wc2 cutscenes too fast on old comp(?)

BibbDoo

Rear Admiral
Hello all,

I just spent the last 3 hours resurrecting an old pentium 133 dos based system for the sole purpose of playing wc 1 and 2. Oh what a joy it was to hear that music once again. Its been at least 5 years since I've been able to properly play these games and I cannot wait to get started.

Unfortunately, I'm having a bit of trouble. In Wing COmmander 2, the game seems to play just fine, but all of the cinematic sequences go WAY too fast to be understandable. This is pretty much the entire reason why i went to the trouble of setting up an old computer to play the game on. Imagine my disappointment.

As I mentnioned above, the system is running a pentium 133 cpu and has 32mb of ram. I would have prefered to use a 486 for this, but a p133 was all i had available. Apparently its just not slow enough to play the game properly.

Does anyone know of a way to slow down just the cinematics? Any fixes or patches around to make wc2 playable on a "not quite old enough yet cetrainly not newish" computer?

Thanks for any help you can render!
-joe
 
Moslo seems to be working pretty well, thanks for the advice.

The only trouble I have now (aside from wc1 still being too fast) is the annoying stuttering that moslo seems to be causing. The controls do not feel very smooth at all. Its not that big of a deal, but definately noticable. Any suggestions how I can smooth things out with moslo?

Thanks again for the help!
 
The alternative to moslo back in the day was disabling the internal and/or external CPU cache. This will be an option in the BIOS. I forget which one, but one of them causes crippling slowness and the other causes the speed to halve. This was a smoother slowdown than moslo provided, though you had a lot less ability to customize exactly which speed you wanted. But cutting a P133 in half would be just about right for Wing Commander 2. WC1 would want that cut by a good 3/4ths though.

DOSBox also has some decent slowdown stuff built right into the program. If you go back to your regular computer and give it a try, that might end up being better.
 
I originally started by playing around with dosbox. After fighting with it for about a day, I finally got it to work more or less correctly. The game seems to run just fine, however I can't seem to get a decent enough frameskip/cpu cycle balance to allow me to play without skipping sound and control. The best I've gotten is pretty much the exact same level that I get out of moslo, lol. Again, it's playable, but not quite as good as I'd like, y'know?

I'll try out the bios cache settings. Hopefully that'll give me what I'm looking for. If not, I think I'll just have to go ahead and find an actual 486 to relive the memories :)
 
Back
Top