Star Wars

Quick caveat - if you're hoping for a simple, easy explanation on how to get this one video game working in whatever flavor of LINUX you happen to be running, think again.  I hate Windows, I prefer to not have Windows running on my computer, not even in a virtual machine, but in this particular case, for most other people, I'd actually suggest trying to get this game working in Windows first before going down this particular rabbit hole.

That being said, unless you are using a computer that is more than two years old with Windows XP, you will probably have a really hard time getting this game to run correctly, especially if you are using an HD series ATI video card or any GeForce video card newer than the 8000 series.  Therefore (ironically) trying to get the game running correctly in LINUX actually makes a certain amount of sense, even with the complexity involved.

"What's with the whole 'while Rome burns' comment, Valkyri9?"

Oh that? I'm just remarking on how silly this article seems when compared to things like Occupy Wall Street causing protests to spawn in other major metropolitan areas across America, when we still have over 9% unemployment and the economy has been officially declared as in ANOTHER recession, as food prices skyrocket and incidents of crime increase and prisons are releasing their "less dangerous" prisoners due to insufficient funding and chaos is everywhere while the rest of the country is fast asleep.  Or the lesser issue where WineHQ itself was hacked.  It's all about perspective. Getting an old video game to run in LINUX is not a challenge compared to these issues, and could quite seriously be called a complete waste of time. But it does pose some interesting questions, so in my mind it's still a worthwhile pursuit.

Of course all of this pales when compared to the Universe, as pointed out by my friend Hardgeus. So again, perspective.

"Why are you even bothering with Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance? This game is over twelve years old!"

This is true, however, it is also the last complete space-flight simulator released by LucasArts. There have been other simulators since, but because they were designed for console systems such as the Sony Playstation or the Nintendo Gamecube they did not grant the player full control over their craft.  This level of control enhances the immersive qualities of this game, much like it did in its predecessors (Star Wars: X-Wing, Star Wars: TIE Fighter and Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter).

In other words, it's the last Star Wars themed video game out there that lets you do things like match the speed of your target, divert power from engines toward shields or lasers, or transfer power in quick bursts from shields to lasers or vice versa.  It's the last Star Wars themed video game out there that will allow you to quickly slow down to 1/3 your maximum speed so that you can perform a quick turn in order to get a bead on your opponent, and then quickly switch back to max speed in order to stay on their tail.  It's the only one set up so that you can map out the buttons on your flight stick in order to be able to easily look around in your cockpit, switch weapons from lasers to missiles, throttle up/down, perform rolls and other evade maneuvers, and so forth.  That makes it relevant.  It also makes it a goddamned shame that the developers decided to rely as heavily on DirectX 6.0 as they did during development, because now it's come back to bite those of us who still love this game in the ass.  Thank you Microsoft, for yet again finding another way to piss me off.  While I'm at it, hey LucasArts, stop recycling those pieces of fecal matter you call The Force Unleashed and start making some good games again. Is that too much to ask?

So to get to the nitty gritty - I received an email from a gentleman asking if I had run into an issue where the entire background of the game goes blue - or black after running Reiman's patch, and could not get in-game sound effects or voices to work.  I had not attempted to get the game working for quite some time; after my last aborted attempt I decided I'd wait for Wine to mature some more before I gave it another shot.  So I let him know I'd try again now that PlayOnLinux had made some great strides and we are now up to version 1.3.30 in Wine.  Current documentation at WineHQ is old and out of date, but indicative of the problems I had previously run into when trying to get this game working.

PlayOnLinux is an amazing tool.  Go to the website and install a copy on your LINUX system if you haven't already.  Wine is an awesome tool but it comes at the price of complication when dealing with these kinds of games.  My success rate in getting a game to work in Wine has been improved dramatically when using PlayOnLinux because I don't have to spend as much time fighting with the software, trying (begging and pleading) to get it to work.  The biggest benefit of PlayOnLinux is that it encapsulates each of your software installations, so that when you make a change to try to get one game working, you don't inadvertently break all of the other games that used to work just fine.  It also makes it very easy to use different versions of Wine - sometimes regressions occur with new Wine releases, and this tool makes it incredibly simple to specify the version you want with the game in question.  I can't praise it enough.

