Tie Fighter revisited
Several months ago I was looking for help getting ancient DOS game, TIE Fighter to work on Windows XP and modern hardware. I never had much success getting it to run in SVGA (woo!) mode - i.e. 640×480, until today. Back then I was using an ATI graphics card, which apparently no longer supports the ancient VESA graphics modes TIE Fighter uses. Now I have an nVidia 6800GT, and after some faffing about, it works flawlessly.
I spent many, many hours on that game when I was about 13/14, and now I’m doing it all over again 
What makes it possible is VDMSound, a great piece of free software that emulates the typical soundcards of the DOS days, and also throws in support for joystick emulation - i.e. any joystick you can use with Windows XP, you can use with your DOS games through VDMSound. VDMSound can do VESA emulation as well but it doesn’t work properly with TIE Fighter, which is why I could never get it to work with my old ATI cards (9800 Pro AGP and X800 PCI-E).
danger on January 23rd, 2006
Cracking game. Spent far too long on it too.
Jim on February 15th, 2006
This is one of my all-time favorites and I play through it completely again from time to time. Funny thing is, after I bought the X-Wing Collectors Series (or whatever its called) with XWing Alliance and the Windows 95 versions of X-Wing and Tie Fighter, I never got Tie Fighter to work on Windows 2000.
However, Tie Fighter works just fine on Linux using wine (http://www.winehq.com).
Steve on February 15th, 2006
Is that Win95 version of Tie Fighter (when it works) much prettier than the original in 640×480?