I recently acquired a copy of Sierra's Thexder for Windows 95. It seems to run fine under Windows XP, except that I can't get the MIDI music working. I know about MIDI and how to make programs work with it on my system (as I do a lot of MIDI composing using the Soundfont-based synth on my sound card), but apparently Thexder '95 must be bypassing Windows' normal MIDI interface or something because there just isn't any music. I tried setting the music option to both FM synthesis (wouldn't make sense though, since I don't have an FM synth chip on my sound card) and General MIDI and neither produced anything.

It's no big loss though - the game appears to truly suck compared to the Japanese-created Thexder and Firehawk games that inspired it (both of which run great under DOSBox now - Firehawk especially with Canadacow's MT-32 version).