2002.06.12 ~17  X-Wing nostalgia

It's been many many many years since I played Star Wars: X-Wing, the space
combat simulator.  Never played it again ever since that hard drive crashed
(a whopping 345MB...).  Recently, however, there appears to be a surge of
re-release/re-package at Fry's Electronics.  A large number of old-ish
games repacked into a simple shrink-wrapped jewel case (instead of a
massive box large enough to hold a couple trans-Atlantic oil tankers).

Among the LucasArts games in said small packages were X-Wing, TIE Fighter,
X-Wing Alliance, Dark Forces (1), Rebel Assault II (where's 1?), and X-Wing
vs TIE Fighter.  What I distinctly remember is the original X-Wing running
under MS-DOS.  This X-Wing CD required Microsoft Windows and DirectX
something or other.  This suggested (a) someone, somewhere, is doing an
authorized maintanence of this stuff, and likely to do so well past the
expiration of MS-Windos XP, (b) trying to get this to work under WINE will
probably turn out to be a fscking PITA.  Similar thing with TIE Fighter: I
remember it originally ran under DOS only, and the CD cover stated MS-dows
as a requirement.

I decided to get X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, to get the basic feel of both the
Rebel and Imperial snubfighters in one package (I only got as far as the
TIE Fighter demo version before the hard drive went farming).  It also
stated network play (at 8 max... oh well).

WINE 20020610.  Installation went mostly well -- at least all the files
made it to disk.  Startup was a problem; XvT (and apparently the other
space combat games) use a launcher app.  The launcher kept wanting to
install DirectX no matter what.  There was another executable, z_xvt__.exe,
which looked promising (weighing in at 1.7MB, over xwingtie.exe's 200K, I
figured this was the meat of the game).  Intro played fine... sort of.
After six seconds, the WINE debugger popped up.

More strings(1)'ing.  Found "skipintro" option.  No more debug window, but
now the "Create Pilot" dialog appears.  No keyboard input recognized.
Dammit.

Visit LucasArts support.  Visiting X-Wing downloads to get topace5.plt
pilot file.  Plop in and hope for best.  XvT gets to main menu ("Data
Pad"), crashes.  Try brute force, "echo foo > foo.plt".  Starts fine, pilot
data repopulated, but name ends with a funny glyph.  Probably the newline.
Try again, "echo -n foo > foo.plt".  Start again, pilot data repopulated
with initial data, name looks fine.  Keyboard still ignored.

Try an actual combat.  Briefing works.  Start mission.  Says "Prepare for
mission launch".  Crash.  Presumably related to 3D gfx.  Error messages
mention some WINE function with the string "MESA" in it.  It maybe not even
be related to 3D per se, since the line after mentions a function about
DirectSound and setting Cooperative Level.  WINE dies with error 254.

Probably I'll just wait for WINE to mature.  Either that, or try to whip up
an SDL based engine, which would be an overwhelming task to do from
scratch.  Pondering...