I also used to use something called POL Helper so that I could easily take advantage of winetricks.  This is no longer necessary as the primary functions of winetricks are now built into PlayOnLinux and done in a significantly more user friendly way.

You must have a copy (legitimate copy is strongly recommended here) of Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance, which I have. However, because the CD copy protection does not play well in Wine, I also obtained a utility to strip this copy protection from the main X-Wing Alliance executable.  As far as I'm concerned I am well within my rights to take whatever steps necessary to get a twelve year old copy of software that I purchased through legitimate means in working order, especially when the developer or publisher has pretty much washed their hands of any responsibility beyond hosting a patch update (and many don't even do that for more than a few years).  However, explaining how to accomplish this is not within the scope of this post (you're on your own).

PlayOnLinux does not at this time have an automated installation option for Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance, but it is perfectly fine to select "Install a non-listed program" in order to install it.  I chose "Install a program in a new virtual drive", created a wineprefix with the name XWingAlliance (no spaces) and then selected "Configure Wine" and "Install some libraries".

In winecfg I changed the OS version to Windows 98 since that was the latest Windows version available when the game shipped, and I selected ALSA as the default audio option and applied my changes.  I did not change the Wine version to 1.3.30 at this time because it resulted in an incomplete install - I left it at the default "System" version of Wine, the 1.2 release that shipped with Ubuntu Natty Narwhal.  I also installed the d3dx9 and directplay libraries in the next menu since these areas have not yet been fully addressed in Wine for many games.

I then installed the game from the CD-ROM, which was pretty much identical to a Windows install, and was sure to select Full Install (275MB) in order to get the majority of the files copied over from the disk.  I elected to not select Alliance.exe as the icon launcher because I knew it also made checks to verify the game disk was present in the drive.  I also knew that if I needed to create or select a new pilot I could access the launcher from within its installed folder, or from Applications > Wine > Programs > LucasArts > X-Wing Alliance > Play X-Wing Alliance in the Ubuntu menu, and I prefer to not have multiple entries for the same program within PlayOnLinux.  I instead browsed for and selected xwingalliance.exe as the launcher.

Because my laptop has a built-in Radeon HD 5850, I had already installed AMD's latest proprietary drivers for the best possible 3d rendering support as documented on the unofficial AMD LINUX driver wiki.  I also selected X-Wing Alliance from the PlayOnLinux menu and clicked the Configure button.  I selected 1.3.30 in the Wine Version menu, then switched to the Display tab and left everything at default except for "Video memory size", which I changed to 2048 to reflect the 2GB memory dedicated to my graphics card.  I finished up my PlayOnLinux setup by selecting the Wine tab so I could click the "Windows reboot" button in order to refresh the system with these changes.

For (hopefully) obvious reasons, X-Wing Alliance does not support widescreen resolutions.  To address this, I visited WSGF (Widescreen Gaming Forum) and found their article for this game.  I downloaded and installed ghex from the Ubuntu repositories and followed their instructions on modifying the entry in xwingalliance.exe for 1280x1024 to display at 1920x1080.  I also applied the NOCD patch on xwingalliance.exe to remove its CD checks at this time.

At this point the game failed to launch, so I accessed winecfg from the PlayOnLinux config window under the Wine tab, and changed DirectPlay from (Native) to (Native, then Built-In) and tried again.  The game now launched correctly, running movies and the main screens at 800x600 stretched across the widescreen.  Starting a new mission and entering the hangar rendered correctly at 1920x1080, but the mission could not begin because no keyboard inputs were recognized within the hangar.  Consequently the game was unplayable from this perspective.  It was possible to start a new game in the simulator environment in single player mode because no launch from a hangar was necessary.   I did not bother testing multiplayer mode because I fully expected it to fail due to the lack of support for DirectPlay, and that really wasn't within the scope of my expectations at this time anyway.

Reimar Döffinger, author of the XWA Hacker tools on Sourceforge that will help get this game and other X-Wing themed games running on new hardware and new Windows systems, mentioned in a Wine bug report that I can no longer find that he had been successful at correcting this input bug in X-Wing Alliance with Wine 1.2.0 by replacing dinput.dll.so with the same file from Wine 0.9.15 - and he had uploaded the file so that others might be able to use it in their version of Wine.  Much to my disappointment, by the time I found this, both his hosted file and someone else's had already been taken offline.

