PC Gaming a la 1993

Playing PC games in the early 90s was a real pain in the ass.  For all of the good games, e.g. not solitaire, there was a significant investment in getting the games to run.  Only those who have fooled around with HIMEM.EXE , CONFIG.SYS, and AUTOEXEC.BAT files for days trying to free up enough 'conventional RAM' can truly relate to the plight of the early PC gamer. And once that was all working, you then had to worry about sound card compatibility and whether your CPU would be able to handle the 256 color 2-D graphics -- there was no 'hardware acceleration'. If you were trying to get a "network" game working ( i.e. a direct modem-to-modem connection), both parties had to have two phone lines - one for the modem and another to verbally negotiate the connection.  Once I tried to connect Falcon 3.0 over my brand new 9600 baud modem, I think it took an hour to finally get connected for a mission that lasted 10 minutes.

Today's PC gamer has it easy.  Stick in the 10 CDs (which is better than the 10 3.5" floppy disks for Conquests of Camelot), install the game, put in your registration code, and you're good to go. That is of course assuming your video card is good enough, you've got plenty of free 'extended' memory, and you're running Windows.

In order to bring PC gaming to the masses, some sacrifices had to be made. For a span of many years (10? 15?), I have not played several of my all-time favorite games. Over the past two weeks, however, I've gotten my X-Wing Collector's Edition CD to run using DosBox, and have spent on it a significant portion of time. The graphics are awful compared to any game made in the last decade, but the gameplay is still amazing.  With my X-Box style Logitech controller I have pretty much all of my essential functionality (throttle, shields, target acquisition, weapons selection) mapped, and I rarely have to touch the keyboard or mouse.

So far I'm loving it, although last night I attempted the Death Star "trench run" mission a few times and got obliterated ... I thought now that I am older and wiser that mission would be a little bit easier, but no. I think that since it was originally the last mission of the game (pre-expansion) that they made it nearly impossible to complete on regular settings. Aside from my recent defeats, I am still pretty good at picking off TIE fighters at a distance and single-handedly destroying unescorted Star Destroyers. I've not yet seen if I can complete the 'one minute minesweeper' mission, which I know took me weeks to accomplish in my youth.

I'll make a separate 'How-to: XWing with DosBox' post at some point in the future, in case someone else wants to play a great old game.  I've also got some links to X-Wing sites with utilities (campaign, mission, ship, and pilot editors) on my del.icio.us page.