In my run below, I get a 12:02 as the final time. 18 seconds behind the record. Where did I lose all this time you ask? Well…I don’t know myself. Sure, I lost maybe around 5 seconds on Nue and 1 second in 3-1, but I gained about that same amount of time in other stages (1-2, 1-4, and 1-7 especially) so it should’ve evened out in the end to be AT LEAST within 5 seconds of the world record, but I’m nowhere close. My theory, based off of a forum post from the past, is that this game runs faster on Windows 7.

I tried messing with my graphics settings, enabling triple buffering, adaptive vsync, disabling every graphical enhancement, highest performance over quality, etc, to minimal effect. Even Windows 7 compatibility mode is no help! Achieving a 1:29 RTA time at the end of 1-3 is simply impossible without an old operating system, or, who knows, maybe even older hardware. This is highly unfortunate because I was looking forward to competing against past times, but unless something is done to address this inexplicable gap, there is little incentive to be subject to such an unfair disadvantage.