I was not able to find a copy of Wine 0.9.15 on WineHQ, but I was able to download a copy of Wine 0.9.19 and compile it.  I copied my new version of dinput.dll.so from Wine version 0.9.19 into my Wine 1.3.30 installation under my .PlayOnLinux folder and tried again.  The input bug in the hangar was eradicated.  I had one last thing to address - the game played music but there were no voices or sound effects.

I accessed my CD-ROMs and copied the "wave" folder from each disk into my PlayOnLinux prefix XwingAlliance folder.  I also did the same with the "movies" folder from each disk.

I now have a fully playable (at least single player anyway) Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance running on Wine in Ubuntu!

For my next trick, I will be repairing my Moon Patrol arcade cabinet that no longer boots up properly.

Thank you, Reimar!

I am a nostalgia gamer.  When the going gets rough, I like to remember when PC video games did not require 3D accelerators and insanely powerful computer systems like they do today.  They could be difficult to install, they could be even more difficult to configure.  But once they were working the way they were designed, they were a certain form of magic.

They were also much harder than today's fare.  With the advent of the affordable PC came a much wider PC gaming market, and to appeal to this new breed of gamers a lot of difficulty that us old-timers had been putting up with for years got cut away.  I feel like a crotchety old man yelling at "you youngsters have it WAY easier than we did, with your instanced saves and super-powers", even though I'm only turning 36 in a few days (I keep using the word "only" to myself but it's not really working).

Regardless, whether due to the fact that I'm feeling my age or that the winter is really starting to wear on my nerves, I've been much touchier of late and consequently I found myself itching for some old school dog-fighting like I used to play back when I was in college.  The game that I always wanted to own a PC for, the game that I used to play in my imagination before I owned a computer - that game was Star Wars: X-Wing.

This is not an easy game to learn.  It is more difficult to master.  It is significantly harder without a flightstick controller.  You need to memorize keyboard hotkeys and be able to rapidly use them in a dogfight.  You need to be able to track where your opponent plans to go and fire ahead of their craft in order to strike them with your blaster fire.  You need to be able to keep an opponent in your sights long enough to get a missile lock.  You need to know how to regulate power so you do not run out of blaster fire, so you can catch bombers before they reach their target's missile range, or so that you can buffer your shields that are taking a lot of hits.  These are just the basics you must learn in order to complete your missions.

You're also typically trying to destroy something that looks like three red blinking pixels clustered together on your screen.

The original game features three different starfighters that you will fly to complete your missions, including the Y-Wing (slow bomber class), the A-Wing (fast scout/strike & evade class) of course, the X-Wing (space superiority fighter) which can be applied to almost any purpose.  Your missions grow increasingly more difficult as you progress through the game.  You have the option to replay missions through the "Historical Combat" option, and there are also the "Pilot Proving Grounds" which are also incredibly difficult to master.

Even with all of that, this is an incredibly good game.  There is a lot of immersion that goes on once you learn how to properly play the game.  There are secrets that can be unlocked - such as how to easily take down a Star Destroyer by yourself with either the X-Wing or Y-Wing fighters (the A-Wing is far more challenging because it does not carry photon torpedos).  If you destroy the two round power generators above the bridge by firing three photon torpedoes at each one at point-blank range, you will knock out the Star Destroyer's shields.  The Y-Wing can then switch to Ion Cannon and disable the Star Destroyer, making it a sitting duck that cannot fire back.  The X-Wing will need to dodge cannon fire in order to survive, as will the A-Wing, but blaster fire will eventually take out the power generators as well.

The storyline kept true to the films, and the way each mission was presented helped drive the game along and give the player a sense of accomplishment.  This was not true in X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, although they attempted to address the problem with The Balance of Power expansion on that game.

An expansion added the B-Wing fighter as seen in Return of the Jedi to the list of available craft, and additional missions beyond the trench run on the first Death Star.  When I purchased the Collector's CD in 1996 (my first PC video game purchase ever), it included this add-on, so I'm not sure how much of an impact it had for players who had only had access to the X-Wing, Y-Wing and A-Wing fighters until the expansion was released.  For me, it was part of the game immediately following the destruction of the first Star Destroyer.

So, how does one go about getting this DOS/Windows 3.11 era video game working in a 64-bit non-Microsoft operating system? Pretty simple.  You need DOSBox.

