Yesterday I had a sudden urge to play WC again, so I installed the newest DosBox, configured my paths and played.
Well, DosBox has changed since the last time I used it. It has become very good. WC1 worked with sound and all on the first try, really great.
But then I encountered that the game slows down based on how many ships are in the sector. But I don't think I should set the cycles too high because then a single enemy or two might be too fast... Or am I wrong? I played until Gimle 2 yesterday night and didn't test further. My setting is 16mb memory and 3600 cycles.
What do you use in the newer versions of DosBox?
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Also I tried something:
My Joystick is the "Logitech G940 Flight System", because I play a lot of simulations, and it has a nice config tool. So I created a profile that starts whenever DosBox is used, and mapped the Wing Commander Keys on my joystick. I know it is an overkill for playing Wing Commander, but it is fun and it enhances the gameplay for me because I play that many Simulations that I can't play well without descent controls anymore.
I mapped the keyboard buttons
A, G, W, T, L, Tab and the two fire buttons to the stick (I can't stand it when you have to press two buttons in order to fire a missile, and I always hated the afterburner in WC1 so back in the days I had one finger on tab all the time and fired missiles using the keyboard)
So far it works, but that's not enough for me: I will create scripts for the G940 profiler application to roll with my rudder pedals and have a throttle on the throttle stick. That should be possible in some way since you can design your axis manually by assigning keyboard scripts to them.
Maybe I can even build a script to have a simple sort of Force Feedback in those games, I haven't figured out the whole possibilities of the script language and the profiler yet, but somewhere I read that you can create simple FF effects that are fired when you press certain keys.
Also I will try a similar approach for some other old games.
I'll report back when I find out more.