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Loved these games. Grew up playing them with a yoke + throttle controller my dad bought for MS Flight Simulator. Didn't have the specs for Tie Fighter to run well but X-Wing worked great. I'd angle a clock radio next to the yoke for a little more of a cockpit vibe plus to change up the soundtrack.
So much joy being at that age and in that era of computing/gaming. Hope people are able to pass that same feeling along to the current gen in some way, shape or form.
I wonder if immersion in fiction (interactive or otherwise) is lower nowadays, given the rise of dopamine-saturating short-form content like scrolling. I definitely enjoyed more long-form content (like the mentioned games) 10-20 years ago. I guess I do experience less genuine immersion. I wonder what the effect of that is on my wellbeing.
Might be also that kids generally still can dream, adults lose that ability if untrained. I believe that most of subjects that are touched on in "The Little Prince" are factual.
The other day my wife got into a playground toy car for kids, 3 kids got into, and each was picking a destination while she was driving them. Wooden toy car and pretend motor sounds + an adult pretending to drive them were enough for them to get immersed.
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I enjoyed more long-form content when I had the time.
I can't imagine having 10 hours on a Saturday to just "waste" on playing through XWing, no matter how much In want to. Retirement is looking pretty attractive.
There's a lot of middle ground between doom-scrolling type content and a 10 hour block of non-stop immersion. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
> I definitely enjoyed more long-form content (like the mentioned games) 10-20 years ago.
On a chat about OpenTIE, and OpenXWA, I was talking to this. I used to be able to dive into several hours of a simulation game.
My kids are able to play Minecraft, Stardew Valley, or other immersive games.
I can't because of many reasons, and I was just saying that I'm looking forward to a time when I'll kick them out the house, tell my boss that I'm done, and strap on a VR headset and finally play through Star Wars Squadrons.
I recently setup an emulator, passed it through the TV and had blue tooth controllers hooked up, so I could show my son Donkey Kong Country - we ended up finishing 1 and 2 (with my wife joining in), he loved the older game. Trying to get him into older PC games now. So yeah, it is possible to get them into it (just dragging him away from minecraft is hard haha).
The updated Donkey Kong Country that is available on Switch is also a great game. From what I understand it is almost identical to the older version, but with updated graphics and the option to save progress
my son is addicted to VR gorilla tag. I guess he'll be getting weep-eyed about it in 30 years :P
Very nice. Looking forward to irritating the Empire again as a new recruit [1].
On a more serious note, there's also a really great conversion that ports the original TIE Fighter over to the later X-Wing Alliance engine [2].
And of course if you need copies of the originals, they still sell them over on GOG (Good Old Games).
[1] - https://imgpb.com/AoSwyrZ
[2] - https://www.moddb.com/mods/tie-fighter-total-conversion-tftc
I think a lot of the value of a total rewrite in C is that it is a buildable executable that should be runable on virtually any system, given that this game predates the popularity of the modern "3D Card". A lot of the friction in these games is dealing with all the peculiarities of getting a DOS game to somehow install on a 30 year newer Mac. A complete rewrite eliminates all of that awkward installer friction, so long as you have the necessary game files.
Oh yeah, I completely agree even though DOSBox (or DosBox-X) is fantastic, it’s really nice to be able to potentially run a game natively.
I only mentioned GOG because it’s probably the easiest legal way to obtain the original assets necessary to use OpenTIE.
I think it is the exact opposite. Keep remakes running in DOS instead, and they will run everywhere that DOSBox runs, which is pretty much everywhere, and also everywhere that you can boot up FreeDOS (including in QEMU), plus in other emulators, almost guaranteeing that the executable will keep working somewhere for a very, very long time. Versus a port to some modern system that will then require constant updates and ports forever to keep it running, and as soon as no one is around to maintain the project it will be a pain to get it to run anywhere.
