I don't know exactly why this works yet but for the first time EVER I have both Tornado and F-14FD running smoothly under DOSBox!
It started with a DOSBox Config tweak that somehow fixed Subwar 2050 (another first, such a good day I'm having!
). Holy crap, I played for a while to confirm that everything would continue running smoothly on full graphics.
Then I had an idea...
I copied over the self-running Subwar demo, started and the then exited Subwar to the DOS prompt to continue using the tweaked GOG Config settings, started the demo and it worked perfectly too!
So then I copied my Tornado and Fleet Defender game folders to my Subwar folder and did the same thing. Flew around in both and they're running silky smooth! I freaking can't believe it!
So after all this time I seem to have finally hit the 'magic' DOSBox config settings that allows these games to run smoothly on my PC (and possibly my laptop, much more experimenting to do tonight). I just need to document the tweaks by GOG and whatever I may have done in addition and I'll post my findings later on this thread.