As you can see, DOSBox does not load drive C: by default, but it must rather be mounted instead.  On a typical Ubuntu installation your command to do this would be:

mount c ~/(your DOS video game folder name)

You can then navigate to the folder by typing "C:" (without the quotation marks) and "CD (folder name)" to change into the directory of a specific video game.  You may need to configure the game using its INSTALL.EXE or SETUP.EXE file in order to set the audio to Sound Blaster - most DOS games support Sound Blaster cards and DOSBox does a pretty good job of emulating it for you.  You should then be able to type the command to launch your DOS game, and enjoy.

Because X-Wing really should be played with a flightstick, just a little more work needs to be done.  You can install a joystick calibrator in Ubuntu with the following command:

sudo apt-get install joystick

And you can then type "jscal /dev/input/js0" to calibrate it (you may need to change the js number to match your flightstick if you have more than one joystick installed on your computer).  If your DOS game supports joysticks or flightsticks, it should automatically detect that you have one installed, and in the case of Star Wars: X-Wing, it should go through a simple three step calibration before launching the game.

Once the above is accomplished, you should be destroying TIE Fighters in no time.

I came across this website put together by one Bradley Lewis, who is not only a video game developer but also builds these replica lightsabers using various found objects and parts that he either alters or machines himself.  I have not had a chance to view all of his pieces but the most stunning so far is the Luke Skywalker lightsaber that can be disassembled to reveal a lit crystal chamber assembly and also houses a working soundboard + speaker system that is significantly louder than anything else out there.

I have to say I am extremely jealous on many fronts, particularly of his workshop and spare miscellaneous parts collection.  He's also lucky enough to have a wife who encourages him in his endeavors (now if only I'd listen to my wife for this sort of thing - preemptive self-nag - hehehe).

The interior was even signed by Mark Hamill during a Star Wars convention before it was entirely finished.  Completely awesome - I highly recommend visiting the website:  http://www.slothfurnace.com

Star Wars: The Old Republic has announced that in addition to player housing being in the form of starships, space combat would also be present.  Sadly, unlike LucasArts space simulators such as X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, this space combat will be in the form of an arcade-style "rail shooter", meaning the player will not be able to direct the ship except to avoid incoming obstacles.  While the graphics look nice and the gameplay is probably fun, it detracts from immersion and therefore in my opinion has no place in a MMO.  So far this is a significant disappointment, and there are several other fans who share this point of view.  Hopefully Bioware will listen to the fans instead of proceeding with development in this vein, but I won't hold my breath.

I've on occasion gone on the excessive geekish rant that has to fall under the category of geekish just from the standpoint that it has something to do with Star Wars.  Of course I know plenty of folks who don't fall under the "geek" category who love Star Wars as much, if not more than, I do.  It's a bitter love-hate relationship.

I love The Empire Strikes Back, the second film and only one not directed by George Lucas (which speaks volumes in itself).  It has an excellent story, a sad plot with lots of intense emotion, brings a greater understanding to the viewers the nature of the Force and what it means to be a Jedi, provides startling revelations to those who are not in the know (I was fortunate to see the film when it was first released in the theaters before my childhood friends could spoil the surprise for me), and is an all around amazing film.

The rest - could be better.  Would certainly be better if not for the inclusion of annoyances such as Jabba the Hut getting his tail stepped on by Han Solo (in the DVD re-released edition), the Jar-Jar mess, the idiotic cartoon-like computer animated music performance in Jabba's palace prior to the entrance of Chewbacca and Princess Leia disguised as a Bounty Hunter (again in the DVD re-released edition), and the sensation that over 99% of the new Star Wars films (Epidodes I, II and III) feel as though they were filmed in front of a blue-screen so that everything else aside from the actors could be added with computers later, including static scenery.

So...there's a certain distaste in my mouth.  I've never really even liked Luke - he's far too whiney for this one.  I've been more of a fan of Han Solo - he's cool, has the badass spaceship, not to mention gets the girl.

And yet I have a distinct fascination with all things to do with being a Jedi.

