Wing Commander is very picky on CPU speed. It suffers of speed issues on anything faster than a 386. Even the 486SX @ 25MHz that I had back then was too fast (the very lowest of 486): I had to switch off the "turbo button" to play the game.
Today, on my K6-2 @ 400 Mhz I play WC with both L1 and L2 caches disabled: this slow down the CPU to the level of a 386 and the game plays just fine.
EDIT: disabling caches on a P4 is not sufficient, the CPU is still too fast. At minute 9:20 you can find a test of Wing commander on a P4 with caches disabled
[ Show youtube player ]
As you can see, you can play a lot of other games, tough
