Hurt the processor? It hurts the processor to run at higher temperatures (due to speed and/or voltage) than it is designed for. There is no risk in running slower. See it as a road: you have a speed limit. Exceed it and you might crash and possibly damage stuff. Drive slower and... it just takes longer to get where you're going.

Note that some P2 CPUs are multiplier locked so might ignore anything you set there anyway, but if you have a P2-300 Klamath it's likely unlocked and can go down to 2x (i.e. 133MHz)

As for AGP - if you don't have fancy drivers, AGP is just PCI running a bit faster, and DOS only uses BIOS/VESA calls. So an AGP card will work as a (fast) dumb framebuffer for DOS just as well as a PCI card.

But...

Ultima VII Black Gate? On a P2?

This is one of the most difficult games to get to run on non-period hardware:
- it needs approximately 386DX-40 / 486-33 speeds to work, and does not have a frame limiter so will be insanely fast on much faster CPUs
- it has its own very eccentric memory manager (Voodoo memory manager) that doesn't let you use UMBs, so conventional memory is under pressure. That also rules out any sound cards that need TSRs to run
- the way the Voodoo memory manager puts the system into Unreal mode re-enables L1 cache if you had turned it off to slow the system down...

There are frame limiter patches, but YMMV. If there was ever a reason for a late 386/early 486 build, this game is it. Added bonus: you can also run things like Wing Commander and Ultima Underworld fine on it.

I had it running right on a 486dx at 120 mhzwhen I was a kid , so the speed would be close, The bios on this board has the abilty to disable the L1 cache and all shadow rom regions. It is worth the shot. I can always get this game to run and the guardian talking, but the background effects go crazy fast. There is also another weird setting in this bios , throttle processor 1 to 100% in power management would this help any to slow the mahine down, or is it only for idle power states ?

Paladin PIP wrote on 2025-05-26, 21:45:

This is the first bios that I have seen a bios with cpu speed settings like this , and I have seen a lot of bios setups. This one is fron 1999, there is no multiplier by the speed setting and no jumpers on the board. It goes from 133 to 466mhz and sits at 300 right now. If I lower it to 133 to match the speed of Ultima Black Gate and games in that era will it hurt the processor ? Some sites say it is ok but I'm cautious and don't believe everything. I know going higher would hurt it, but I've never tried to reduce processor speed on purpose. What would be the effect of doing this ? This is Micronics Diamond C300 board and has an agp card. Would the video card stop working if the speed goes too low ? I didn't even know Dos could use AGP vvideo cards.

P2s had working multipliers. It must have been an early softmenu

As for throttling... The most likely explanation is deliberately signalling prochot (processor hot) which had configurable levels of sleeping the cpu to help it cool down.

I thought it maxed out at 75% though
Quite a fancy bios.

It is the most elaborate bios I have ever seen in my long life, even the sections headings and wording are lined up like it came straight out of a word processor.