It is always good to see open source reimplementations of old games, but sad to see almost none of them keep MS-DOS support. It's easily the most portable and future-safe of all virtual machines you can run games in.
I see merit in both approaches. The emulation approach preserves the original experience, which is valuable when you want to experience the work in its original form. This is great for scratching the nostalgia itch, as well as anyone who wants to study the original work. The porting approach transforms the original work into a form that is approachable to the modern game player. This is great for people who want to play a game but are not as concerned with a "vanilla" or the as-it-was-released experience. This could mean the port surfaces new controls (touch controls for phone/tablet devices), or applies quality of life changes to patch out frustrations.
> I think a lot of the value of a total rewrite in C is that it is a buildable executable that should be runable on virtually any system
That may be true in general, but in this particular instance the rewrite requires a 64-bit system with a modern GPU for no particularly good reason.
I grew up playing X-Wing and TIE Fighter, editing missions was my first exposure to "programming" and the notion that you could change the bits inside the computer to make different outcomes occur.
I also fondly remember my cousins and I taking turns playing missions, and the two that were not playing would swivel and tilt our big office chair to give the sensation of motion, punching the chair with our fists when taking heavy fire.
The original Star Wars: TIE Fighter was one of the first computer games I played as a teenager. The funny thing is, I had absolutely no idea what Star Wars was, but somehow I still thought the game was really cool and played it for quite a while.
At that age, all I knew about most movies was from Mad parodies, which resulted in some highly confusing revelations later in life.
Wow, I thought this could not be possible. May I ask, where did you grow up? I mean, in the 80s the Star Wars were already a cult thing.
Star Wars went dormant in the late 80s through the mid-late 90s where there was no merch or toys in stores, no cartoons or shows on tv, and no comic books. Cable and home video wasn’t yet ubiquitous, for a cohort of kids born in the 80s and early 90s it’s quite possible to have missed out on it until you were older.
I was 7 or 8 in the early 90s in Texas before I heard about Star Wars. I was playing play sword fighting with my dad, when he mentioned my broom handle looked like a lightsaber, I was like “what’s that?” My dad then proceeded to delight me with the story. It would be about 6 months later when an aunt lent us a VHS player that I would get to see it.
I grew up in China, where the first Star Wars movie wasn't released in theaters until 1999. It had probably been shown on TV in some cities before then, but Star Wars definitely wasn't a well-known pop culture phenomenon there.
If your parents thought cable TV was too expensive, even a North American kid could have no idea what Star Wars was until they became a teenager , had access to a BBS and saw jpegs of princess Lea.
> in the 80s the Star Wars were already a cult thing
I grew up in the 90s, and when the special editions came out in '97, it was the kind of thing that only those of us with nostalgic dads actually went to see.
I only saw Empire at the time, don't think I saw the rest of the trilogy until shortly before the prequels came out.
How is it that FS mechanics are dependent on which release you have available? It all seems to key off of TieProfile_UsesTie98Logic(). Why can't you enable that with just the 95 release?
There’s also a great mod for the original x wing game that adds beautiful new models and textures. Makes it feel very modern which is impressive given how old the game is. https://www.moddb.com/mods/xwvm/news/xwvm-alpha-20251116-dow...
I wouldn't call xwvm a mod. It's a reimplementation of the X-Wing alliance engine .
> XWVM is a facilitator app to play Star Wars X-Wing from Lucas Arts and Totally Games. > We are re-implementing the executable to extend the game beyond its original hardware support.
This is not XWA. The are hooking Into the original XW exe. They say it’s a “facilitator app”, but it requires all the original files and runs the original exe. It’s a mod.
I loved these games as a kid. So much so that I made a VR clone of sorts Rogue Stargun (https://roguestargun.com)
Never quite got around to polishing it to the desired level (due to having kids), and Star Wars Squadrons ended up coming out before I even released the game.
