I just used the instructions on the website to install daggerfall and added the lines at the bottom to the config so dosbox would autorun daggerfall on startup. Is there a way I can increase frames for melee combat so it's smoother, like Arena's, or am I stuck with choppy frames when I swing a sword? If anything hurts the game, it's the fact that melee can be an exercise in guesswork when you only see 3 frames during a swing.

Maybe it's just your speed rating? Make a character and boost the speed higher.. It could just be your speed is low, thus you swing slower..

I think he may be referring to the actual animation frames. O_o

Are you in fullscreen mode cause if I'm in fullscreen mode outside it goes extremely slow and the only fix I found was to stay in windowed mode.

Yes this. The animation frames for weapon attacks seem just slow and sparse. Windowed mode doesn't help this. I've played Oblivion perfectly on this PC so shouldn't have any issues playing this game.

Try setting cycles to max instead of auto, and also try increasing the amount of memory allocated to DOSbox, both settings could be found in the config. Also you could try a different render method, it default to surface, but I usually use overlay instead.

And since dosbox is an emulator, the system requirements of the game go up significantly, so if it's still choppy it may just be your processor struggling to emulate the game.

Setting cycles around 15000 (for me) worked well for running the game. Very smooth.