Stinger's WCDX patch streamlined and fixed a lot of minor annoyances with Kilrathi Saga WC1, and even improved the graphics rendering and compatibility with newer versions of Windows. There is an early, playable version of the patch that fixes some of the issues plaguing the Wing 2 port, but getting KS WC2 up to the same level of refinement is proving to be a major undertaking. In a forums post, Stinger provides some insight into one strange aspect of the Windows port, namely its framerate. He also explains how this ties into the infamous "disembodied cockpit" glitch.
One interesting conundrum: Fixing cut scene frame rates. In KS WC2, the game will change the frame rate of a cut scene as it is playing depending on whether or not there is any speech. If there's a voice, the frame rate is set relatively low in order to stay synchronized with the audio playback (I can't remember the exact number offhand, but something like 25 fps); if there's no speech, the frame rate is set all the way up at 75! You can see this by just how fast the debris animations are playing in the space backdrops. I have no idea why the devs chose such a high frame rate, but it causes a lot of problems; for instance, in some of the in-flight briefings, the player's ship animates too far into the frame and you can see the entire sprite -- just the nose and cockpit of a fighter completely detached from the rest of its body. To correct for some of these issues, the devs changed some of the timings for scene duration and so forth, but the result is pretty bad. I'd like to set a fixed frame rate for animations, but I can't do that without patching game data, and that's a big dark hole I haven't wanted to crawl down into just yet. To get an idea of the scale of the problem, try comparing the gamedat folders from your GOG install with your KS install. Some of those changes I may want to keep; some (probably most) I'd want to revert. But to know what needs changing, I first need to figure out what all that data means.
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