Hardware, baby

Choosing the right hardware for any gaming project is important.

This game is 14 years old, so there will be little demand for a high-cost rig.

The upgrade project adds a  hell of a lot in terms of graphics, sound and game-play, but it doesn't change the fundamental core of the game. 

One of the biggest contributors on hardware is the HOTAS system. Both the throttle and joystick use a 15-pin game-port connector. There are convertors available to use USB, but they are unreliable at best. I've been playing X-Wing on a dual boot OS on my desktop (I run windows 7 x64 at the moment, with literally NO hope of talking to the game-port).

To separate my gaming from my desktop, I have a second PC, which will be used specifically for this project.

• 1.8Ghz Single Core CPU (The game won't recognize a second core, and I wont be running much else on the system. XP will be happy with this).
• 756MB DDR2 (I did want 1 - 1.5GB, but this is all I have spare at the moment, and to be honest, I can't see me needing anymore)
• Creative Sound Blaster Live! -  This was mainly to provide the system with a game port, but this 13 year old PCI card blows the crap out of the on-board sound anyway.
• GeForce 7200 GS - Probably overkill, but I want dual monitor support (more on that later)
• 2 x SATA HDD - Again, probably overkill, but I want to run the CD audio from a Disk Image on the second drive - I find this to be more reliable (and less noisy) than running CD Audio from the Optical Drive.

I'll be running Windows XP for the game(s). This presents a problem with the Thustmaster WCS, as programming the unit cannot be done from an NT-based system. To resolve this, I dug out another old piece of kit:

Running a Windows 98-based version of DOS from an internal 100MB ZIP drive allows me to configure the Sound Card, and the HOTAS from a compatible kernel.