After much trial and error, I was finally able to get my old Tie Fighters Collector’s CD edition to work under WinXP using Dosbox and the D-Fend frontend. Full Sound, joystick support, and no lag time/ frame skips during gameplay. After that, I went back and got XP and Privateer to work as well!
I’m very excited. And now, I’ve come to the conclusion that I just don’t like most newer games. On my pc at the moment, roughly 90% of the games I have installed are ones from the early 90’s…and despite the obstinance of winXP and it’s game-hostile structure, they all work!
So here’s what I’m playing right now:
Tie Fighter
X-Wing
Privateer
X-Com
X-Com 2
One Must Fall 2097
Warlords 2
Wing Commander 2
Doom 1 and 2
Betrayal at Krondor
If anyone needs assistance with getting these to work, just let me know. And I’d welcome any recommendations for other games I might have missed.
-stonebow, who is wondering if there’s a way to get warcraft 2 to work under xp
I know I have an X-Wing disk and I’m pretty sure I still have X-Com. I did play Privateer and Wing Commander II.
Ahhh X-Wing that was my first great game.
Zebra- if you’ve never played it, Tie Fighter fixes every little annoying feature (or lack of) you find in X-Wing. Smart, commandable wingmen, the ability to match speeds with your target, and the ability to target gun/tractor emplacements on capital ships…all very cool.
And of course, the mission where Darth vader is your wingman, and you are racing to save the Emperor from a traitorous admiral…'nuff said.
And lno…yes, it’s punishingly hard at times, but it had a good story, and, flourescent coloring aside, is a good, solid game. Certainly better than any of the other sequels.
Niiiice. My X-Wing Windows 95 cd recently got cracked somehow (no idea how, don’t recall dropping it or anything landing on it, but it developed a straight line crack from the thumb-hole to halfway to the edge of the CD. Next time I’m visiting my family, I’ll have to burn a copy of the X-Wing CD for DOS I have lying around there. Get some of that old-school X-Wing music too.
Niiiice. My X-Wing Windows 95 cd recently got cracked somehow, no idea how, don’t recall dropping it or anything landing on it, but it developed a straight line crack from the thumb-hole to halfway to the edge of the CD. Next time I’m visiting my family, I’ll have to burn a copy of the X-Wing CD for DOS I have lying around there. Get some of that old-school X-Wing music too.
FYI, there’s some software out there that plays DOOM 1 and 2 .WAD files under XP, with enhanced (somewhat) graphics. IIRC, the software is free, you just need to get the WAD files from the original install.
My Google-fu is weak today, I can’t find it, so I can’t link to it.
Dude, once my new motherboard arrives on saturday I will totally be emailing you to ask how you did it. I don’t have a joystick, though…maybe I should invest in one…
I’ve tried it several times since I bought it the day-of-release oh so many years ago, but I can’t fight through it. It feels just like X-Com but with levels five times as big, so there’s so much empty walking around looking for the last guy (and always, you find him by getting shot out of nowhere).
I end up going back to UFO Defense over and over and over.
Saitek makes some very good joysticks. I like their Cyborg joysticks that let you adjust all the various stuff like trigger angle, button angle, and whether it’s left-or-right handed. (older versions use a supplied Allen wrench, newer ones use thumbscrews, I don’t like those)
I haven’t found a program that prevents the Xcom earth map from spinning WAY too fast. How do you prevent that? It’s fine in combat mode and when I’m buying/selling, but the clock goes by too quickly (even on the lowest) in my XP.
Get DOSBox. It’s a program that emualtes MS-DOS to a T, and fools it into thinking your CPU speed is waaaaay low. The problem, as I understand it, stems from the fact hat old programmers just used the CPU’s clock speed for thier in-game clocks, because it was easier. No one could be bothered to think it mgiht be a problem when CPU speeds got realyl fast.
“Three gigahertz? You crazy? Maybe in a thousand years! I don’t think we’ll see anything much past 8x86 in our lifetime, bub. Heck, why would you need anything faster than a 6x86 anyways? It runs WIndows 3.1 faster than anything! Get yourself 16 megabytes of RAM and you’ve got a machine that will never be obsolete. NEVER!”
I played Tie Fighter and I liked X-Wing better. Partly because I usually like playing the good guys and for me, TF had too many upgrades from X-Wing. I don’t a fighter should be able to take out a capitol ship all by itself, which is in all of the games. I’ve always wanted a Star Wars capitol ship fighting/strategy game.
I second DOSBox, as well as point out that the Home of the Underdogs site has a patch for X-Com that fixes all of the sound and speed issues in XP. That’s the route I took.
Zebra, you might want to check out Star Wars Rebellion for your SW strategy/ capship gaming needs. I’ve never tried it, though.
