Potential solution for Wing Commander speed problem on modern systems

BarracksDripBucket

1st Lieutenant
So looking on here and on GOG forums, it seems like a common problem in DosBox where inconsistent speeds require the player to constantly adjust the CPU cycles for it to remain playable. Pretty poor experience.

Over the past week I discovered a PC emulator called PCem - https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/

It emulates early PCs e.g. 286, 386 up to early pentiums. You can install DOS as well as Win95 in order to play games!

How would this differ to DosBox? Well the aim is to emulate the machine and not just DOS. So this includes accurate speeds and even goes as far as emulating BIOS!

Anyway I spent a little while setting this up today and from playing with different CPUs between 386 and 486 machines, I can verify what has been said. WC1 has no speed lock and as your the computer gets more powerful, the more unplayable it becomes.

I've settled on an Intel 486 SX 16MHz. Seems pretty smooth throughout. It does get slower/jerky when the missions get busy (asteroids plus 4 or so ships) but not the unplayable experience you get with DosBox.

I say potential solution because I haven't fully tested the game yet. Anyone else with some old saved game files want to help out and give it a try?

I could write a setup tutorial but theres a lots out there if you google. Also it requires BIOS roms, copies of DOS and/or Win95 which I'm sure aren't allowed to be posted here.

Btw, I am new here. I own all WC games on GOG but I've only ever played WC1, so I'm not exactly a fan (yet). I started it about 4 years ago but gave up because of the speed problems in DosBox. Hopefully one day I can play through all games in the series.
 
Welcome!
It's always great to hear about new ways to play the authentic DOS experience :)

As you might be aware of - or not - Kilrathi Saga was a collection of Wing Commander games, re-released as native Windows DirectX games.
Plus, Wing Commander 1 Kilrathi Saga version was released for free.
It's available for download here: http://download.wcnews.com/files/wing1/wc_pcgamer.zip
So, it's a Windows native binary, that means it's more or less optimized for PCs of any speed.

It doesn't come without bugs and some (unintended) differences to the original DOS version, though.
Stinger spent great effort on fixing most of these.
You'll find more on that here: https://www.wcnews.com/chatzone/threads/introducing-wcdx-kilrathi-saga-for-modern-windows.27685/

So, I think for the best (ie most authentic) WC1 experience today, you should go with the free WC1 download and Stinger's fixes.

I'd love to hear your opinion on how the PCem experience compares to Stinger's wcdx.
 
Wow, I'm glad I stumbled across this website, and this post.

I have the GOG version of 1 and 2, but playability is an issue. Back in the day I had an underpowered 286 PC and while the gameplay was less that ideal, it was fairly consistent. I had a lot of problems getting consistent performance from DOSbox.

I will try the download version and see how it compares.

delMar, do you think it's worth hunting down a copy of the Kilrathi Saga? The free download for the first game is great, but I also really enjoyed the second and third games. I do own the 2nd game from GOG, but haven't played it yet. I assume it has the same issues. I still have my original copy of 3, 4, and Prophecy, which I *think* will still work under Windows 10. Gotta check it out this weekend, now I'm curious.
 
@WallyWest WC2 comes with a frame rate cap ootb. so it will run much smoother than WC1 does without going too fast.

So, IMHO WC2 DOS plays much better on today's machines.

If you give it a try, let me know what you think.
 
Oh, ha, I was under the impression it had the same problem. Good news then, from the little bit I fooled around with WC2 last night it seemed to run fine. I'm going to install the PC Gamer version of WC1 with the fixes from Stinger's thread and see how that goes this weekend.

Thanks for the info.
 
Actually, Secret Missions 2 for Wing Commander introduced the fps cap. But as it's a separate binary, WC1 and SM1 don't benefit, unfortunately.
 
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