I think you can do this with a virtual machine. Get vmware and then have a look at this. As you can see, the problem they had is with the vm running too fast, which is just the effect you want.
Therefore, you should be able to tell the VM that your CPU speed is slower than it actually is. Don’t set the sync options that it advises there (or put them to "false): you don’t actually want it to run with the correct time.
I don’t know how much faster you can get it to run, but I don’t see any reason why this shouldn’t work, despite Brain Wreck’s pessimism!
That’s not how I read it, but then again I’m not terribly familiar with the product.
Another reason I thought of why this would be unlikely… if your program’s performance is limited by something other than the CPU, then not even a magic vm solution would work.
One thing I’d like to run faster is a certain application that converts sound files from one format to another by capturing the actual sound card output in realtime as they play. By definition, this is limited to the playback through the sound card, which is limited by the bus speed. That’s just one example of non-cpu things that your program could be bound by.
If the program includes purposely-inserted simple delay loops, then I suppose it would be possible to scan the code and replace them with shorter loops or a block of NOOPs.
Everyone has pretty much covered all the angles but to try and pull it together. The program is running at a certain speed either because that’s as fast as it can go (due to some resource, cpu, memory, disk speed etc) or it’s designed to go that fast and is kept to that speed by some limit (tied to cpu cycles, clock speed, actual time, etc).
If it’s the first problem you can speed it up by increasing the amount of resources available, there are many ways to do this – a lot of them have been covered already. If it’s a disk drive thing then you can consider using a ramdrive (no idea how to set that up in modern windows I’ve not used one on a PC for years).
If it’s the second problem you have to work out what it’s using as the limiting factor and fritz with that. That’s were vmware might help, or dicking with the cpu clock or every trying to fiddle the code to remove the timing. But without more information we’re not going to be able to give a definitive answer.
First thing I’d do is Google “How do I speed up X” where X is the name of the program. Chances are someone has already asked the question on usenet if it’s a common problem.
My second computer (early 80’s) was a 6502 based UK101 - and the builder (it was a kit) had added a 1MHz/2MHz switch - Pacman was impossible at 2MHz.
At that stage (and for a good few years afterwards) the standard approach to a delay was a do nothing loop - a few hundred ops would do the trick.
Then Intel started ramping up chip speeds (particularly with the 80286 based AT pc), and many apps (mostly games, but hardware drivers too) had problems because the loops were now too short. You either had to physically switch the processor into a slow mode (out of turbo mode), or load a memory resident program to eat up cpu cycles (via clock interrupt) before you played the game.
Eventually programming practices moved on, and programmers started to use the cpu independent clock chip to provide timing functions - and this is how things are should be done today - at least in games and OSes and commercial software.
That said - I have seen some odd behavior. My laptop is an AMD64 Turion. When I first started to play Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 3 on it, I thought it was an insanely fast game - too fast for me. Then I tried it again, and it was ok. It went on like this for a while - sometimes insanely fast, then playable. I finally figured it out. As the game started, it asked Windows how fast the CPU was. At that point of time, the cpu was throttled back (by the AMD Speedstep system) to save power. CFS3 does some maths and sets itself up, and starts the game. But by now, the cpu has kicked into overdrive to meet the increasing demand, and the cpu clock speed is now twice what it was, and the game is insane. In the end, I disabled the throttling function so the cpu speed did not change, and it was OK.
So, if the game uses cpu clock cycles to track time - you may be able to do something in VMware or via Speedstep or something. Otherwise, no.