Star Wars : Starfighter

What works

Launcher, Configuration Options (Video, Keyboard tested), the Analyze Your Computer utility (under Help), the loading screen, Save and Load a game. All the critical functionality is there, and the entire campaign can be completed. The mouse appears to work too, although I didn't end up using it much. Performance was fine (as expected of such an old game). I posted the final level play-through under wine 1.7.36 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j33bvnNuu7g

What does not

Prior to setting the keyboard key mappings, the keyboard was not working in the game at all (or at least not in the game main menu anyway). When the menus said to press Enter for yes or Escape for cancel, only left-clicking worked (for yes) and right-clicking worked (for cancel). Very odd. This wasn't a problem after remapping the keys to my liking - all keys worked fine from that point onwards, despite Enter and Escape not being keys that are possible to remap). Selecting the View Troubleshooting Guide does nothing. The main menu does not appear correctly - as if only the top-left-most corner of the screen is blown up to full-screen. This issue is easily worked around by using alt-tab to switch to another application (which will restore your normal desktop resolution), and then switch back (which will now show the correct resolution). This may be specific to nVidia, so your mileage may vary. Cut-scenes play audio, but no video. Wine constantly prints "err:d3d_surface:surface_load_location Don't know how to handle location 0x100." throughout. This is the same when winecfg is set to full-screen or playing in a window (emulating a virtual desktop). It was not possible to aim while using the zoom and fire buttons. I had the arrow keys mapped to direction buttons (with WASD mapped to accelerate/brake and roll), E mapped to zoom and space to primary fire. With this setup, I could zoom and look around, but fire would not activate unless I was only using the left arrow button. If I was already zooming and had fire held down, only the left arrow button would work. This made the zoom button impractical for use in the game.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Joystick support, as I did not have a joystick with me at the time of testing. I also did not test changing the sensitivity of the mouse, as I quickly decided not to use it.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

I considered scoring this as Bronze, but I was able to complete the game (despite keyboard frustration and no cut-scenes to understand the plot) so decided to give it Silver. The game was installed into a 64-bit prefix, which (aside from the Steam font registry fix) was completely free of DLL overrides, registry hacks, etc (but other games were also installed via Steam within the same prefix). Tested using nvidia 356.35 drivers on a GTX 660M at 1280x1024.