A while back, I created a self-contained installation of Dark Forces that used the Daum SVN DOSBox for the save states, GlovePIE to give fake mouselook and OverlayXHair to put a crosshair on the screen. When the subject of Dark Forces came up on another forum, I went back to my copy, streamlined it, added a bunch of options and created an installer that would re-create my installation from a retail CD-ROM copy of the game.

I'm not a programmer, so I did everything through Windows batch scripts. The main one draws a menu that lets you install the game, launch the game, run the game's setup, run OverlayXHair's configuration, toggle inverted/non-inverted mouselook, and separately toggle GlovePIE and OverlayXHair on/off. There's also one that will launch the game directly for after you have the game configured and working properly. I also included the GearUp cutscene from the demo and set the controls to the WASD standard.

There's an extensive ReadMe.txt file in the archive that covers some problems you might have and also lists reputable sites to download copies of all the programs that I used, in case you don't trust using the copies that I included.

That just leaves my two scripts. I can only give my word that they're safe to use, but I assume that there are people here knowledgeable enough to look at them and verify that they don't do anything malicious.

You'll need a copy of Dark Forces to install the game files, the game itself is not included in the archive.

Here's the download link;

EDIT: I screwed up! I updated the file to fix a minor cosmetic issue and forgot to post the new link. Here's a working link. Sorry to anyone who tried to download it before.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/px2m7c1rku9y44j … taller.rar/file

If you get a popup ad, just close it.

Extract the archive and it will create a "Dark Forces" directory containing all the files. Double-click "!Start.bat" to install the game and change the various options. Double-click "Play.bat" to launch the game directly.

I have an older system with Windows XP on it, so I can't guarantee that this will work "as-is" on newer systems. In particular, OverlayXhair 1.3 may not work on Windows 10. You also might need to adjust the DOSBox settings with regard to "output=direct3d". I used that because the other options didn't seem to work properly for me.

Anyway, if someone would be brave enough to download and try this (after verifying that it's safe), I'd appreciate it.

Again, I'm not a programmer, so I just threw together some third party freeware and created a script to tie it all together. With my luck, it will probably fail on anything newer than my system.