Games :: dosbox configs

Attempting to make a few dosbox game extensions, but don't know much about the configs, in particular, cpu cycles.
I made a Mortal Kombat 2 extension (yep, it's free now), and toyed around with the cpu cycles setting untill I found something that ran smoothly on my machine - 1500cycles. BUT, when I tried it on another machine (a P4 1700, mine's an XP2400), it ran badly, and I couldn't find a decent cycle rate. And apparently setting a cycle rate that is too much for the machine to handle is bad.
I remember playing Mortal Kombat Trilogy on my old 486 DX100, admitedly a little slowly, so I figure(?) MK2 should be able to run on most machines, but what kind of settings should I use to make it universal?

PS. the MK2 extension is a bit under 10meg, not bad at all. MKTril looks like it would be at least 50meg, and so far I haven't had any luck with it under dosbox (not to mention the fact that it's probably not free yet).

PPS. abandonia.com is great for finding out that your old dos favourites are now abandoned and free! Should be lots of games we can turn into extensions for dsl.

Actually, I run dosbox on my machine with Xfree86 and nvidia acceleration, whereas the other machine I tried just used the kdrive vesa X system, maybe that affects performance? Should there be a specification that you should be running XFree86 if you want to run games under dosbox?

original here.