I finally have been able to cobble together a complete boxed set of Wing Commander for Amiga. It took me for. ev. vah.
My first set had no blueprints, and a dead disk three. My 2nd set had everything, but some mildly wrinkled paperwork. So, I made 1 complete bad ass set and will release the others back to the wild soon for someone else's cobbling project (this is a very common experience with Infocom feelies, too, btw).
With the complete boxed copy, I began the installation procedure on my Amiga 3000 running OS 1.3.
After the 3rd disk finished copying its files over, I went to the drawer and opened it up. There was only another folder inside where all of the data files reside. No application icon. WTF?
I opened DOPUS and opened the Wing Commander drawer. Hm. There was an .info file in there. Strange...
So I clicked on the icon file and used the "Show" command in DOPUS. The application launch icon was indeed right there and looking just fine. So I went back to the drawer and re-opened it. Still no icon for me to click on! I started to scroll around in the window to every corner and it was nowhere to be found off-screen. Finally, I soft-rebooted the machine and voila! There it was! Woo hoo!
Never had that happen before.
I launched the program, and during the Origin logo intro screen (there is an orchestra and a conductor in front of a blue Earth planet) the conductor raised his arms and... the game froze.
I couldn't believe it. I powered down and rebooted the machine once more (after plugging in my joystick this time, trying to feel optimistic) and this time the game launched perfectly. Whew! I watched the first few intro animations - not intending to sit and play today; I just wanted to get things working. Frankly it looked fantastic and sounded great.
I'll never be a pro at this game like some (e.g. Shot97), but I do look forward to finally playing it some day soon.