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Sim City 2000 is a very different (and computationally more demanding) game than the original Sim City.

In my youth, people would quit Windows 3.1 to run games in DOS, because the overhead of the OS was too much.

Don’t know if that could be an explanation.

Definitely that was often a solution, but the version I had didn't run on DOS. Not sure whether this was a windows only version I had. Often the problem was ram, extended memory often didn't really work on DOS.

One had to do some significant hand tuning of config.sys and autoexec.bat to optimize conventional.memory usage for a lot of games in that era (ie. relocating device drivers to extended memory), at least until later versions of MS Dos included the memmaker utility to partially automate the process.

This was tricky enough that folks would pay my barely adult self a consultant's hourly rate to do this for them.

It ran great on a Performa 475 (25 MHz Motorola 68LC040). I guess that settles that old debate!