I believe the XWA revamp project also has a VR mode
I checked this out, do you have the music available for purchase or download? Loved the song in this trailer, looks cool as well! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdQ_QV2t5vQ
That's a very neat soundtrack. Reminds me a little of Vangelis
I played X-Wing on my mother's work Thinkpad 486, I used the pointing stick that was located in the middle of the keyboard, It kind of worked like a mouse with infinite range. Never having to lift and reposition the mouse was great. I eventually wore out the red rubber on the pointing stick, but I kept playing until losing the skin on my finger made it to painful. I figured out that I could wear a rubber dishwashing glove, it became very sweaty by I kept playing, later I realised that I could cut the glove since I only needed to cover my finger.
At the final missions the game became very hard, but you could cheese it by doing a failed hyperspace jump, that would race past a lot of the enemy waves.
Your cheesing startegy sounds more like what would actually happen in movies, where the protagonists get a last minute dangerous idea to skip jump past the overwhelming enemies and save the day…
Funnily enough doing it yourself in the game may feel like just cheating, but watching a movie one would be celebrating along.
Why not just run it in an emulator or VM? Is there tangible benefit to reimplementing everything, or is it just an intellectual exercise?
"high-resolution rendering and substantially more advanced lighting" and several other items are documented as improvements in the link.
A quick glance through the README would demonstrate the litany of improvements you can expect from a proper decomp/port, compared to emulation.
Yes, a lot of these are much improved by reverse-engineering them and adding a few tweaks to modernize them. Many of them have added support for different display aspects, since most retro games are tied to 4:3. I downloaded the new RE of Sega Rally the other day and it was nice to have full proper widescreen.
Here are some features, common in other simulator games, that could now be added to these games:
• Custom control panels, with various switches and levers, and lights and displays.
• Multiple displays.
• Virtual reality.
• Mixed reality that shows your hands and your custom control panel, combined with the VR display outside your craft.
• Speech recognition for giving commands to your allies.
• Cockpit motion control and seat rumble.
I personally like to play with the graphs of the Totally Games version of Tie Fighter but with the iMuse music of the original. it's the best experience.
input handling that does not explode under Proton would be one thing...
TIE Fighter is one of the best space sims to play for score (i. e. on the hardest difficulty level). Already the first mission is insanely brutal, fighting Escort Shuttle group "Tough". You, in a lone, unshielded TIE against turbolasers.
"Keying" those shuttles to Outpost D-34 while still managing to shoot them down yourself before they burn through popcorn reinforcements is one of the high points of DOSWin gaming. Sort of the Star Wars version of Wing Commander's famous Ralari defense.
Having a Thrustmaster and these games made me feel like we really might have space travel in our future. I've given up on space travel, but I'm hopeful I might still have a Thrustmaster and these games in my future... Someday...
Cool! I played the original with a joystick back in the day. I tried the previous port to XWA with Tie Fighter more recently, and it had been so long that I couldnt even complete the tutorial with the joystick! Proper gamepad support would be clutch
Thrustmaster FCS & WCS MK1 for me. And as much as I'd love to play it again, it will never be the same.
Oh, wow. I loved these games when they were new.
May need to find a modern HOTAS setup and immerse myself in these.
I am not a mobile gamer by any means but...
I think I would really like a Tie Fighter mobile port.
That being said I still remember all the keybindings of Tie Fighter...
... and the correct sound card settings for my Pentium.
Really excited to give this a go! Being able to merge the two versions together is a killer feature.
Nice! Brings back memories.
Anybody know a modern game with a similar gameplay/vibe ?
Although it's already 20 years old and not very recent, have you tried Freelancer?
Amazing games. It'll be fun to give this a spin some time.
Would be cool to have a web port of this.
You still need users to jump through all the hoops of installing the game data files, or you’d be on very shaky ground concerning copyright.
+1 -- that would be an excellent idea. A lot of these would work great ported to web and the download is small enough that you'd barely notice it. Tie Fighter probably ran off floppy originally?
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