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A Weird Install Story: Wing Commander

Posted: Sun Sep 01, 2019 11:17 am
by intric8
I finally have been able to cobble together a complete boxed set of Wing Commander for Amiga. It took me for. ev. vah.
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Getting every single original piece of paper - especially the blue prints - took some work.

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!
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The intro animation is short but very dramatic, and must have been jaw-dropping to see that kind of 3D animation at the time, which plays very fluidly on the A3000.

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.
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Better get ready!


Re: A Weird Install Story: Wing Commander

Posted: Sun Sep 01, 2019 5:11 pm
by Shot97
Have your son sit by while you play, bet he'll love it. Thanks for the mention.

Re: A Weird Install Story: Wing Commander

Posted: Sat Sep 07, 2019 10:11 am
by morningstar
Totally my kind of game, I really love it too, thanks.

Re: A Weird Install Story: Wing Commander

Posted: Sat Nov 23, 2019 10:11 am
by Mixel
I loved WC.. Played it on the 500+ I have my own weird WC story which is only tangentally connected to WC..

Kind of funny how emotionally invested I got in the stories of the mostly two dimensional characters through the campaign too.. It was pretty well written. :D I still have all the box contents but no box, i think. :cry:

My strangest Wing Commander memory, and I won't explain the whole story here, and totally unrelated to the game itself but I once halucinated an entire really freaky short movie while playing WC.. It was in the couple of hours after school when I was alone at home before parents got back from work. Our Amiga was rigged up to TV and I sometimes paused and switched between the 4 (maybe 5 back then?) channels we got over terrestrial TV back then. I told my family about it when they got home as I was absolutely convinced it was real and something I'd watched, but it was way too messed up (body horror) for something before the 9pm watershed, and it wasn't in the TV listings.

So I have this really weird story involving a couple living in a council flat slowly attaching to each other and dying connected to this really fun, not at all grim game, LOL. I know I fell asleep at the amiga a few times (i was really quite ill much of my teenage years and kept a terrible sleep schedule.) but its the only big occasion I know where I fell asleep without even noticing/was asleep and awake simultaneously. Every few years i convince myself it was a real thing (i remember it so vividly) and try to find it on the net, but someone would have remembered seeing it, and it's not online anywhere I can find.

So.. that's fun. :lol: