! smile.gif[/b]

Press ALT+ENTER when DosBox is running to switch between windowed and fullscreen modes, or open dosbox.conf and change line that says "fullscreen=false" to "fullscreen=true". And if you're at that, also change "fullresolution=original" to "fullresolution=640x480".

In the same file, the line "windowresolution=" controls how large Dosbox display is when running in windowed mode. I suggest about 80% of your desktop size as the optimum.

3.) I'll re-check documentation here to see what I missed about the F8 andF12 keys speeding the game up... but anything obvious?[/b]

CTRL+F7/F8 - increase/decrease frameskip. Minimal performance gain, usually.
CTRL+F11/F12 - increase/decrease the number of cycles Dosbox runs at. You can adjust the starting value as well as those by which the cycles are adjusted by editing dosbox.conf.

Another way to improve performance is to change the core mode to dynamic. In dosbox.conf, where it says "core=normal", change it to say "core=dynamic". You may experience occasional crashes when using Dynamic Core, but these are usually few and far between.

And of course, it almost always runs faster in fullscreen mode.

[Jeff The Ninja]

You could try to use a frontend like D-Fend. It makes setup easy so you dont have to slog through all the setup just so you can run a game. Its basically done for you.

[The Fifth Horseman]

In theory.
Personally, I find making separate Dosbox configfiless and corresponding shortcuts easy and convenient enough to not require frontends. All it takes is about 15 minutes per shortcut - two thirds of that time to dig through my icons archive for one to match the shortcut.