gerwin wrote:

found disabling the L1 cache has too much of a slowdown effect for most Dos games. Disabling the L2 cache on the other hand does not slowdown these games much. So neither seems useful, unless I do the same on a much faster system (disable L1), or much slower system (disable L2). Unfortunately my Athlon system seems unable to disable the L1 cache with the BIOS setting 'disable internal cache', as it remains way too fast.

I just managed to disable the L1 cache on my AMD Athlon system with the attached Dos utility. Found it Here. Unlike some similar tools, this actually works on both my Athlon and Pentium III system. In benchmarks the Pentium scores like a 386DX-20/387, the Athlon scores like a 486DX-33. 😀. I haven't tried it in actual games yet.

archsan wrote:

*re:WC1 & WC2. Supposedly non-speed-sensitive WC1 & WC2 release can be found in the Kilrathi Saga package, made to run on Windows 95. Has anyone tried this on a much faster machine than 486?

I have a PC Gamer July 2000 disk, it comes with the Kilrathi Saga version of WC1, and it works splendidly on my C2D 2.8ghz machine running windows XP... 🤣... dig that!

I actually missed this discussion. Shame on me.

As a suggestion: If a "Cache Disable Program" crashes your PC, try running it in your autoexec prior to moving stuff into the UMBs ort try it first with emm386 without any options. I found that UMB active progs can crash the disablement program.

I found Wing Commander to do fine with a P3-800 without L1. The Athlon XP-M has the great advantage to be adjustable in speed - if you are lucky, you can do this in you bios. With cache off and a speed range from 300MHz to 2200MHz and more, you can hit the speed of basically any old machine you like. I have yet to find a Mobo, which supports the extended multipliers in bios and offers an Isa slot.

Edit: "Magic the Gathering" is a (great) Windows game that is speed sensitive on the strategic map of shandalar.

There is a fairly important qustion for retro PC design: If you make a win98 PC, what should it clock down to? Will 300MHz be slow enough? Or would you need 133MHz?

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

A lot of them can probably be fixed with a slow graphics card, too.

What options do we have to slow an AGP card down?