Pix Revives Tandy TX For Glorious Wing Commander Run

Pix has put together a wonderful walkthrough of the process he followed to get an 8 MHz Tandy TX to run Wing Commander. The technical hurdles he had to jump through are a fun read for those of us who've built computers from scratch, and the results are quite impressive. The game is super choppy since the machine is well below the recommended specs, but it's amazing that it actually runs! It's not unplayable, and I'm sure we all have stories about playing games that performed worse. As an original Tandy 1000 owner myself back in the late '80s, I'd have been absolutely stunned to see something like this in action. It certainly loads faster than Wing Commander 3 did on a 486 with 8 megs of RAM, and it's only marginally worse than playing Prophecy on a Pentium 100 with 16 megs (both experiences I was all to familiar with in the '90s).

The proprietary 16-color Tandy mode running through this CGA monitor produces very interesting results. Some contrasts disappear and other things are washed out, but it's fascinating to see how the game compensates with solutions like checker box Dralthis and red-faced Spirit. Kids today might think WC1 looks dated, but this will really make you appreciate the graphical quality of the standard DOS original. This gives me the impression of what the game would have had to look like if it were ever ported to the 8-bit Nintendo. If you think this is wild, Pix does lots of great work like this all the time, so definitely check out his webpage for more fantastic info. You can find the full article on this story here.