The game loads — and runs like it is on fast-forward. Characters sprint at impossible speed, timers drain in seconds, a turn-based classic plays like an action game. Or the reverse: everything crawls in slow motion. Speed problems are the third classic DxWnd use case after windowing and colours, because DxWnd ships a documented feature made for exactly this: Time Stretching, found in a profile’s Timing settings. This guide explains why old games lose their sense of time on modern hardware, what time stretching does, and how to dial a game back to the speed its designers intended.
Why Old Games Run at the Wrong Speed
Many classic games were written against hardware with a known, fixed speed. Their timing logic assumed a CPU of a certain quickness, or tied game logic directly to how fast frames could be drawn — a reasonable shortcut when every machine the game would meet was roughly as fast as every other. Your modern PC breaks the contract from both directions. A CPU thousands of times faster executes game logic at absurd rates if nothing paces it, so the simulation sprints. And a game that renders as fast as the hardware allows can produce hundreds of frames per second, animating everything at that multiple of the intended speed. The opposite failure exists too: a game that waits on timing mechanisms modern systems handle differently can drag. Either way, the game is not misbehaving — it is faithfully running timing code written for a vanished machine.
This is related to, but not identical with, the frame-rate question. A game can render at a well-behaved frame rate while its internal clock runs fast, or render frantically while its logic stays sane. That distinction is why “limit the FPS” advice sometimes fixes a too-fast game and sometimes does nothing at all: it depends which clock the game obeys.
What Time Stretching Does
DxWnd’s Time Stretching intervenes in the game’s sense of time itself. Conceptually it is a multiplier applied to the clock the game reads: at a factor below 1.0, time inside the game passes more slowly than real time — the correction for games running too fast; above 1.0, it passes more quickly, for games that drag. Because DxWnd sits between the game and the system calls that report time, it can present the game with a slowed or quickened clock while the rest of your system runs normally. It is a per-profile setting, on the Timing side of the game’s DxWnd profile, so each game carries its own correction and your other titles are unaffected. Our main tutorial shows where profile settings live if this is your first time editing one.
How to Dial In a Value
- Start from how wrong the speed feels. If the game plays at roughly double speed, you need roughly half the time rate; if it is unplayably frantic, the factor is larger. There is no measurement tool needed — your estimate sets the first trial.
- Change the Timing settings in small steps. Adjust the time-stretching factor, launch the game, and play a section you know well. A familiar sequence — a race’s first lap, a strategy game’s turn timer, a character’s walk cycle — is your speedometer.
- Iterate two or three times. Speed correction converges quickly: halve, test, refine. Most players land within a couple of adjustments on a value that feels like the game they remember.
- Save the profile. DxWnd stores the profile in
dxwnd.ini, so the correction is waiting next session. The search was per-game; so is the answer.
The Soundtrack Clue
One observation helps you tell which clock a game obeys: listen to its music. Audio is often clocked independently of game logic — music files and CD audio tracks play at their real duration regardless of how fast the simulation runs. So a game whose soundtrack plays at the correct, familiar tempo while the on-screen action races is telling you its logic clock is the broken one, which is precisely the clock time stretching adjusts. Conversely, if music, speech and action are all sped up together like a chipmunk recording, the game’s whole presentation is frame-driven, and you should expect the correction to need a different — usually stronger — adjustment, possibly combined with limiting how fast the game is allowed to render. Either way, the soundtrack is a free diagnostic: it tells you what kind of too-fast you have before you change a single setting.
Honest Limits
There is no universal number we can print here, and any guide that names one correct value for all games is guessing. The right factor depends on how the specific game measures time, and two games from the same year can need different treatment — one obeys its clock, the other its frame rate, and time stretching reaches the first kind more directly than the second. Some titles also mix clocks: movies play at one rate, gameplay at another, so a value that perfects one can leave the other slightly off, and you choose the compromise that favours gameplay. Community .dxw profiles occasionally include a tested value for a specific game, which is worth trying before your own experiments; the project’s SourceForge forum is where those live. And if a game’s speed problem arrives together with other symptoms — a window that will not form, colours gone wrong — fix the windowing first via the troubleshooting hub: timing is a refinement, applied to a game that basically works. Windows 11 players may also recognise this symptom from our Windows 11 guide, where the too-fast game is one of the standard misbehaviours the platform causes.