I installed the original dos version of Star Control 2, which is designed for something like 386 era PCs, on my pentium 233mmx machine (s3 trio pci graphics card, vibra 16 sound card, 80MB ram, Win98/dos 7.1, which is all overkill for a game from 1992). It loads into the game fine, but it is running maybe 25% of the speed it should be. The sound and music are impacted as well and play slowly and pitched down.

I noticed Star Control 2 is on the list of games that are cpu speed sensitive ( https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/List_of_ … sensitive_games ), though there were no particular comments about what the issue there is or what a fix might be.

Some of my early 90s stuff runs better when I use setmul to switch off the cpu's l1 cache, bringing it down to something akin to 386 levels of performance. I tested running the game with slower cpu settings but it did not change the performance of the game where it is running as slow as molasses.

I was surprised that I could not find anyone else discussing this particular issue, surely others have run this popular game on faster/pentium cpus? Is my result aetypical for my hardware spec?