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Wing Commander (1990) on Pentium II : Is a 26-Second Intro Ideal? Plus, Debris Animation Query

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First post, by chenke

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This morning, I played the DOS game Wing Commander (1990) on a Pentium II MMX 400 computer with a Roland MT-32 (FW1.07) MIDI device. The Pentium II MMX 400 has its L1 cache disabled, but the L2 cache remains enabled. I recorded a video of the game's intro (twice) and the intro of the first mission. I’d like to ask everyone: is my current game speed at the Sweet Point?
https://youtu.be/WjEs8080ZXY?si=P2vrKl9ys0g1hiYT

I came across this website , which states,

if the composer animation, Origin logo, and fireworks are all over in about 25 seconds, you need to slow down your PC!

I’m not sure how he calculated the time. Does the timing start when the band first appears on screen with sound? I timed my recording, and the band intro took about 26 seconds. Is this optimal? The website author mentioned he aimed to slow it down to 28 seconds, which I think might be a bit slow.

There’s also an interesting detail: when I recorded the game intro twice, I noticed a difference. As the Wing Commander logo zooms in from far to near, a large piece of spaceship debris seemed to lag behind in one recording. This debris is supposed to appear alongside the logo, zooming in together, but in the other recording (and many of my previous tests), this didn’t happen. What could be the reason for this? Are the debris in the game intro randomly generated or computed in real-time?

The attachment Debris_1.JPG is no longer available
The attachment Debris_2.JPG is no longer available
The attachment Debris_3.JPG is no longer available

Here’s my retro PC configuration:
• Intel Pentium II 400 MHz SL2S7 (unlocked, can be underclocked to 200 MHz)
• 256MB*2 PC133 SDRAM
• Intel 440BX motherboard (MS-6199 VER2)
• nVIDIA Quadro FX 500 AGP
• S3 Trio64V2/DX 86C775
• Gainward Dragon 3000 12MB Voodoo2*2 SLi
• Sound Blaster Live!
• Roland MPU401/AT
• Sound Blaster 16 CT2910 npnp
• IBM Joystick 76H1571
• Microsoft MS-DOS 6.22

Thank you for your help!

Reply 1 of 3, by megatron-uk

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It looks reasonable... perhaps a little on the fast side, but not to the extent of being unplayable. Honestly you'll get a better feel by playing the simulator though - using the afterburner and flying past the enemy ships.

The combat engine *does* speed up and slow down quite significantly though, depending on the amount of content, so it's never perfect all of the time.

My collection database and technical wiki:
https://www.target-earth.net

Reply 2 of 3, by megatron-uk

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Here's the intro (and some of the flight sim gameplay) on my 20MHz 286 machine... which plays the game really rather well and around the same speed intro/animations as your L1-cache disabled system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD18i0whLgU

But you can see in the sim dogfights that when you start to get 2 or 3 enemies simultaneously the framerate drops.
With a mid-to-high end 386 it would be fairly similar in terms of animation speed, but the combat gameplay shouldn't dip as much (it will still speed up and slow down though - there's no way to work around that).

Give it a go, it looks perfectly playable to me.

My collection database and technical wiki:
https://www.target-earth.net

Reply 3 of 3, by chenke

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megatron-uk wrote on 2025-03-09, 09:28:
Here's the intro (and some of the flight sim gameplay) on my 20MHz 286 machine... which plays the game really rather well and ar […]
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Here's the intro (and some of the flight sim gameplay) on my 20MHz 286 machine... which plays the game really rather well and around the same speed intro/animations as your L1-cache disabled system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD18i0whLgU

But you can see in the sim dogfights that when you start to get 2 or 3 enemies simultaneously the framerate drops.
With a mid-to-high end 386 it would be fairly similar in terms of animation speed, but the combat gameplay shouldn't dip as much (it will still speed up and slow down though - there's no way to work around that).

Give it a go, it looks perfectly playable to me.

Thank you for your 286 20MHz video! I also watched Phil's 386DX25 video, and after comparing them, I couldn’t really feel any significant generational difference between the 386 and 286—Wing Commander didn’t feel noticeably faster on the 386DX25. Here’s the link to Phil’s 386DX25 video for reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxMt-bIm5bk

On the other hand, in Phil’s 386DX33 video, the speed was noticeably improved, especially in the animation of running to the hangar before the first mission. You can check it out here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6T0qd-A6WU

As for my own video with a Pentium II 400MHz (with L1 cache disabled), the frame rate of Wing Commander seems to fall somewhere between the 386DX25 (or the 286 20MHz) and the 386DX33.

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