Great Hierophant wrote:

Wing Commander (DOS) is one of those games that is designed to run on a small "sweet spot" of computers. I think it runs best on 386 machines, but which ones? There are 386s at 16, 20, 25, 33 and 40MHz. They also come in the 32-bit DX variety and the 16-bit SX variety. Which one is best for this game and other games of similar vintage?

Also, I would think that many other games that suffer from speed problems on faster machines would do very well on a system of similar vintage. Which processor would you select and why?

Have tried on the following 386 configurations:

386DX 25mhz non cache: a bit sluggish but okay
386DX 25mhz with 64k cacjhe: runs at perfect speed
386DX 33mhz with 128k cache: runs a bit too fast but barely noticeable
386DX 33mhz with 64k cache: same as above
386SX 16mhz: runs too slow

The game makers at Origin must have been in a rush when they released this game...
Wing Commander 2 doesn't suffer from speed problems as much as WC 1 does.
Privateer suffers from sound problems like crackling noises and squeeks on too fast PC's
Wing Commander 3 doesn't like too fast cd-rom players or controllers...the game has a tedency to crash then...you even get a warning when installing the game that your cd-rom is too fast and that you might run into trouble

😵

my 386sx 16mhz ran it well iirc, plus it had no issues with wc2

Forgot to add it ran too fast on my 386DX 40mhz 128k cache machine

On my 486DX 40mhz in non turbo mode it runs on perfect speed

What if I just disable the caches?
I'll have to try wing commander on that because yea 🤣

I completed the game with 40Mhz 386, not sure about how much cache.

leileilol wrote:

What if I just disable the caches?
I'll have to try wing commander on that because yea 🤣

It will run too choppy then.... 😜

Runs just fine on a 486/66 with the internal cache disabled (resulting in ~386/25 speed). Every time this comes up, it makes me think someone has a bunch of 386s they're trying to inflate the value of... 🙄

You know what's strange? I played WC1 on a 486DX2 50 and don't remember having problems...... Maybe the Trident video card saved me? 😀

Time to make some vids running the game on different machines I got to show the speed difference...I recently got a digital camcorder I've hardly used so far 😁

Wing Commander is more a benchmark for graphics card speed than for CPU speed.