That should have gotten your attention..
Here's some more info..
There's a crack which bypasses the star info on
http://www.star-control.com
(it's somewhere on the site, but you'll have to find it for yourself. It's quite intuitive. If you know that you're searching for a "file"...)
If you want to run it in dosbox, follow the info people said in a few threads before....
If you want to run it without dosbox, run it with these extra parameters:
/g:bios /s:silent
(so it becomes sc2.exe /g:bios /s:silent or something like that)
This will give you NO sound, yet it will probably work for you if you run it in any OS other than XP..
If you still can't get it to work:
http://sc2.sf.net
they released UQM 0.4 Saturday the 21st of May..
Oh, and "Bloodbath", doing your information trick sometimes won't work. There are a few occasions that you'll only get a "Conversation ability" if you bought the info from the Melnorme. This can cause to, IMHO, the best conversation with a baddie in game history... ever... that's right...
Besides, there are enough rainbow worlds.. When you've found a few, you should probably be able to find the rest.. Or so I hope.
Oh, and about the time limit: yes, you CAN know about it.
Firstly, the Melnorme tell you about their Metachron turning black.
Secondly, the Pkunk make a little confusing reference to it somewhere when you meet them first.
Thirdly, if you do the Zoq-Fot-Pik sidequest (making friends with them), you can get status updates from them. Boy, you'd soon find out about it.
Fourthly and Fifthly (?), both Ur-Quan species tell you about it if you ask them... The Kzer-Za (green) being more talkative about that though. However, it takes guts to go there.. :P
Most people make the mistake to go mining ONLY in the beginning of the game, though. As a player of the first hour, I'd recommend not to. Instead, mine WHILE DOING "QUESTS". Buys you a LOT of time.. You might also want to combine mining and questing with exploring (into unchartered terrain), so you'll soon find those aliens.