As a bit of a heads-up for hardware "limitations", my little computer is home-built, with an Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 Conroe 2.00GHZ cpu, an Asrock 775i65G r3.0 AGP motherboard (not exactly the best of anything), has 2 x G.Skill 1GB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) CL2.5 sticks (oooohhh...), and a blindingly slow ATI All-In-Wonder 128 Pro video card, and it runs the game. I do have the video graphics details turned down, and if I run into a lot of ships, the poor thing will slow to a crawl and only do 9-12 fps, but I can use it for testing of things.
The one thing I ~have~ to do, without fail, is avoid the interior of the boat. If I go into the interior - which is the "default" view when you first start a game - it will drop *way* slow on the fps, probably to less that 1 frame a second. The first few times I ran the game with CapnScurvy's interior work, I thought it had frozen. But when the interior first comes up, I hit the F3 key to get to the periscope view, or the F5 for the Chart Room. Everything is fine once there.
Now, this is ~MY~ machine. Yours may be different. I do NOT recommend playing with hardware like this... A better video card is definitely recommended first. Something from this century for certain, and preferably something from this decade... Second would be to increase the RAM, which my mobo is maxed-out at 2gig. I'd say 4 gig is the recommended minimum, and as RR says, use the LAA enabler on the SH4.exe file. Of course, as usual, the more muscle you can give the cpu, the better. Let's say a dual-core at 2.4gHz, maybe even higher. My quad-core Core 2 Quad Q8300 Yorkfield 2.5GHz with 8g of ram runs it with ease, and I've got a low-end ATI Radeon HD 4550 video card in it (my computers are almost as old as CapnScurvy - and me!)
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... and for the team, "Thanks" for the thanks, Sniper450.