The source port that dosfreak suggested should work perfectly. It works great here with a little tweaking.
First download this:
http://www.descent2.de/downloads/d2x-xl-w32-1.9.155.rar
Then make an image of your descent 2 cd, do not run using a real cdrom drive but rather use a virtual drive emulator. Make a cd image, configure your virtual emulator (e.g. daemon tools) to use the first cdrom letter.
Install descent2 normally, patch the game to 1.2.
Then copy all files from the descent 2 cd to the game directory.
This means that you should transfer all files from [cddriveletter]\d2data to the game directory's root. For example if your descent2 directory is c:\games\descent2 copy all files from \d2data to c:\games\descent2
Then unpack d2x-xl-w32-1-9.155.rar to your c:\games\descent2 directory.
Mount the game cd-image you've created with a virtual drive emulator and make sure it is the first cdrom drive letter. Then simply click on d2x-xl.exe to start the game.
Use alt-enter to go fullscreen, name your pilot, go to configure/sound effects & music and tick redbook audio to hear cd music. After that you can select your resolution, configure your control layout, watch the intro again or just play the game. You can further select frame limit cap and customize a lot of other things.
There is also a config file in your game directory's \config which is created after you have extracted the port. If you copy d2x.ini from it to the game's root you can set the game to run in full-screen automatically by removing the ";" from the -fullscreen line. But don't forget to disable the -nocdcheck line and enable the movies by putting a semicolon before the -nomovies 2 line. So you should have the three lines -fullscreen , ;-nocdcheck and ;-nomovies 2. As I said there are many other options with which you can experiment.