What sucks is that as far as the films are concerned, if I want to know what it means to be a Jedi I only have the venerable and somewhat mad Yoda and the self-sacrificing aged Obi Wan Kenobi for reference in the original trilogy (Episodes IV, V and VI).  Otherwise I have the stiff-as-board actors who were really not much more than George Lucas's puppets in Episodes I, II and III - or the creepy Anakin turning into Darth Vader, or the way over-the-top Senator Palpatine, especially after he becomes the Emporer.  In short - there's not a whole lot to go on other than don't stray toward the Dark Side, use the Force, concentrate, the Force is for knowledge and defense, never for attack, size matters not, and you must unlearn what you have learned.

If you want to know more you need to delve into other aspects of the Star Wars universe, preferably those areas that have not been directly tainted with George Lucas's influence (yes, I have to give the man props for creating the universe, however with his success he has become like an evil God who ruins whatever he touches within his creation).  Those areas are novels and comic books continuing the story of the film characters following The Return of the Jedi, and also novels and comic books of what came before.

Most notably there are video games, and perhaps the best of those are Knights of the Old Republic, and its sequel - Knights of the Old Republic 2.  I bring these games up because even now, on modern computer systems, these games are still excellent in terms of graphics, gameplay, story and entertainment.  Furthermore, they help expand the understanding of what it means to be a Jedi, or a Sith, within the Star Wars universe.

So I'm a wee bit excited over the upcoming MMORPG:  Star Wars - The Old Republic.  I'm not a big fan of MMORPGs in general, although I have found Star Trek Online to be far more entertaining than others out there.  I also need to mention that there already was an MMORPG released under the Star Wars name by EA, which has seen its share of ups and downs, and has managed to generate a massive amount of bad feelings.  That Star Wars was based on the movies, however.  This Star Wars is in the past, over a millenia before there was even the idea of an Anakin Skywalker or a Darth Vader.

The Old Republic has entered into Beta testing phase, and apparently there is already an overwhelming number of people clamoring for an opportunity to participate.  The game is expected to release sometime in the Spring of 2011.  I for one, am rather excited at the idea of getting another chance to get an idea of what it is like to be a Jedi.  Jedi won't be the only characters people can create, however - there will be Sith of course, and also smugglers, soldiers, spys and the like.

If you have not yet had a chance to see the trailers, here's a couple for your viewing pleasure:

Deceived:

Hope:

As seen at Penny Arcade:  http://www.penny-arcade.com

A couple weeks ago I got the inspiration to check out the status of some custom mod projects for X-Wing Alliance that I had not recently been keeping track of.  I also realized that I had yet to try out X-Wing Alliance since I built my new computer system, and was anxious to see how good of an experience I could manage now that I have a 22" screen and a rather nice sound system to go with it.

My biggest hurdle (I thought) was going to be getting the game to work in my computer's native 1680x1050 widescreen resolution.  Most of the games I like to play were designed long before widescreen LCD flat screen monitors were the norm, and while most of them offer 1600x1200 resolution, it looks strange and somewhat distorted on the screen.

So I went about looking for the latest version of X-Wing Alliance Version Integrale (which sadly seems to have been taken down, the website used to be http://www.xwavi.com) and failing that started downloading individual ship model upgrades from the X-Wing Alliance Upgrade project while surfing around trying to find a widescreen solution.  Since the game was originally released in 1999 (making it nine years old altogether) there have been many advances in 3d rendering design, and the X-Wing Alliance Upgrade project is the combined efforts of 3d artists in their spare time who have recreated each ship for the X-Wing Alliance game with better detail and support for higher resolutions.  One of the more talented artists who goes by the name Darksaber also hosts his own X-Wing Alliance website and offers something called the Ultimate Craft Pack for X-Wing Alliance, featuring all of these ships and more in a single combined installation.  Of course, I found this after I had already downloaded every individual ship file from X-Wing Alliance Upgrade, but I went ahead and downloaded Darksaber's UCP as well.

In the meantime, my quest for widescreen support was getting a little upsetting, since from all appearances there was none. But a bit of digging finally yielded success in that department as well.  On the same Widescreen Gaming Forum website where X-Wing Alliance is listed as having no widescreen support, there is a hack that can be performed with a free hex editor to get your preferred resolution working.  One of the in-game video resolution options is 1152x864 (which is a bizarro resolution that nobody I know would ever use) and the above linked hack allows you to convert the 1152x864 resolution setting to your preferred resolution with a list of the hex codes necessary for the most common widescreen resolutions.  This way, even though the game lists 1152x864 under the video settings, I am actually running the game at my native 1680x1050 resolution after having performed this hack.

