I got Descent to run and the performance is much better than I would have expected. Expecting low performance I started out with the lowest settings... but seeing it running so well I tried the highest settings and it still runs well. Highest settings does lower the frame-rate a bit though.
To get it to run I used the HX DOS Extender 2.18:
https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/HX
It requires some extra DLLs and such and I collected all of that in this VHD:
http://dionysus.dk/software/DOS/FreeDOS-1.3-RC3.vhd.7z
But in the video I copied it to a VHD running DOS 7.1 from Windows 98.
A video of it running:
https://youtu.be/oll7dvzDhbQ
I compiled the source from the dev branch myself, so it includes an addition with "Instruction Fetch path improved:". But its been a few days since I tried running Descent and I just got the idea to try to use the HX DOS extender under something other than FreeDOS to see if it would then run and it did.
Descent
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rhester72
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Re: Descent
Wasn't Descent originally on DOS? Have you tried it to see how it fares against DirectX? (I was somewhat astonished back in the day to see DirectX performance _exceed_ that of bare metal in some cases.)
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Caldor
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Re: Descent
Yes, this is just a workaround fix of a problem the cache cores seems to have. They are unable to run a few games that should run in DOS like Descent and Warcraft II. Warcraft II will run very well under Windows, and it will run using the method I used here, but Warcraft II ends up having some annoying sound issues using the HX DOS Extender solution. With Descent though, it will not run in Windows, it always crashes. It is a DOS game, but I remember playing this game in Windows back in the day. We even had LANs at our school where we had the computers run the game in Windows. But here it crashes when it is done loading. With the HX DOS Extender, it loads the game as we see in the video, and then the game runs very well.
I am pretty sure its just part of what the HX DOS extender does that makes Descent work. So I am thinking there are other solutions than this HX DOS extender.