(originally posted in another subforum accidentally)

(EDIT: For the record, I'm running a WinXP Pro machine using a P4 at 2.8GHz)

Okay, so I'm trying to get this DOS game working by the name of Azrael's Tear.

It runs too choppy under DOSBox, so yeah, I've tried that already.

I managed to run it okay under WinXP by using VDMsound and dgvesa, except now it runs too fast. This is a problem I totally anticipated, so I took a look at speedset, packaged with VDMS.

The issue is that speedset, when running and set to anything below, say, -20, causes the game to just stop even attempting to load. As in, the exe I'm running after speedset will obviously start loading since it starts printing some diagnostic messages or whatnot that it usually prints before the game starts, but then it'll just... stop. So I'll be staring at the command prompt window, with the cursor blinking at, say, the end of a line of text. The program obviously hasn't terminated, since I'm not getting a prompt for a new command.

Of course, if I run it with speedset set to, say, -20 (or anything else closer to 0), it's fine.

Running the game in superfast mode like this is mostly playable, but some things just plain look strange, and I swear the MIDI is skipping notes. It's one of those old games where the gameplay itself pretty much runs as fast as your computer will do so, so I need SOMETHING to mess with it, but speedset isn't really doing the trick here. Is there some known issue with speedset that I'm encountering?

So I'm wondering:
How does speedset even work? I mean, I know it purports to slow down/speed up games, but I have no idea how it does this, especially the "speed up" part, which sorta baffles me.
Also, is there another slowdown utility I could use? I tried using CPUKiller 3, but that turned out to be some kind of trash for this application, since all it did was make the game run damn near as fast as before, but in an unplayably choppy/jittery manner.