So I was excited - I had widescreen.  I had enhanced 3d rendered star ships.  I had a fast rig capable of running the game at full speed with all features enabled.  I was ready to start blasting TIE fighters to bits.

I started the game, enabled 3d, turned on all the features, set the resolution properly, and tried to launch a mission, and the game crashed.

Not to be deterred, I figured there was probably some sort of glitch with my ATI Radeon HD 2600XT video card drivers, so I visited http://ati.amd.com and downloaded the latest driver set, Catalyst 8.8 (I had been running ATI Catalyst 8.7).  I installed the new drivers, rebooted my computer, started the game, launched a mission...

...and nothing was rendering.  I was looking at the cockpit HUD, and beyond that there was the backdrop of stars and planets.  There was no cockpit interior, there were no other ships in the docking bay, there was no docking bay, there was just a bunch of stars.

My next step was to see if anyone else was having a similar problem.  As it turned out, there were others, and they were having nearly identical problems.  Pretty much anyone who has an ATI Radeon HD series video card cannot get the game to render 3d objects properly.  The best success anyone has had was to downgrade their Catalyst drivers to version 7.6 - 7.9, which allows about half of each 3d object to be rendered with flickering.  Also, there were problems with the text in the missions being pixelated and unreadable, although that comparitively minor issue could be corrected by enabling "Alternate Pixel Center" in the Catalyst Control Center.  I also tried Catalyst 7.7 and 7.9 myself with no better success than anyone else.  I even found a copy of Catalyst 8.9 BETA and again, had no success.  For extreme measure, I went out to Omega Drivers and found a 3rd party re-engineered Catalyst driver set that had been set up with additional tweaking support, with no success.

All of this took a few hours each evening, with multiple attempts within each driver set at tweaking individual settings within the ATI Catalyst Control Center in the hopes that one setting or another would allow it to work.  The problem seemed to be directly related to Anti-Aliasing, because if I allowed the drivers to use the game's settings the game would typically crash.  If I manually set Anti-Aliasing it would allow the game to run but would not render 3d properly.  No other setting made any impact on the game (aside from Alternate Pixel Center).

Finally, on a whim, I pulled out my ATI Radeon HD 2600XT 256MB GDDR3 PCI-Express video accelerator, hooked up a VGA cable to my Samsung 22" LCD monitor, and connected it to the onboard ATI Radeon X1250 VGA connector on the back of my case (my MSI K9AGM3 motherboard has built-in ATI video).  I made no driver changes, but merely rebooted the computer once after the card was automatically detected and set up by Windows.  I started X-Wing Alliance, launched a mission, and low and behold - I had fully working 3d rendering at full speed at 1680x1050 resolution.

In case you missed that - I downgraded from a fairly high-end 3d graphics accelerator that cost me $79.99 to the built-in 3d graphics accelerator that has an older GPU (graphics processor unit) and shares system RAM to get a nine year old video game to render 3d properly.

What the Hell is going on at your factory, ATI?!?!  The drivers are the same Catalyst 8.9 BETA as before.  This is clearly not a driver issue, but a GPU issue.  It's not a card manufacturer issue otherwise only people with Sapphire Radeon cards would be experiencing this problem.  I found people who were using HIS Radeon cards and other brands during my research, and we all had the same problems.  This is clearly a design flaw in what is supposed to be a superior 3d graphics accelerator, because an older and supposedly inferior model could do what it could not without any additional software support needed.

On a related note - I rebooted my system into LINUX and was able to continue to use the ATI official LINUX Catalyst 8.8 driver set after reinitializing my card from the command prompt and rebooting once.  Immediately I noticed a few rendering issues that I had been experiencing in Compiz Fusion were gone.  Again, without any change in software, by downgrading to a supposedly inferior graphics chipset I was able to correct issues with 3d rendering.

So now that I had X-Wing Alliance working, I proceeded to accomplish my ultimate goal, which was to get flyable space craft from Star Wars: Episodes I through III working in the game.  Bear in mind that in 1999, Star Wars Episode I had not been released yet, so the game did not feature any space craft that appeared in the prequels.  Later games would appear with only certain craft from the films, but they also received poor overall reviews and none of them offered the level of complexity as X-Wing Alliance.

