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Some of that is already being done by fans.

I thought they were talking about this guy.

I'll have to try the DD hack - I haven't played WC1 and WC2 in a heck of a long time. I loved the whole series. For especially WC Prophecy, I play in all its Glide API glory via zeckensack's Glide wrapper http://www.zeckensack.de/glide/index.html and a bunch of patches and high resolution fixes from http://www.wcnews.com/index.shtml using WinXP. I switched to the glide wrapper when my antique Voodoo 12MB 3D pass through card bit the dust. At the time I used a AMD Athlon slot A 800Mhz and Geforce256 DDR and the glide wrapper was a life saver for my Glide games.

I have bought most of the WC games. The version in question is the Kiltrathi edition (which btw is worth about 130 bucks if you have it). They also gave I and II away on magazine CDs. Recently http://www.wcnews.com/ had some permission to give away a copy of wcI windows edition. They also have a huge amount of information on everything about wing commander. Think at one point they even had a set of beta source code for one of them.

So it is not exactly some 'weird collectors edition'. It is a well known version in the WC groups. It is a 'little' on the rare side but they did sell pretty well too...

Also what he did was semi cool (and in scope of the original directx). As that was the point of using a well defined interface (I remember it being one of the selling points of DirectX when it first came out).

I know I don't have much to go on at the moment, but the game looks more like the X series than the Wing Commander and Privateer series. While X was cool, it simply didn't manage to impress the same... aliveness? of the Wing Commander universe.

Case in point: WCNews did a first look piece on the game, but it didn't get much enthusiasm from the crowd. While one can HOPE that the game revives the Wing Commander genre, I think too many space sim developers focus too much on realism and/or pretty graphics to truly understand why the simplistic Wing Commander engine was so popular.

Original game music:
-Might and Magic (and Heroes). Might and Magic VI, VII, and VIII had the tunes as CD tracks so they are easy to get if you own the game. Heores III had them as MP3s so that's even easier. I think most of the tunes are by Rob King. VII is my favorite
-Silent Hill 3 has a great soundtrack included with the PS2 game (at least the one I got).
-Oblivion. "atmosphere_07" is awesome. The theme is good as well, but Morrowind's is better.
-Wing Commander Privateer has some great tunes, esepically the New Constanople and Perry music. It is probably still there somewhere, but I downloaded all the tunes from http://www.wcnews.com/. I couldn't find it after a quick search.

Remixes: -Sonic the Hedgehog 1 - Marble Zone. http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR01416/ -Lots of Final Fantasy remixes. "To Zanarkand" has a couple good ones.

Album Rexies:
-Final Fantasy 7 - Voices of the Lifestream http://www.ocremix.org/album/final-fantasy-vii-voices-of-the-lifestream/. Cid's Theme starts out wierd, but gets good. The Prelude and Main theme are good.
-Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo - Blood on the Asphalt http://www.ocremix.org/album/super-street-fighter-ii-turbo-blood-on-the-asphalt/ Cammy, Ryu, Ken, Guile, Sagat, and Balrog stages are my favorite.

http://deeplayer.com/spiritplumber/wcu-devel.0.2.3 .zip
http://www.wcnews.com/
http://priv.solsector.net/

Never fear, at least Wing Commander is alive and well!

Admittedly, Linux isn't for everyone. But to be scared of people online? I don't think that's really a problem with Linux nor the Linux community, but rather the individual who lacked the self confidence to ask questions and admit that he or she needed some help. As long as you act intelligently and politely, there are many people willing to help out new Linux users, be it via mailing lists or on IRC or in newsgroups or online forums.

Indeed, these guys should just accept who the are, and be comfortable with that. And they should be able to ask questions to more advanced Linux users without feeling intimidated or scared. If they do a little bit of research beforehand, and remain polite, then they will get the answers they seek and the help they require.

Indeed. However, that association has been causing significant harm to Linux adoption. I met a fellow over on WCNews who claimed that the Linux community "scared him." As a result, he tried to have as little to do with Linux as possible. (Although from his wording, I think his point extended beyond Linux to the GNU community as well.)

As any businessman can tell you, scaring away the customers is not good for business. :-)

They have!

Bah! Super Soakers all the way. That guy was just using a limited selection of Soakers. http://www.wcnews.com/chrisreid/supersoakers.html

I don't know about that. 128 megabytes is very small compared to the size of games today.

If you read the post I linked to, the idea was to bring back classic gaming at a low price point, not compete with today's games. I was originally thinking games along the lines of Duke Nukem II and Halloween Harry. But with this chip, we could jump all the way to Super Wing Commander! (With better voice acting, of course.)

Then play it again, Sam. :-)

It's interesting how tons of Wing Commander clones have come and gone, yet not a one has managed to capture that same "magic" as the true series. Starting with Jagged Alliance, then going to Allegience, Descent: Freespace, StarShock, all the way through X:2, they all manage to look nice but somehow lack gameplay. Even Chris Robert's Freelancer didn't manage to compete with his own series!

