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Stinger has released his long awaited and highly anticipated update to wcdx! It now fully supports Wing Commander 2 and both Special Operations packs. This means a handful of annoying bugs and incompatibilities have been fixed, thus enabling the Kilrathi Saga version of the game to compete with DOSBox/GOG as the ideal way to play the originals in 2020. This release also includes bonus tools to explore the game's data files and listen to the soundtrack. Grab it below!
wcdx version 2.2 is here! After years of empty promises and unmet expectations, I can finally present to you the next official release of wcdx!What's that, you say? Version 2.2? But what ever happened to 2.0 and 2.1? Last anybody knew, there was just an alpha that kinda-sorta worked for WC2! What gives?
wcdx gives, that's what gives! Specifically, it gives you Wing Commander 2, and Special Operations 1, and Special Operations 2! All three games are now fully playable in all their Windows-compatible glory! (Well, as long as you don't look too closely at the cut scenes, I guess. They're still way too fast and jittery. But never mind the cut scenes! We're here for space combat!)
For those who haven't been keeping up (and with my terrible release cadence, I don't blame you): wcdx is a patch for the Kilrathi Saga versions of Wing Commander 1 and 2. The Kilrathi Saga was released for Windows 95 way back in 1996, comprising Wing Commander 1, 2, and 3, along with the Secret Missions and Special Operations add-on packs (each available as separate download). These versions contained some nifty enhancements over the original DOS versions, such as invisible cockpits (Wing Commander 4 style!), a frame limiter to keep the frame rate nice and steady (don't fly without it!), and perhaps best of all, a pre-rendered enhanced digital score based on the original MIDI soundtrack, courtesy of George Oldziey! Unfortunately, it also came with a lot of brand new bugs, including (perhaps most infamously) that planets and other space backdrops would no longer render, and one particularly short piece of victory fanfare music would just loop forever if it ever played. There were also numerous Windows compatibility issues that would not become apparent until several years later. wcdx fixes many of these issues, making the games enjoyable again on a modern machine with a steady, reliable frame rate and without the need to fiddle with DOSBox configurations.
If you're interested in trying out wcdx, feel free to drop on by the forums for instructions on how to download it and get it running! If you don't have the Kilrathi Saga, you can still download the PC Gamer coverdisk release along with the Secret Missions add-on to get started! If you want to play Wing Commander 2 with wcdx, and don't have a copy of The Kilrathi Saga, then I'm afraid I can't help you there; KS is not presently available for purchase from EA or any other official venue, though you may be able to find copies for sale on the secondhand market.
Lastly, this release of wcdx has some additional bonus goodies -- tools that you can use to examine the game's data files, and listen to the soundtrack! Read all about it here!
We have mirrored the package here (900 k zip).
