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  • 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.

    by spankibalt
  • 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...
    by frog42
  • 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
    by pdntspa
  • Thrustmaster FCS & WCS MK1 for me. And as much as I'd love to play it again, it will never be the same.
    by Singletail
  • 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.

    by joachimma
  • 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.

    by karhuton
  • Why not just run it in an emulator or VM? Is there tangible benefit to reimplementing everything, or is it just an intellectual exercise?
    by hackyhacky
  • input handling that does not explode under Proton would be one thing...
    by p_l
  • 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.

    by DerekL
  • 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.
    by Zardoz84
  • 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.
    by qingcharles
  • A quick glance through the README would demonstrate the litany of improvements you can expect from a proper decomp/port, compared to emulation.
    by apetresc
  • "high-resolution rendering and substantially more advanced lighting" and several other items are documented as improvements in the link.
    by ceejayoz
  • 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

    by LarsDu88
  • That's a very neat soundtrack. Reminds me a little of Vangelis
    by swiftcoder
  • 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
    by johng
  • 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...
    by darthcircuit
  • 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.

    by Zardoz84
  • 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?
    by kevin_thibedeau
  • The hitboxes were very different; presumably this needs the different models.
    by ZiiS
  • 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.
    by felixding
  • 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.
    by kensai
  • At that age, all I knew about most movies was from Mad parodies, which resulted in some highly confusing revelations later in life.
    by InsideOutSanta
  • 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.

    by jboggan
  • 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

    by vunderba
  • 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.
    by hadlock
  • 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.

    by chucksmash
  • my son is addicted to VR gorilla tag. I guess he'll be getting weep-eyed about it in 30 years :P
    by cpill
  • 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).
    by marak830
  • 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.
    by dmos62