Three Engines, Three Numbers — and a Match Clock That Runs Four Percent Fast
· 9 min read
Run Tiberian Sun headless on a modern machine and it holds about thirty frames a second, the rate it was always meant to run at. Run Red Alert 2 the same way, on the same machine, in the same minute, and it runs about six hundred and fifty — roughly twenty times too fast, finishing a skirmish before you can read the loading screen.
Same hardware. Same emulation layer. Same kind of match. Two engines from the same lineage, one of them apparently missing a brake.
Last week we found the brake. It was there all along.