Bioware/EA/Mythic might be doing a wing commander/ultima dosbox.
- Thread starter TEH BABA
- Start date
Seems like a push, but if it's coming from inside the company it could be cool. The fact that they stripped the copy protection and got it working is nice anyway.
It's also been mentioned on www.wcnews.com (or at least the Wing Commander part)
A version of WC I bought in the mid-'90s as part of a combo pack had the protection removed, too. Must be fairly trivial.
Does no one remember The Kilrathi Saga? That was the first 3 WC games coded to run under DirectX. I understand it was a bit buggy but that might be a far better place to start than running it under fucking DOSBox.
I love DOSBox but I get a little annoyed with how lazy some game companies have gotten because of it. They won't take the time to rework the game into a modern graphics/sound API because it's too hard, waaaah. Forget all the open source projects where people do exactly that, remaking classic games with modern technology and keeping them compatible with the original data files. It can't be that damn tough if there are a billion OSS projects out there who do it.
I say this mostly because I've gotten a couple games from Steam that run under DOSBox and they usually don't have it set up very well. I end up having to tweak everything myself to get it to run decently. If you're going to do a re-release actually do something with it, don't just slap it into DOSBox and sell it for $10 a pop.
Hrm, I do remember the Kilrathi Saga... I guess that stuff isn't Windows Vista/7 compatible?
I do find it unfortunate that they can't just rework the game to run without emulation, but I guess the point is that it's better than nothing?
I do find it unfortunate that they can't just rework the game to run without emulation, but I guess the point is that it's better than nothing?
TKS was coded for Windows 95, so it doesn't work that well (or at all) for the NT-based Windows versions (2000, XP, Vista, 7.)
But assuming the original source code is available to the folks at EA--which it should be since they own the Origin properties--it should not be tremendously effort-intensive to rewrite the graphics, audio, and input subsystems to use DirectX.
But assuming the original source code is available to the folks at EA--which it should be since they own the Origin properties--it should not be tremendously effort-intensive to rewrite the graphics, audio, and input subsystems to use DirectX.
DOSBox releases don't have to be "slapped together" however... see GOG. I don't see anything wrong with a properly configured DOSBox release. Not to mention of course that the purpose of these releases in general is to make money, they have limited appeal and doing a real port is a lot more expensive relatively speaking. Even if EA does have access to the code for TKS, it's a non-trivial task.
Windows 7 doesn't have DirectDraw support which rules out The Kilrathi Saga. Also TKS version of Wing Commander 2 wasn't that good. Apparently there where missing art and music assets. As for the source code, that's long gone. Origin apparently wern't that good at keeping track of their assets.
I also remember that with TKS, you had to download the Secret Missions? They couldn't get them ready at the time or something.
Oh, that reminds me - the Prophecy "sequel" was one of the first times that I remember a game being released for free and consistently episodically. Don't know why I was reminded of it though.
Oh, that reminds me - the Prophecy "sequel" was one of the first times that I remember a game being released for free and consistently episodically. Don't know why I was reminded of it though.
I also remember that with TKS, you had to download the Secret Missions? They couldn't get them ready at the time or something.
Oh, that reminds me - the Prophecy "sequel" was one of the first times that I remember a game being released for free and consistently episodically. Don't know why I was reminded of it though.
Secret missions and Special ops both had to be downloaded for TKS. Secret Ops, the Prophecy "sequel" was downloadable, Armada also had a patch/add on called Proving Grounds.
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