mothergoose729 wrote on 2022-04-12, 22:00:
In the early 90's most games were not speed sensitive, but those that were generally expected 386 class performance. A Pentium 1 is roughly similar to a 386DX33 with L1 cache disable.
actually there's more speed sensitive DOS games than people think, even past the early 90s and including major releases. an interesting case is magic carpet, which came out in late 1994. say you had a top-end machine right from that time, a pentium 90 or 100, the game would run way too fast in VGA mode but SVGA would be a slideshow. this is exactly mentioned in this discussion from back in the day: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.ibm.pc.g … /c/SU0h8PA38M4/
so if your machine didn't have the correct settings for disabling L1 but leaving L2 enabled in the BIOS, which OEM systems generally didn't, your only option was to play in SVGA with shrinking the screen size a lot+disabling detail; hardly a good experience. i think other bullfrog releases like syndicate wars are in that same boat.
then there's descent, which feels exactly the right speed to me in VGA on a 430NX P90, but put it on a faster pentium and you might be stuck fiddling with some of those intermediate modes with distorted HUD text and missing cockpit graphics.
so you don't even need to go pre-pentium era at all to find problematic games.