Not sure about all of the various versions, but my X-Wing Collector's CD-ROM (DOS) indeed only runs in 320x200.

Sadly the only X-Wing that does 640x480 is the Collector's Series one for Win95.

TIE Fighter DOS Collector's Edition is the only DOS one of them all with SVGA.

Ok thanks for the confirmation guys. Guess I'll have to deal with uber jaggies.

Slighty off-topic but what the heck: would you guys recommend the "New Missions" option where supposedly some of the very difficult original missions in X-Wing are toned down? I've never played the single player campaign mode and I don't think I'm quite a jedi master of flying either.

X-Wing missions can be a real bitch because you don't get the same mission screen hints as in TIE Fighter and yet your timing and position can be critically important. There were a few missions that were very difficult and were complained about, probably because some people simply could not beat them, and so they reworked those and this option swaps them out.

TIE is really a much easier game than X-Wing, even with TIE on "hard".

I never got past mission 3 of x-wing, it didnt help that my pc wasnt really up to the task 386sx-16

Davros wrote:

386sx-16

Yup it runs terrible on those. 😀 Probably because it was polygonal 3D. Wing Commander was the 386 game.

swaaye wrote:

TIE is really a much easier game than X-Wing, even with TIE on "hard".

Really? I found out just the opposite. I have played both games, including the original floppy version of X-Wing, and while you are right that some missions have critical timings and things you need to keep in mind, I could beat X-Wing without using any cheats, but could not do the same with Tie Fighter, playing at the hard level.

For me, because the speed of the laser guns (and angles used in firing by the shuttles) in Tie Fighter is faster, also the mission complexity and number of enemy ships is greater, I could not go deeper than a few missions into that game, without using invulnerability.

Granted, I have done this years ago, with Tie Fighter being probably my first quasi sim game, so probably when I play it again in the future, I would approach it differently, having had more experience in the meantime.

One solution to the jaggies issue is to get a build of dosbox with pixel shaders - i think I used ykhwong's build. It actually looks quite good on the hq3x shader. I played it for a while like this although it will give a performance hit.
If you are playing on an actual DOS system though then this isn't an option 😜

Note that I did this a few versions of DOSBOX ago, before the hq3x scaler option came in. I think this is different to the hq3x pixel shader. The version of DOSBox I used had seperate options for shaders and scalers.

As for the new vs classic missions - You don't lose anything for playing the classic missions so you might as well. Some of the missions in question are really nasty, they go beyond the point of being challenging to being frustrating. There's one where you have to ID about 5 shuttles, disable them and protect your own transports while it docks and hypers out- meanwhile all the imperials are trying to destroy the shuttles as well. Really nasty mission, I got stuck on that one for ages on the original floppy version because the shuttles kept getting destroyed. The 'new' mission on the CDROM version makes this much less frustrating.

DonutKing,

I never knew such a kickass rescaling option existed for Dosbox. The results are more than acceptable to me (just looking at the screenshots I'd say brilliant). I'll have to check it out sometime and report back.

Yeah those pixel shaders are quite effective at making the old low res graphics look good 😀
It also includes 2xSAI and Super Eagle shaders like some SNES emulators do, if you've ever seen those. They are high quality but they tend to make things look like a cartoon.

In my experience, X-Wing was only 320xyyy and TiE Fighter was 640x480 if you had a VESA 2.0 Card. That would let you go kick it into SVGA mode under the options. It really seemed to me, to be some kind of 3D acceleration. It was beautiful. I too always wished X-Wing would of had some update or supported mode.

When the collectors series came out, (not the cd-rom collectors edition of each dos game), I was disappointed that it was just the old missions in a X-Wing vs TiE Fighter game engine for win9x. Looks good, but I hate that engine. It doesn't have any interactive music as the events take place. Call me crazy, but I think TiE Fighter in SVGA mode looks better. I like the feel and atmosphere of it better.

When X-Wing Alliance came out, I was thrilled that it reintroduced interactive music back. I guess that was called imuse.