X-Wing will push the limits of your computer’s power, especially if you are running on a 68040-based system. In order to achieve a satisfactory frame rate, X-Wing provides a number of options you can use to trade off detail and/or music for greater framerate and better overall gameplay. Most of these are accessible via the Preferences item in the File menu or through keyboard hotkey commands. Please refer to your X-Wing manual for appropriate commands.
Here is a list of things you can do to increase performance on your 68040 system:
• turn off music. Generating the music in X-Wing takes a considerable chunk of the available processing power. By toggling music off, you can often realize a large performance gain, especially on slower machines.
• turn down the detail settings. A great deal of time is spent doing shading of the models in the flight engine. Turning down the detail levels will reduce the work X-Wing has to do to draw objects. You can try turning off some or all of the detail settings such as galaxies/stars, space debris, engine glow, spacecraft markings, etc. Reducing Starship Detail will also help framerate, especially during graphically intensive missions and dogfights while reducing Death Star detail will help in any missions which contain the Death Star.
• turn on interlacing. Because drawing to the screen takes the most time, this option tells X-Wing to just draw every other line. Your cockpits will still be completely drawn, but the world outside your cockpit will be interlaced. This will greatly improve performance in graphically intensive missions containing capital ships or the Death Star.
• turn off virtual memory. If you haven’t done so already, please go into the Memory control panel and turn off virtual memory. Although virtual memory may give you more memory to load X-Wing, you may experience performance degradation or crashes.
Performance Tips for PowerPC Macintoshes
X-Wing is written in 100% native optimized PowerPC code. This means that in general, performance should not be an issue. If the game is still not running satisfactorily smooth, you can use the same techniques outlined above. However, please be aware that turning off music does not help PowerPC frame rates nearly as much as it does 68040 machines.
Memory
Memory Before Playing
X-Wing is a highly memory-intensive game. If you have a Macintosh with 8MB of RAM, you may have difficulty finding the 5400k minimum that X-Wing requires to run on a PowerPC-based machine. The game should run just fine at that memory level, but the more memory you can give it, the better its performance and gameplay quality will be. Please refer to Memory for suggestions on how to free up more memory for X-Wing.
X-Wing requires a minimum of 4500k free RAM in order to run on 68040 machines and a minimum of 5400k to run on PowerPCs. If you have a Macintosh with only 8MB of RAM, you may have to work a little to find the minimum amount required to run X-Wing. If you have more than 8MB of RAM, you can increase the size of the preferred memory to 6500k for PowerPC machines and 5500k for 68040 machines. By doing this, the "quit all applications" dialogue will not appear and the game will not try to quit any applications/disable music before running X-Wing.
You can find out how much memory is available on your system by choosing About This Macintosh from the Apple menu in the Finder. Look at the value next to the “Largest Unused Block”. That value indicates how much memory you have available for running X-Wing. Note that if you have other applications running, they will eat up some of your memory, so you should quit them first to determine the maximum available.
• disable unnecessary extensions and control panels. If you are running System 7.5 or later, use the Extensions Manager control panel that shipped with your system. It is suggested that you turn off everything that isn’t vital and restart before running X-Wing CD. To do this conveniently, first save your current configuration by choosing Save Set... from the pop-up menu above the list. Name this set “Standard”. Next, turn off everything in Extensions Manager except your CD-ROM driver (either the Apple CD-ROM extension or your particular third-party driver) and your joystick's driver software and choose Save Set... again, naming this set “X-Wing CD”. Now, before you run X-Wing CD, simply choose your X-Wing CD set from the pop-up menu in Extensions Manager, and restart your system. To return to your usual setup, choose “Standard” from the pop-up menu and restart again.
If you are running a System version prior to 7.5, you can do exactly the same thing with the Extensions Manager control panel that you copied to your System Folder when you installed X-Wing CD. You can use the pop-up menu below the extension list to save extension sets, just as described above. However, properly enabling a set with this version of Extensions Manager involves two steps. First, turn off everything by clicking the All Off button. Then, enable the set you want by selecting “Enabled Set” from the pop-up menu and—while still holding down the mouse button—moving the mouse over the name of the set you wish to turn on. When you’ve finished, restart your system to enable the set of extensions you have chosen.
IMPORTANT: Some third-party hardware require their own drivers to operate properly. If this hardware is essential to your running X-Wing CD (e.g., joysticks, monitors or hard drives), you will need to make sure that you don’t disable the extensions and/or control panels that control the hardware. Consult the users manual for the hardware in question to find out what is essential.
• quit all applications before running. Each application that is running takes up some memory that X-Wing CD could be using. If you’re tight on space, make sure you quit other applications before playing the game.
• reduce the disk cache size and turn off any RAM disks. In Apple’s Memory control panel are options for controlling the disk cache size and for creating RAM disks. If you have created a RAM disk, turn it off and restart your system before running X-Wing CD. If you really want to push your memory to its max, reducing the disk cache to 96k or less can also help, at the expense of slower disk access.
• turn off Appletalk. Disabling the networking software in your machine's system can free up to several 100k of memory, depending on the network configuration used. To do this, go to the Chooser under the Apple menu, change the setting for Appletalk to "off" and restart your machine. IMPORTANT: Make sure that you turn Appletalk back to "on" when you're finished with the game.
• choose "disable music". If you get a dialogue telling you whether to "quit all applications" or "disable music," select "disable music" since doing this will free up some memory to run the game.
IF ALL ELSE FAILS: If after trying the above suggestions, you still find that you do not have the minimum free memory required to run X-Wing, you may have to turn on Virtual Memory. Before you do turn on Virtual Memory, make sure that you have freed up as much memory as you can by following the steps above. The more free memory you have, the better your performance will be with Virtual Memory turned on.
