I seems that whenever there are 3 or more fighters on my screen at the same time my FPS takes a big hit until there is less clutter flying around in front of me. So basically my question is whether or not there is a way to stabilize my frame rate.

I've tried tinkering with the cycle count but no matter how high or low i set it the frame rate is still very inconsistent when getting into big dogfights.

I'm not expect a consistent 60 fps count, but I don't remember the fps being all over the place when i played the games years ago.

Any help would be much appreciated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6J_cq--SWA

Not much you can do about this.

Our minds remember things better than they actually were. Chances the games was quite slow to begin with and got even slower during heavy scenes.

I have real 386 and 486 hardware and the game is simply programmed poorly when it comes to speed.

However, starting with the second mission pack of Wing Commander you can change the frame delay and frame duration. I show this in my video. So on a fast computer you can put a cap on frames and have a smoother experience.

But WC1 and the first mission pack there is little you can do apart from playing the cycle up and down game.

I'm pretty sure the old Kilrathi Saga Windows version didn't have the crazy slowdown problems. Unfortunately it had its own problems with things like some of the background starfield stuff being missing, and I'd imagine it'd be a major pain in the rump to get running on a modern version of Windows.

Something you can do with the DOS version in DosBox that you can't on the actual hardware is adjusting the CPU cycles. Basically you can dynamically speed up and slow down the emulated machine by pressing ctrl+F12 and F11 (or maybe F11 and F10, can't remember offhand). On my laptop, for example, 7000 cycles is a pretty good general purpose setting, but I'll raise it sometimes for especially busy missions.