The price for gaming is to be on the bleeding edge of technology. It used to be that computers had to be upgraded every six months. I mean, it was practically mandatory. Really. It was insane. I once purchased Wing Commander 1 & 2 for a Pentium1 computer & I was pretty happy about it. I brought it home & at first I was playing this weird colorful arcade game that was going like 10 times as fast as it should have been going. After awhile, I realized, this isn’t an arcade game within the game, THIS IS THE GAME!!! Today, the same thing is happening with Double & quad cores. I have a lot of trouble playing Thief3 because of my OVERPOWERED computer. But technology isn’t going to just wait because we’re done making stuff.
Hmm.... perhaps you should try setting processor affinity to one core so the timing of the game isn't thrown off by multi-cores. Has very little to do with the OVERPOWERED machine of yours, has a lot to do with the game being old and not designed to run on multi-core systems. But it sounds good as a straw-man argument I guess.