I bought WC1 + WC2 from...well, what waste of money.

Both games look very cool for its time, but thats not the problem.
DOSbox doesn´t emulate they well. The games do not work well on modern machines as they were supposed to be.

The gameplay is lagged, and you have to ajust cycles all the time, no fun...gameplay is completely broken for a space shooter

GOG shoud take out this game of its catalogy because they do not work well in a modern machine. I like gog a lot but the disappointed me this time

something is wrong with your setup or machine then, as I've played WC 1 & 2, both my originals and the GOG version, in DosBox and they played great. No issues at all.

ncarty is right, they work fine for me on my machine as well, I even managed to get the first expantion for WC1 to work lol.

Fabiolinks you should try and adjust the settings/ on your machine before blaming the game/gog, after all other people don't have the same problems, so the problem must be with your system.

Ditto. I have played both WC II and Privateer from GOG on the EeePC and it works just fine.

Well, I do have to change the cycles somewhat depending on whether I'm fighting a wing of Kilrathi in an asteroid field or just a lone kitty in open space.

I haven't tried WC2 yet, but WC1 is also a waste of money here. Speed is never right; at times, it's unplayable because it's too slow, and then it's unplayable because it's too fast.

I've tried many different DosBox configurations, none worked. Searching on the internet you'll see that it's a know problem in modern systems, they just won't play WC1 fine. In fact, I'm pretty curious about your systems, guys... it's the first time I find people who are able to play WC1 at normal speed on modern computers. Are you sure you're talking about the first WC?

Yep for me BOTH WC1 and 2 AND Privateer work just fine.

Ofcourse my system is not "BAND" new (in fact its about 6 years old, my specs are:

Intel Core2 QuadCPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
4GB Ram
ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series
Soundblaster X-FI

and still have Vista.

Mine is a few years old too:

Intel Core2Duo E8400 @ 3.0Ghz
Gigabyte EP35C-DS3R motherboard
4GB Corsair DDR2-800 (2 x2GB in dual channel mode)
160GB 8MB Cache & 750GB 32MB Cache Western Digital SATA 300
HIS Radeon HD 6870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5
Logitech Bluetooth Wave Keyboard and Mouse.
750W Corsair Power Supply

I doubt the difference between my machine and something just bought is enough to make it work on mine and not on the new one though.

I do adjust the cycles sometimes during the game though. I haven't had to do it just because of too many fighters or anything, more just to speed up some of the slow parts. The game probably doesn't play exactly like it did back when it was released (I've noticed that the mouth movements are hilariously fast during dialogue scenes), but its definitely playable. Never had any problems with the missions themselves.

I finished the WC1 a few months ago and played a bit of WC2 before getting distracted. I still have it installed I think. When I get home tonight, I'll check it out and post my config file if it is still there.

I hate to say it, but if anyone expects DosBox to perfectly emulate the experience of playing these games in MSDos on 286/386/486's, they are probably going to be disappointed. There are some things that DosBox just doesn't handle properly (the screen shaking at the beginning of Ultima VII comes to mind).

If you really want to get these games to work exactly as they did (or as close as possible without buying a 15 year old PC), you could try installing MS-DOS in a virtual box and then using MoSlo to crank down the CPU's. You'd still have to visualize all the hardware to make it work, so it would be a pain, but it would be doable. VirtualBox or VirtualPC seem like the best way to go. Here's a link on how a guy got Dos 6.22 running in VirtualPC for games: http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=19421

Looked last night and it appears I lost my installs when my hard drive crashed a while back. I'll see if I can get them running again and post the config files.

WC1 and 2 don't require much in the way of system resources... Newer versions of dosbox though default to auto core and cycle settings. I would really recommend editing your dosbox config and switching to either Dynamic core or even Normal core for these games and then choose a fixed cycle setting... You may still experience some slowdown if you have the cycle setting a little low but you won't necessarily get the huge fluctuations you might with the Auto setting.

I've heard these games had fluctuating speeds back in the day. I think it's an engine problem and not a DOSBox issue. If you can find the Kilrathi Saga versions, they run at a stable speed.

Nothing is wrong with my machine. I have been testing the game in different machines, and I can say the game is lagged. I dont know if these inssues are natural of the game, probably it is.

I downloaded yesterday the win 95 Wing Commander: The Kilrathi Saga, wich has no problems of lagg, but since its a abandware site the game was missing things like music.

GOG should use the Kilrathi Saga version as base and fix WC 1+2

I have some of the same problems with the first game. Having to adjust cycles depending on how many enemies are on screen is very awkward. Dogfights with 4-5 opponents that are managable at 5000 cycles become impossible when only one opponent is left - they just juke spastically all over the place at breakneck speed until I lower the emulation rate. The other major problem I've had is that trying to manoeuvre a fighter with the keyboard is utterly broken in dosbox emulation for some reason. The Kilrathi Saga version doesn't suffer these issues, but it has other issues of its own. There are other problems as well, like the mouse controls being clumsy and the game refusing to let you shoot at opponents in an asteroid field due to rendering limitations, but those were present in the game at release.

All in all I agree, the game does not perform well at all. The missing expansions are problematic too as they include a lot of important plot, and going from the first game to the second without playing the secret missions means you lose out on a huge chunk of the narrative. Probably my most disappointing experience with GOG so far, everything else I've bought has been quite good.