Help me, dosgameclub.com. You’re my only hope.

[Alkaryn Varyatar]

#12142

Hi! It’s great to discover this community. I first played *Star Wars: X-Wing* back in 1994 on a 486 PC running the DOS version—my computer didn’t even have a CD-ROM drive—and I played it endlessly. I remember experimenting with key combinations and finding one that changed the scanner range (I think it was Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S); for a long time, I looked into it and people on various forums insisted it wasn’t real, but I was 20 years old in ’94 and I swear it’s true. I recently searched online and found out that it was, in fact, an Easter egg. However, I’ve tried it with the Steam version and a floppy-disk version running on DOSBox and DOSBox-X, and it doesn’t work. I was wondering if anyone has access to an MS-DOS PC who could verify this and share an image.

[Tijn]

#12143

Hey welcome! I don’t have a PC handy to test this on, but I’m sure someone else here is able to help to get to the bottom of this intruiging mystery!

[Pix]

#12144

I could potentially check this out later. Can you remember if you had the expansion packs installed? I’m guessing you probably did if you spent that long on it. From what I recall B-Wing at the very least had a whole different executable to start the game so maybe it’s only present if one of those is installed?

[Alkaryn Varyatar]

#12145

Thanks for answering!! Yes I did have the two expansions, but not at first, I’m not sure if I found the easter egg when it was only X-Wing or when I got the two expansions.

[Pix]

#12146

I’ve tried with and without expansions and that key combination doesn’t seem to do anything for me. Ctrl-S stops the game dead until I start pressing keys again so something is going on there, with time still passing while nothing is happening it seems as things skip ahead a bit once it springs back to life but that’s all I found.

[Alkaryn Varyatar]

#12147

ohh, that´s too bad, I remember using a 4 keys combination, google suggested it could be that one (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+s), but honestly I´m not sure what was the exact combination….

Well thanks for trying!!

I tried in steam version using dosbox, and for once all I got was my missiles locking on target the moment I target them, but not needing to center the boxes, the locking was always on, but I cant reproduce the effect any more!!

[rocky1138]

#12159

I wonder if there’s a way to search the binary for the key combination.

[Bobbin]

#12248

Modern LLMs can probably reverse the whole program and find out whether the feature exists.

Absent that, I would suggest Alkaryn to ask the XWVM project, which reimplemented X-Wing from scratch finding out a lot of program secrets in the process (e.g. the damage done by any shot is affected by the speed of the shooting ship). Their Discord: https://discord.gg/juNj4BKMQq

[voxel]

#12250

Does X-Wing/TieFighter even have a range limit on the scanner? I thought all ships were always ‘in range’ and the only reason some were not shown was due to them not having yet been spawned in?

[Alkaryn Varyatar]

#12271

Yeah, I´m part of XWVM testers, I asked about it but we couldn´t reproduce the effect. I tried in DosBox and DosBox-X but only once I was able to have the effect working, I got target lock when changing objectives even when more than 10 (km?) units away; it was fun, but Azrapse tried too and he wasn´t able to reproduce it.

[Alkaryn Varyatar]

#12272

I´m not sure Voxel, if the ship is more than 3 km (I think) away you can´t start the lock for missiles. You can see them in sensors but cannot lock with missiles or lasers.