Wing Commander Games and Windows XP - A Summary

Neither this thread nor the one he linked to have DOSBox in the title. He just didn't read any posts.
 
Here's my aggravation. This evening I installed WC3 KS version and I have Windows XP. The game ran pretty much flawlessly and the only trouble was a slighty laggy keyboard input during flight. So I came on to these forums to find a fix, and used the Microsoft Compatability Tool Kit I found on the thread "WC3 KS Version fix on XP".

And after a while dinking around with that program, I tried running WC3 from it and all of the sudden it would freeze at the intro. This had not been happening before at all. I deleted and reinstalled everything but I'm still having the problem. I tried deleting the Microsoft program but that did nothing (although it won't allow me to completely delete it).

So I came here and read through the posts earlier about people who had the same problem with the intro freezing. And I've applied the Win2000 patch and set the game to 2000 compatability. Nothing. I've set the game to 95 and 98 compatability, no dice. I've alt tabbed to set the game to Normal priority and found that it already -was- at normal priority, so I set it to all the other priorities. Nothing!

So now I'm really in a mysterious pickle. It was running perfectly well a few hours ago. I played up until the fourth mission without a hitch. And now I can't get past the intro. I really, really need some help here. :)
 
Doing all that shady stuff like installing the Windows 2000 patch and setting the game to 2000 compatibility mode is just going to gum your installation up more. The focus should have been on trying to extract that compatibility toolkit thing from your system. If things seem broken, try using CrapCleaner's uninstall program to remove things. I don't think I've ever used this toolkit, so if it's something like DirectX that simply doesn't want to be removed, you probably have to research what sort of tricks people have online for getting it out of your system.
 
ChrisReid said:
Doing all that shady stuff like installing the Windows 2000 patch and setting the game to 2000 compatibility mode is just going to gum your installation up more. The focus should have been on trying to extract that compatibility toolkit thing from your system. If things seem broken, try using CrapCleaner's uninstall program to remove things. I don't think I've ever used this toolkit, so if it's something like DirectX that simply doesn't want to be removed, you probably have to research what sort of tricks people have online for getting it out of your system.
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Thing is I've already found a way to completely uninstall it, and then I uninstalled and reinstalled WC3. And still no joy.
 
From what I understand (haven't tried that toolkit) the compatibility toolkit changes some settings in the registry. So uninstalling the toolkit or reinstalling WC3 won't restore the settings that were modified. You'll have to remove the changes with the toolkit itself somehow.
 
Got it up and running. I had to redownload the tool kit and disable the WC3 "fixes" it had set up. The effect was immediate and I am now able to play WC3 again. Still the occasional crash but no big deal.

I'd say the biggest problem is the keyboard lag. I can't really afterburn in a fight because it'll stay stuck on afterburn for many seconds after I let go of tab, or I'll temporarily lose control of the ship for a second after firing a missile. It'd be nice to find a solution to this, but if not then I can work around it.
 
That was always something of an issue with WC3 KS, but not usually to the severity you describe. Do you use a joystick? KS has an issue with keyboard input to a certain degree, but it might be less noticeable if you try different interface methods.
 
i got wc4 on winxp pro sp2 running and everything is fine, but the inflight graphics are quite bad. How can i change the resolution? It looks like it is 640x480.
 
Unregistered said:
i got wc4 on winxp pro sp2 running and everything is fine, but the inflight graphics are quite bad. How can i change the resolution? It looks like it is 640x480.
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For the age they aren't that bad really (and I'm using a 19" monitor). However you are out of luck for changeing the resolution. The only option is to run the game windowed (alt-enter I beleive) but that makes everything small.
 
Unregistered said:
i got wc4 on winxp pro sp2 running and everything is fine, but the inflight graphics are quite bad. How can i change the resolution? It looks like it is 640x480.
Click to expand...

No Wing Commander game has officially supported a resolution higher than 640x480 yet. Voodoo 1 3dfx hardware acceleration cards released years after WC4 for Wing Commander Prophecy weren't even capable of it.
 
wing commander games

i'm just a casual game player and pc user and i was going through some old games i have around and i was wondering if anybody could tell me how to get my old wing commander games working. i've got a gateway with windows xp and pentium 4 , and i think nvidia gforce 2. please help, i love those games.

wing commander 1 with secret missions
wing commander 2
wing commander priv
 
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