The Force is With Me! TIE Fighter 95 on Windows 7 x64

I’ve mentioned before how I was looking forward to trying many of my old games on Windows 7.  I was delighted to learn I could get my most favorite game working, Star Wars: TIE Fighter.  This game was released for DOS, when I first played it, and then on a CD collection for Windows 95, when I played it some more.

TIE Fighter wouldn’t work on Windows XP for anything I tried.   When Lucasarts said that the game would never work on XP and would never be fixed, I figured that was it.   I was crushed.  I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of the install CD.  As with Duke Nukem, I had hoped someday I’d get it going on a leftover copy of Windows 98.

I knew, over the years, Microsoft was releasing new application shims for XP, and I had intended to try the Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT).  I never got to it.

In 2004, someone did!   Craig Perry created a compatibility shim for both TIE Fighter and X-Wing.  It’s on the Lucasfiles web site.  (UPDATE:  Use my shim instead:  xwtie95v2.zip)   It doesn’t feel right for me to use it unless I can understand how it works—I should have figured this out in the first place!  I’m stupid!

Quoting Microsoft, the application compatibility infrastructure works like this:

You can circumvent the compatibility problem by using the Compatibility Fix infrastructure to target a specific application fix, for a particular application (and typically for particular versions of that application). The Compatibility Fix infrastructure implements a form of application programming interface (API) hooking, which uses the inherent linking ability of the APIs to redirect from Windows code directly to alternative code that constitutes the compatibility fix. The Windows Portable Executable File Format includes a number of headers that contain the data directories that are used to provide a layer of indirection between the application and the linked file.

There are many compatibility fixes, or shims, exposed in the ACT, most of which are not in the standard compatibility mode UI that you see in the properties tab of a shortcut or an EXE file.   The shims for an application (which may cover more than one executable) are bundled into a .SDB file and placed in the Windows directory \Windows\AppCompat.  Here is the SDB file for TIE Fighter, XWTIE95.SDB:

After installing the ACT, and running Compatibility Administrator on this SDB, we can see this fix applies to two applications, Star Wars TIE Fighter 95, and X-Wing 95.  The right pane displays specific settings for TIE Fighter.   There are shims for two programs, TIE95.EXE and TIESTART.EXE.  (X-Wing 95 is similar, so I won’t describe that application.)

TIESTART, the game launcher, has two fixes applied, CorrectFilePaths, and SingleProcAffinity.  The latter is a common fix—it tells Windows to keep the application on one processor.  Until very recently, there were almost no home PC’s with multiple processors;  XP Home, the host for most modern PC games was only licensed for one processor and in any event you could not buy, let alone afford, a multi-processor board that supported a 3D video card, sound or even game controllers (analog, in those days.)   Almost all PC games are single-processor;  there may be some newer games that now take advantage of multicore CPU’s, but since I seldom run contemporary (read: expensive) games, I wouldn’t know.

CorrectFilePaths fixes the Windows path for the executable so that it sees Windows 95 file paths.

TIE95, the main executable, has the most important fixes as far as the game is concerned.  In addition to SingleProcAffinity, it has EmulateCDFS;  this allows Windows 95 apps to see  the CD (now DVD) drive in the way they expect;  there were many changes to the CD filesystem drivers between 9x and XP.  But two more fixes really make this game work.

IgnoreException instructs Windows to ignore specific runtime exceptions.  In TIE Fighter’s case it is set to READ_ACCESS_VIOLATION.  The game would often crash when launched, and this fixes that without affecting the rest of the executable too much.

MapMemoryB0000 is the most important fix for the game.  Microsoft:

Some applications require that a block of memory be mapped at B0000 as it is on Windows 9x. This compatibility fix will map a block of memory at the B0000 address for the application. Applies to: Windows 95, Windows 98.

Without this fix, it was impossible to run TIE Fighter with 3D hardware.  Fix this and the game runs.

Am I all set?  Not quite.  I run 64-bit Windows (7 Ultimate).  TIE Fighter and many other Windows games use a 16-bit installer which won’t work in 64.  Windows has code for some 16-bit installers but not this one.

Fortunately, many games, unlike most applications, don’t have complicated installations:  Just a directory copied off the install CD or uncompressed from packages into \Program Files, a Start Menu shortcut, and installation of redistributables like DirectX and other common libraries.  Many games never use the Windows registry and store their configuration data separately from Windows.

Easier still, a guy in Austria has made MSI packagers for the Star Wars series;  all you need to do is get game patches and the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 redistributables, plus the original CD, and copy all the files to a directory to slipstream a new install CD.   Markus Egger’s site has install patches for TIE Fighter, and all of the Laurence Holland games (X-Wing, TIE Fighter, X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance.  Did I mention I own all of these?!)

The Totally Games forum has tips on getting this series of games to work on modern Windows.

I’ve successfully run TIE Fighter and the other games, though all of them have their individual compatibility quirks, some of which are fixable, others not.  Many newer video cards don’t support older video modes (320×200) correctly, which is a problem for a good number of old games.  X-Wing Alliance is notorious for distorted fonts (there is a replacement fonts package available.)

Amazingly, TIE Fighter and the other Star Wars games work and play great with the XBox controller—the games even default to useable control bindings even though gamepads were not originally made for the PC, let alone with analog controls like modern pads.  (I have not bought or used a traditional joystick in years.)

This is already a long post, so I’ll just close with one last screenshot:

In this training mission,  my commanding officer is about to have a really bad day.  It’s actually one of the mission goals that you take over for your flight leader if he’s taken out of the action.  The game doesn’t say exactly how that’s supposed to happen…then again, it’s just a regular day in the Imperial Navy.

Happy Star Wars gaming!

(UPDATE:  Once again, I’ve revised the SDB file.  Get it here.  And read my updated post.)

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