Pix Revives Tandy TX For Glorious Wing Commander Run (August 17, 2016)

[ChrisReid]

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.

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Original update published on August 17, 2016

 

[Andy Aldrich]

My first memory of WC is my brother buying it to run on an 8086 and having to return it because his PC didn't meet system requirements, so I'll be sure to watch this video later today. I'm definitely not typing this at work right now and that isn't the reason why I'll have to watch it later.

As for WC3 on a 486 with 8MB of RAM, I played it on a Pentium 75 with 8Mb but 1MB of that was shared video RAM so I had to use Windows 95 and virtual memory. The list of items that the ships' computers go through when they 'boot up' before each flight took a good 5 minutes. The game played fine once loaded but there were similar delays when loading the fullscreen videos that occasionally showed mid-flight such as Thrakkath killing Angel. Sorry for the spoiler there.

 

[Oggy]

Ah checkerbox Dralthis, I remember those! on AMiga

 

[-danr-]

That is fascinating!

After the Amiga, my first PC experience of Wing Commander was on an IBM 386 (At 16mhz I think) - there was no sound card as such, only PC speaker effects, but they sounded very similar to the noises that Tandy seems to make; I wonder if they shared some DNA.

Absolutely staggered and delighted he got that running.

 

[st3lt3k]

Seriously impressive!!!

I wonder how many frames per second that is. 10?

 

[Maslas]

...The proprietary 16-color Tandy mode running through this CGA monitor produces very interesting results...

Hey Chris,
Nice article it really brings back nice memories! However, a CGA monitor even with a Tandy adapter on it could show only 4 colours. An EGA monitor, on the other hand, could show 16.
I wrote that just for the sake of technology, no other reason. Really nice video indeed!

 

[ChrisReid]

Hey Chris,
Nice article it really brings back nice memories! However, a CGA monitor even with a Tandy adapter on it could show only 4 colours. An EGA monitor, on the other hand, could show 16.

Yeah, someone mentioned that on twitter, and LOAF explained:

"EGA was 16 at once from a palette of 64, CGA was 4 from 16. Tandy was special: could do all 16 at once from the CGA palette. It was technically called TGA or ECGA, but you'd pick CGA in a game installer to use it and it'd run on a CGA monitor."

 

[Maslas]

Yeah, someone mentioned that on twitter, and LOAF explained:

"EGA was 16 at once from a palette of 64, CGA was 4 from 16. Tandy was special: could do all 16 at once from the CGA palette. It was technically called TGA or ECGA, but you'd pick CGA in a game installer to use it and it'd run on a CGA monitor."

Someone old and wise, once said: "I grow old ever learning many things".