It has been a while since the last update but unfortunately, I did not have much time left recently to work on my retro systems.
Anyhow, I have been playing The Dig for a while and managed to find a part of the game that seems to be quite resource demanding. It is where you have to move three glowing rods to certain positions to make a crystal glow again in order to activate energy for a part of the tram system. While moving a rod around the background music will begin stuttering after some time (until you release the mouse button and therefore kill the "rod-moving" sound effect). With less cycles (like on my 1.1GHz Coppermine) this happens pretty quickly (less than 30s).
I transferred the savegame to the system I built for DOSBox several years ago (Pentium G2030, semi-passively cooled, running Windows XP SP2) and tried to reproduce the issue. Starting with 20k cycles (equivalent to what is running on the 1.1GHz Coppermine), I could hear the same thing pretty fast, so it is reproducible. The more cycles I make available the longer it takes for the issue to occur, until it no longer occurs for as long as one would reasonably be holding a mouse button in this sequence of the game (this is with ~40k cycles, I tested with up to 100k cycles).
This is a very small sequence within the game, and I haven't encountered any other issues so far. However, if I were to decide to get rid of this issue, it would require a 100% increase in CPU cycles, at least. This cannot be achieved by upgrading to a 1.4GHz Tualatin Celeron (which only offers a ~27% increase in clock rate over the Coppermine)...
I tested running The Dig directly in Windows (I have a CD-ROM that contains a Windows executable). It works fine, but the scaler/filter they applied to upscale the image is unacceptable (and I didn't find a way to get rid of that)... So, no way around DOSBox.
I have not made a final decision yet, but if this issue keeps bugging me I'll have to reconfigure Retro 1 again. There is no way of getting this many CPU cycles out of the current system platform.