So, if you've got a craving for Wing Commander, go grab the original titles off of EBay. Then when you're done with those, go grab the free Wing Commander: Secret Ops starter kit. (Yes, it was official Wing Commander!) You may need to mess around with the XP Application Compatibility Toolkit to get it running. (Hint: Install ALL the shims for the Heap.) Once you've got that installed and played, you can try these great fan-made Secret Ops add ons:

Unknown Enemy
Standoff
Secret Ops Missions

And if you STILL can't get enough Wing Commander (*burp*), yell at EA that we need another title! See you at WCNews. :-)

Then play it again, Sam. :-)

It's interesting how tons of Wing Commander clones have come and gone, yet not a one has managed to capture that same "magic" as the true series. Starting with Jagged Alliance, then going to Allegience, Descent: Freespace, StarShock, all the way through X:2, they all manage to look nice but somehow lack gameplay. Even Chris Robert's Freelancer didn't manage to compete with his own series!

So, if you've got a craving for Wing Commander, go grab the original titles off of EBay. Then when you're done with those, go grab the free Wing Commander: Secret Ops starter kit. (Yes, it was official Wing Commander!) You may need to mess around with the XP Application Compatibility Toolkit to get it running. (Hint: Install ALL the shims for the Heap.) Once you've got that installed and played, you can try these great fan-made Secret Ops add ons:

Unknown Enemy
Standoff
Secret Ops Missions

And if you STILL can't get enough Wing Commander (*burp*), yell at EA that we need another title! See you at WCNews. :-)

Linked without the slash so that people can actually download it.

They apparently uploaded some celebration music according to wcnews.com ftp://ftp.wcnews.com/files/mods/privremakereleasem usic.mp3/ I found it a somewhat interesting cross between something from hunt for the red october and a slow sad "the server has died" sort of march. Very interesting stuff--I wonder if they use it in the game.

I wonder if there is anyplace you can download in game scenes like that in video form. That would be cool.

You can, just read TFA

I don't think it was III. I'm leaning towards II, but whichever one opened with an Origin "symphony" being conducted. Man, that put my Sound Blaster to the test. Actually it was the original Wing Commander, after checking out some of the info WCNews has on the game, it all comes rushing back: the Tiger's Claw... ah, the joys of youth.

Donut --

As a number of posts above have covered, a community still exists around a game that's been dead for roughly 6 years (WC: SO was released in '98).

I'm willing to bet that I'm not the only guy who wants Privateer on Linux or a modern OS, or even a multiplayer version.

What are your thoughts on releasing the source to the community for really old timers like Privateer, Armada, etc.? I think there's a lot of potential for a community project.

"To the Origin Guys: Look to the community, we are with you, many would help you start anew to become what you once were. Weh ave confident in you guys."

No doubt! There is still an entire community based around a game which hasn't been active in 6 years! Think of the last game you played from 1998, the year Wing Commander: Secret Ops was published as a free download. 6 years and mods and fan projects are still going.

I wish at least we could get them to OSS some of their older games for a little modification fun. I really think a community project to port some of the older games to newer platforms would really get somewhere -- there are enough 'old school' gamers like myself who would love to play Privateer on Linux. Or multiplayer!

Anyone know anything about getting game companies to GPL old games? I live in Austin and if possible would love to see something happen here.

Cheers

MOSLO to the rescue!

I bet that does really horrible things to your processor, though. Make sure your CPU fan is working, or you'll have yourself a little tiny Chernobyl under your desk.

I remember answering the phones at Origin and telling people to download MOSLO to get Wing Commander to run properly on their P-60's. Now, if they had a Gravis UltraSound, they were pretty well not going to get any music ever. *wistful sigh*

Anbody notice on the main page's Screenshots, the thumbnail for the ship going into (coming out of?) the wormhole is BIGGER than the actual picture?

SNES RESOLUTION: 512x448

Although the Maximum resolution the SNES can achieve is the one you apointed, SNES also has a lower resolution, roughly half this one (256x224), which is just a little bigger than GBA's, and actually the resolution used on most games - very few games use the higher resolution.

[...]The GBA has the SNES beat hands down in terms of processing power. I don't know how many sprites the GBA can put on screen at once (or how big they can be), but it can display more colors at once than the SNES, and if it weren't for the small screen (and corresponding low resolution) and pitifully dark LCD I would say that the GBA had better graphics, too.

While I agree with you on that, I'd say that overall the GBA is a much better system than SNES. Is just that the full potential of the GBA wasn't explored yet, or was by very few games. When people ask me about the GBA, I usually say that the quality of the games are something between the SNES and PSX. Overrated? Maybe, but we'll see when this comes out. Don't know if it will be a good game, but surely will show what else the GBA can do.

Actually, there's a true 3D engine for the GBA now. It's called Blue Roses and a port of Wing Commander: Prophecy will be using it.

In other words, the Gameboy Advance doesn't just literally do what Doom did (in 1993), it runs software on a level that wouldn't come to the PC until 1997 (the year Prophecy was released for the PC).