I was hoping someone could maybe explain what causes a game like Crusader to run worse than Quake in DosBox? Crusader was targeting mid-range 486s in its time while Quake was a Pentium-class game. Crusader seems to run almost as well with Normal core as Dynx86.

Is this caused by the Phar Lap 286 16-bit extender they used? Is this a case of self-modifying code?

I am just curious about the challenges that an emulator author faces getting things going smoothly in the case of these quirky DOS games.

edit: It occurred to me a few hours ago that Crusader is a 640x480 game while I always test Quake in standard 320x200. So I wonder if that's a big part of the performance difference. It isn't on real hardware.....