To all SSC Station occupants
Thank you for the donations over the past year (2024), it is much appreciated. I am still trying to figure out how to migrate the forums to another community software (probably phpbb) but in the meantime I have updated the forum software to the latest version. SSC has been around a while so their is some very long time members here still using the site, thanks for making SSC home and sorry I haven't been as vocal as I should be in the forums I will try to improve my posting frequency.
Thank you again to all of the members that do take the time to donate a little, it helps keep this station functioning on the outer reaches of space.
-D1-
Here is some nice news for all the wing commander fans out there.
Article: http://kotaku.com/5649634/bioware-guy-b ... e+releases
BioWare's Paul Barnett, a man with a keen sense of history, realised this week that Wing Commander is now 20 years old. So he, like the rest of us, wants a re-release.
So he's kicked off a campaign to have the game ported over to DOSBox, a means of running old PC games on new hardware.
Normally we don't bother publicising these kind of things, but since Barnett works for EA, the company which owns the Wing Commander rights, this isn't your average internet petition, as it's as likely to be a sneaky marketing campaign as it is a genuine crusade in the name of all that is good in the world.
Still, even if it is a marketing campaign...I don't care if it's sneaky enough to steal the socks off my feet in the dead of night if it means I get to play Wing Commander again without screwing around.
UPDATE - Paul tells us "It's certainly not a marketing campaign!" Good to hear!
I would hope they would just remove any DRM/Copy Protection and release free to the masses. Reason why is that they are not updating the game at all. I know the big kick nowadays is retro gaming but this game is still 20yrs old now so just make some people happy EA and make it free 🙂
I thought the WC1 could be played in dosbox Iam sure I had the cd version running a couple years ago in dosbox.
WC1 can be run on DOSBox. I still have my old CDs for WC1 and 2. I play them from time to time on DOSBox.
WC1, 2, and 3 were released together for Windows 95 as the Kilrathi Saga too. You might be able to get it to run on XP, not sure about Vista or 7.
That is an excellent idea; not just for Wing Commander but for any Win9x game.
The general plan would be to install Windows 98 in a virtual machine, then install games the same way that you did back on your old Win9x machine.
I wonder if modern joysticks would work on the virtual machine?
The genius behind this idea is that it is counter-intuitive to try to play a game on a virtual machine. Modern versions of DirectX do not work on most virtual machines, and graphics performance is usually limited. However, Win9x games used very early versions of DirectX, which a virtual machine might very well support.
Thank you for mentioning this.
We use VM's all the time at work and just don't have a win98 image to use to try some of this. But as long as you assign the appropriate cpu/mem/hd for the VM I could see this working. because then all you have to do is edit the MSDOS 5.0. Since Msoft has deprecated Win98 they should just hand it out for free download.
Wing Commander Kilrathi Saga works perfectly under VMWare/Win98 SE. VirtualPC doesn't have joystick support, it's useless for playing space sims.
I don't know about gog.com, but I did try Privateer Gemini Gold. While Gemini Gold is an nice demonstration of the Vega Strike engine, it lacks some of the user interface "finishing touches" that are important to game play. I found Gemini Gold to be interesting, but not really playable.
I enjoyed the original Privateer very much -- it was one of my favorites of the Wing Command/Privateer/Freelancer family of games. Most of the game play features are improved in Freelancer, which makes Freelancer the better game overall. But the brilliant sense of humor in Privateer was not fully developed in Freelancer, which is unfortunate.
I find it interesting that gog sells Privateer for $6, and that they have other classic Electronic Arts games, as well. Do they have a special license from Electronic Arts? Or does EA simply not care?
The reason that I ask is that I have a dosbox-playable image of Privateer. I would upload it to the Files section here if there were no copyright restrictions.
Yes. Or else gog would be sued for copyright infrigement (or something like that). In fact they broke a deal to sell 25 EA games.
So now that GOG are selling it have EA cracked down on all the abandon ware site that used to have these game on. ❓
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