Note: On PowerPC's only, we found that RAM Doubler was incompatible with X-Wing CD.
Controls
Mouse
This is the default mode for the game. There is no setup necessary when you begin the game for the first time. If you need to enable the mouse for flight control at anytime, you can do so by going to the preference menu either from the menubar or by hitting P during the game. Once in the prefs menu, go to the upper left hand corner and click on mouse. A dialogue will then remind you that "A joystick is recommended for optimum game play." Click on "ok" and the mouse will be ready for use. If you later decide to play with a joystick, make sure you follow the instructions below for turning on the joystick.
Joystick
Although X-Wing defaults to the mouse the first time you begin the game, you may use a joystick to control your spacecraft during flight sequences. Please note: Gameplay is greatly enhanced when you play X-Wing with a joystick. To enable a joystick, go to the preference menu either from the menubar or by hitting P during the game. Once in the prefs menu, go to the upper left hand corner and click on joystick. A dialogue will then ask you to calibrate your joystick. Follow the instructions as they appear. For more information on joysticks, see the "Joystick Read Me" in the Controller Settings Folder.
Keyboard
Besides using mouse or joystick to control your spacecraft during flight, you may also use the cursor keys. To fire, simply click your mouse button. We do not recommend the use of keyboard for controlling flight but we did find that a combination of mouse and cursor key control worked better than either control alone.
Undocumented feature: Hold Ctrl key while clicking on the zoom button to zoom in during inflight map.
Troubleshooting
The game keeps crashing on my Mac with DOS Compatibility card.
Before running the game, you should disable the DOS Compatibility card by turning off any of the software required to run the card in the Extensions Manager and restart your machine. Turn the DOS Compatibility software back on when you're done playing.
The game kicks me back to the desktop or the screen freezes during the opening movie.
Please make sure that you are running the latest version of the Apple CD-Rom drivers (version 5.1.1) If you are running with any driver version less than 5.1.1, you should get a dialogue box alerting you to this fact when you try to run X-Wing CD. To install version 5.1.1 of the Apple CD-Rom driver, please use the installer found in your X-Wing CD under the folder "CD-ROM software 5.1.1".
I'm seeing low-res cutscenes when I'm playing on a 68040 machine.
Due to performance limitations on some slower 68040-based machines, X-Wing will automatically switch to low-res cutscenes to provide the best display performance. If you would still like to see the high-res cutscenes, you may activate them by holding down the command () key when a particular transition is loading. NOTE: Not all the scenes in the game are in hi-res, so holding down the command key may have no effect.
My CH Flightstick Pro joystick seems to drift or feels off-center during flight.
If the trim (wheel dials at the base of the stick) of the CH Flightstick Pro are miscalibrated, the game cannot detect this, even after going through the in-game calibration sequence. Please make sure that you have gone through the joystick trim calibration found in the CH Flightstick Pro control panel before starting X-Wing.
I'm playing on a Powerbook and all the objects in the flight engine are leaving what seems to be pixel trails.
Because of possible hardware limitations of certain Powerbook machines, this problem may occur. For optimal gameplay, we do not recommend playing X-Wing on a Powerbook.
I just completed a mission and hypered out. However, I still failed the mission.
If you complete your mission goals, but hyper out before getting the "Mission Complete" message, you will fail the mission. You must stay around the battle area until the "Mission Complete" message appears before hypering out to guarantee that the game registers your mission as a success.
I have invulnerablity on but I can still crash and burn on the Death Star.
In order to recreate the tension and excitement of the Rebel attack on the Death Star in Star Wars, the creators of X-Wing CD wanted to keep the game at a certain difficulty level. Therefore, you can still crash into the Death Star even though you're set to invulnerable.
My joystick won't calibrate when I am in flight.
The joystick won't calibrate unless you have the joystick mode set in the preferences dialog. Select the dialog with by hitting P, and select joystick. A calibration dialog will appear for you to calibrate your joystick.
My keyboard commands don't seem to work.
Make sure that the caps lock is turned off. Your keys won't work in X-Wing when caps lock is on.
I can't seem to be able to fire my weapons when I am flying an X-Wing or B-Wing, even though I have missiles available and plenty of energy to fire lasers.
Make sure your S-foils are open. Hit "F" to open them. You can't fire weapons when your X-Wing or B-Wing have their wings closed.
I just finished Tour 3, Mission 13 and 14. Why don't I get flight ribbons for them?
The attack on the Death Star is an honor all by itself.
My saved film seems to be inaccurate sometimes.
Because of limited funding and resources, the Rebel Alliance consider flight cameras lowest in priority.
Technical Support
If you are experiencing any problems with X-Wing CD, please carefully reread this Read Me and refer to the X-Wing Reference Manual. If after you have tried everything and you are still experiencing problems, please feel free to contact our technical support line. For your convenience, if you cannot get through to a representative by phone, you can access technical assistance through fax, through modem into our BBS or through our website on the internet. When contacting us, please include as much pertinent information about your computer as you can: make, model, peripherals, RAM and hard disk size, the version of the system software used for the game, the version number of the CD Rom driver that you are using, the title and version of the game, and a detailed description of the problem. It would also be of great help if the computer that you are experiencing problems with is within easy reach when you call. If you send us a fax, please include your name, return fax number with the area code, and a voice phone number so we can contact you.
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Version History
Version 1.0.1
Fixes a Type 1 error with Bonus Mission 2 and Tour 1 Mission 7. Fixed problem with default setting of mouse controls and using the keyboard with cursor arrows and the control key. Gravis Firebird support added and now allows user-defined settings for CH Products controllers. Fixed a bug when using multiple monitors and selecting the preferences dialog.