A bit of history:  the first video game I ever purchased for the PC was Star Wars: X-Wing, a game written for DOS (although I ran it just fine on my first Windows 95 computer) and I loved it.  I beat it more than once, and I also modified the game, created custom missions, added space craft, etc.  The sequel, TIE Fighter, was a superior game in many ways, although I did not manage to finish that one before the next game, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, the first Star Wars space simulator designed to run natively in Windows was released.  Ironically, I had a lot of problems getting X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter to work after I purchased it, but once I did I found it did not have a good story line and therefore was less fun to play than its predecessors.  X-Wing Alliance took care of the story problem, and also offered full 3d rendering and effects on top of the core foundation of this series of games, with the added benefit of multiplayer support (which was also offered in X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter).   The appeal, however, was that each game in this series offered full control over your space craft.  You can manage power consumption, direct power from laser cannons to your defensive shields and vice versa, dump all recharging power from your weapons and shielding to your engines giving you a significant boost in speed, change speed, match the speed of your opponent, track through each space craft in the vicinity, view them in a top-down map, and more.  X-Wing Alliance was also the first game in the series to offer docking bays where you can re-arm your craft with missile weapons, and potentially change to a different ship in mid-battle, in addition to taking advantage of hyperspace jumps to complete complicated missions.

The reason I love these games so much is because they are about as close to being in the Star Wars universe as you can get.  The added benefit of having a good joystick, a great sound system and a large widescreen monitor allows for a level of gaming immersion that is simply amazing.  I love having full control of my ship.  I love being able to adjust and tune performance to my preference, and being able to do it in the heat of battle.  I just don't have the proper words to explain.

So to get back to what I was talking about - there are no games that offer this level of Star Wars space simulator experience and also offer any of the new space craft from the Star Wars prequels.  Therefore I had to find them and add them in myself.  My first stop was the X-Wing Alliance Version Integrale - a French project that not only offered a number of craft from the prequels but also a series of missions that spanned the entire six movie series.  Unfortunately, it was unfinished, and since the site is no longer there I suspect they have stopped working on the project entirely.  I still have the actual upgrade files and will post them somewhere where they can be downloaded when I get the chance, but the final release that I had downloaded, while offering cool fighters such as the Actis Eta 2 Jedi Interceptor (as seen in the opening of Star Wars Episode III), it had the unfortunate side effect of destroying all in-game sound effects, which ruined the experience.

Darksaber's Ultimate Craft Pack offers a bunch of additional ships, but none of the ones from the prequels.  So again, I had to turn to hacking the game.  Darksaber's site had a link to another 3d modeler who creates ships from the prequels for X-Wing Alliance, but they are in a format that is not easy to install and required 3rd party software tools to accomplish.  Due to the length of this post I intend to create a separate one that details how to accomplish this.  Suffice to say it took almost the rest of the weekend before I had a fully working (with sound!) Eta Actis 2 Jedi Interceptor, Delta 7 Jedi Fighter, Anakin's Modified Delta Jedi Fighter (as seen in the Clone Wars animated series), Asajj Ventress' Fanblade fighter, Droid fighters, TRIDroid fighters, Geonosian Nexus fighters, the V-Wing fighter, the V-19 fighter, and other craft from the prequels.  I personally love the Fanblade, but so far it seems that Anakin's modified Delta is superior to everything else in terms of performance, handling and firepower.

So thus ends my quest - on a happy note for once.  Stay tuned for detailed directions on how to install OPT and SHP files into X-Wing Alliance manually.

I'm turning into somewhat of a brand new starwars nerd myself. I love it, this new thrill of trying to scope out the best star wars deals etc. I mean don't get me wrong, I grew up with two older brothers so I was surrounded by Starwars and GI Joe on a daily basis. The dirt road behind my backyard at the time was my Tatooen (sp) playground and the field adjacent was the Ewok's Endore.

Anyway check this out man and scroll all the way down through all the pics: And DANG I JUST FOUND THIS!!!! LINK THAT I NEED TO PUT AHEAD OF THE OTHER ONE!!!!!!! LIMA OHIO SIX FOOT FALCON!!! SORRY MATTY DON't CRY :( I'm freekin' out right now myself!

http://boards.theforce.net/pittsburgh_pa/b10105/14048345/p1/?6

http://starwars.meetup.com/45/boards/thread/4034488