I think I just answered myself.

Config.sys FILES=30 for Tie Fighter

Oops.

Did you get it working then? Was it putting it in a dummy c:\config.sys that fixed it, or what? Might help others in the future to know how you solved it (if you did).

Sure,

Well, according to the link it turns out that there's no subfolder hierarchy in the Tie Fighter zip file. Luckily, I had X-Wing Vs. Tie Fighter installed on my machine and I was able to recreate the different subfolders based on that.

Once I had the game running, it would crash when looking for specific files. I would then get the particular files the error message mentioned, create the subfolder in question and simply cut and paste.

The subfolders are as follows: CP, RESOURCE, SOUND, MISSION, FRONTRES and IVFILES.

((Keep in mind that some of these folders might not be needed as they relate only to XvsTie. I've also duplicated a large number of the files to be on the safe side))

The MISSION folder contains the *.TIE files

FRONTRES and IVFILES contain the *.LST files (I'm not sure the IVFILES folder is needed at all...)

For the RESOURCE subfolder I copied the entire root into it.

SOUND contains the *.ENG, *.WDR and TESTMIDI and TESTWAVE

And CP contains the *.INT, *.LFD and *.PNL files.

Tada!

That's interesting. I remember having the same thing happen to me once when I used a ZIP-file splitter on an X-Wing floppy version backup I was trying to install from once. I ended up doing the same thing - move a file into the correct subdirectory whenever it crashed due to not being able to find it there.

let's start that there are no SOUND, FRONTRES and IVFILES subfolders in tie fighter

Then it's a good thing I popped everything into the Resource folder. To be honest, SOUND was just an (mis?)educated guess. If I have time, I might systematically delete files to find the exact subfolder configuration but I wouldn't hold my breath! 😀