In a Pentium 200 MMX Aladdin has the same terrible tearing as in DOSBox.

I use a 60 Hz LCD Monitor, I'm not sure about how it looks in a CRT.

Aladdin tears on a CRT monitor as well.

A few years back, I've played it on a Pentium MMX 166 and a Celeron 466. The tearing was present on both systems.

Maybe we weren't paying enough attention at the time, but when I played Aladdin on a 486DX2-66Mhz on a 14" Daewoo monitor I don't remember having a problem like that.

Spent a few hours trying to decompile Aladdin.exe with Reko Decompiler to see what its logic might be.

I was able to identify a couple of functions based on their VGA I/O port access patterns:

and find what looks like could be the main loop:

The game does modify the VGA Display Start registers on each iteration (I think it uses it for double-buffering and not for hardware scrolling), and it looks to be unsynchronized with vblank, but after that I got kinda stuck trying to fight against the tool when attempting to figure out what the global data could be. These tools are really not my expertise area.. 😁

Also tried Ghidra, but for some reason it looks like it doesn't decompile all the functions in the executable, and I got lost trying to find the same functions with that tool.

It would be interesting to get to modify the code, e.g. to patch calling to set the Display Start function synchronized with the wait for vblank function.. but no idea if that would be even possible.

it seems to be a problem with rushed console ports of the time, as opposed to games purely built for PC, even gex as an early win95 title has tearing. but then there were cases like the raven games having tearing despite doom literally releasing before and showing how this is done properly, so i think some devs simply didn't care about this issue.