A new overhaul mod has just been released for the 1990 DOS version of Origin Systems' legendary space flight simulator Wing Commander.
W.C.A.T. (or The Wing Commander AllTinker Overhaul Mod to give it its full and proper name) is the work of a veteran developer named AllTinker and is now online available as a "beta/in development" build to get feedback from players ahead of its final release.
According to AllTinker on the project's itch.io page, its main goal is to to fix some of the timing issues that were introduced when machines became "too fast to correctly play Wing Commander" in the early '90s. These are issues that fans have likely encountered when trying to configure the game on DOSBox, to run on their modern set-ups.
AllTinker's mod is apparently the result of roughly a year's part-time labour, and follows on from several other aborted attempts to fix the game over the years.
As he explains, in order to address this issue with the timing of various scenes in the game, he needed to add "game-wide sync-to-blank-based speed limiting" to the title. This required him to make a huge number of changes to the code under the hood due to the way scenes were originally put together. The finished result, however, should hopefully be that the game runs a bit smoother to what players are typically used to in the past.
In addition to this, the mod also includes various bug and content fixes and introduces some new features too. There is now support for a 4-axis/4-button joysticks, for instance, as well as refinements to the Asteroid field difficulty to make it fairer. That's in addition to a newly introduced Keyboard "smooth auto-centre" mode and a "fine" mouse control option with a reduced deadzone.
W.C.A.T. is completely free, but requires you to own a copy of the game's files to run. The download is, meanwhile, is being offered in three flavours, ranging from an automated installer for Windows (bundled with DOSBox-Staging) that will locate your files and copy everything over by itself to a "minimal" version, for custom DOSBox set-ups and real DOS machines.
When it comes to real hardware, the mod targets for mid-tier 486 microprocessors or faster. Pre-386 machines aren't supported. Here's a link to the download page.