for posterity: I figured out that pressing Enter will dismiss (most) dialogs faster than clicking. Still not sure about the delay on the destruction sequence initialization though.

Hey all,

I played this game as a kid and recently came back to it and decided to maybe look into speedrunning it.

Accidentally spent most of the day working on an autosplitter script for livesplit, whoops...

Anyway, when I watch Baato's WR (and several other runs), I notice two things that seem to be a slight behavioral difference to when I'm playing:

• at the start of the game, for me there will be audio that says "Destruct sequence is engaged! 15 minutes till detonation." and I can't dismiss the box until after that plays (which means that it is, as far as I can tell, impossible to do anything before the timer is down to at least 14:57). Yet if I look at runs submitted on here, I hear no dialog and the run continues without waiting on the dialog.

• similarly, throughout other uploaded runs I've watched, I notice that the dialog boxes get dismissed much more quickly than the game will allow me to dismiss them. It seems like the uploaded runs dismiss them nearly immediately, but if I click to dismiss it (or try pressing TAB/Space/ESC) before it's been on screen for a portion of a second, nothing happens.

I've messed around with a bunch of different settings on cycles in DOSBox, and that doesn't seem to change either of those things--was wondering if there are any other settings I need to change to make the behavior match the other runs? It doesn't seem like much in any given occurrence, but over the course of a ~10 minute run the portions of seconds seem to add up.

I'm using DOSBox v0.74-3, SQ1 version 2.0, 36000 cycles (if I go too much higher the game will crash when I try to load it, saying the music couldn't initialize or something; once that happens though, I can use the hotkeys in DOSBox to increase it higher just fine, but that doesn't seem to address the timing issues on the dialogs).

Happy to provide any more information if it can help debug, and if anyone has any ideas what settings I might need to change, please let me know!

Thanks!