When Disney/Lucasarts gave us all the Collector's Edition content, they also added a program to help us run the various versions. This program was to emulate the old operating system DOS, which was used prior to and in various forms as part of Windows during the Windows 95-98 era when these games were designed. When you open Tie Fighter from Steam, several things should happen:

1. You should see a shell script window pop up that asks you which version of Tie Fighter you'd like to play.
   • (For the purposes of this guide you'll be working with either the Classic or Collector's Editions)
2. After you choose your edition, the shell script vanishes and you'll see a window open up with a .cmd window titled "DosBox".
   • This window is emulating a DOS environment using the open-source program DosBox.
     
   • Creating this environment allows programs written for DOS to run on Windows, which has dropped the old DOS functionality in recent versions.
3. A second window then opens which contains the Tie Fighter game itself and will probably attempt to run itself in fullscreen to simulate running Tie Fighter back in the MSDOS era.
   • ALT + Enter will toggle fullscreen on and off, if for instance you ALT+Tab out during play and don't want to restart the whole game.
4. If you close the first window containing DosBox, Tie Fighter will crash.
   • Tie Fighter is crashing because you just forced it back into Windows, which doesn't support much of the code anymore, that is why we had to emulate it.
5. Tie Fighter should then run the intro cutscenes and ask you to calibrate your joystick.
   • If you had a joystick, this will help you run the program.
   • If you lack a joystick and are playing with the mouse and keyboard, this will be annoying and you'll probably want to turn it off. (We'll get to that later on.)
6. If DOSBOX has correctly discerned your keyboard layout, language settings, etc. from Windows, then everything should more or less work fine here and you can stop reading.
   • If not, read on and I will help you try and fix your problems.
   • The most common errors are missing or incorrect keys, and that joystick issue I mentioned earlier.
   • I'll teach you the basics of fixing both of these.

First off, we need to locate our Steam folder, (skip ahead if you know how to do this). For everyone else:

1. Click the Windows icon and open up File Explorer
2. Click "This PC" on the left column
3. Now, go ahead and type "Steam" in the top searchbox
4. After Windows finishes searching your PC you should see the Steam folder in the results displayed. Go ahead and open it.
5. If you're like me, and you just found an Itunes folder full of Peter Gabriel singles, go back and choose the other Steam folder.

Now that we've got Steam's folder open navigate to the STAR WARS Tie Fighter folder, which will be in "steamapps" and then "common". We then need to open the folder containing the version you want to play. (Again, pick something other than "remastered" as the Special Edition version is Windows native and covered in one of the other guides already).

• Okay, now open the first .conf file entry in this folder using Notepad. (dosbox_tiecd.conf in the collector's edition folder)
• We're not quite done with the folder yet, so also navigate to the dosbox folder here.
• You now have easy access to everything we'll need to work with, so leave both of these open while you do everything else.

For those of you without joysticks, you'll want to scroll down to the heading in dosbox_tiecd.conf that reads [joystick].

• Reading this, you'll see the directions for setting up various joysticks.
  
• For no joystick, you'll see the term is "none", so underneath the section with number signs, change the setting for "joysticktype=" to none, (it'll start with either "auto" or whatever joystick setting Dosbox thinks you have here). Save the file at the top, but leave it open and go on to the next section.
  
• If you have a joystick or gamepad, read the settings carefully and try to choose one that best fits your needs under the "joysticktype=" setting, if it isn't correct. If you get confused here, look again at the # line with "Possible values", it lists your choices for that setting.
  
• If you end up really confused, check the dosbox forums for help over at: www.vogons.org about halfway down under the dosbox heading. Ask your joystick question under the General subforum of Dosbox if they do not already have an answer for you when you search through these forums. Chances are they've already answered it for your joystick if you use their search function at the top. For those of you confused by the forum name, the Vogons were from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and wrote the universe's third worst poetry.

This section covers what to try when your keyboard doesn't work period in Tie Fighter, or if it seems to have missing or oddly swapped keys. I am using a Logitech Wave Keyboard k350, which is a multimedia type keyboard Dosbox has trouble with.

We're going to be playing around with both Dosbox.exe in your Tie Fighter/Dosbox folder you should still have open, and the .conf file you've opened in notepad, (dosbox_tiecd.conf for collectors edition).

• First thing you can try is to change the setting "usescancodes" in your .conf file from "true" to "false". It's located right above the heading "[dosbox]"
  
• Pay attention to the line above that setting, "mapperfile=", because we'll need this later if this didn't fix your issue.
  
• Save the .conf file but leave it open and try starting Tie Fighter again, to see if it works now.

If it worked, have fun playing the game. If not:

• Open the dosbox.exe file in your Tie Fighter folder, and see if you can type.
  
• If you can't type here or the keys are giving weird results, scroll down in your .conf file to the very bottom and look at the "keyboardlayout=" setting. It probably is set on "auto" or some two letter country code that isn't correct for your keyboard. You can find a full listing of available country codes on the dosbox wiki at: https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/KEYB You would normally be entering these as a command within Dosbox which would read something like "Z:\>keyb us", or "Z:\>keyb us 850" if I wanted to use the specific United States keyboard layout from page 850 of the dosbox code. I think mine defaults to 858 when I just set it to "us".
  
• After changing this, save the .conf file, close the existing Dosbox and open a new instance, then try typing in Dosbox.exe again.

If you still cannot type period, then you're beyond my ability to fix your problem. So you'll want to visit the dosbox forums over at www.vogons.org and search for your particular keyboard type, or ask about it under the "General" subforum of the Dosbox heading.

Assuming you can type, but your keys are still messed up:

• Scroll back up in the .conf file so the line "mapperfile=" that I had you remember before is visible.
  
• Open up dosbox.exe again and this time push CTRL+F1 (as it prompts you in the big blue box in the Dosbox window).
  
• This will open up the keymapper program within Dosbox. We're going to be changing entries here to give you a keyboard layout you can work with in game.
  
• Now, on my Logitech k350, I'm missing an entire column of keys including +, ], ', and the right shift. So, I have to remap these to keys that can be detected.
  
• Check each key in the keymapper program and see what it is supposed to register as.
  
• You'll then adjust each key by highlighting that key with your mouse so it turns green, then clicking the button at the bottom that says "Add", and pushing either the correct key, or moving things to a new key if your key is not detected. Once you have mapped each new key, use the "Next" button right under "Add" to scroll through that key's assignments and the "Del" button to delete the non-working configuration so that the only entry for that key is the one you remapped it to.
  
• When we finish this process, use the "Save" button at the bottom and close the keymapper window.
  
• In the window titled "DOSBox Status Window", test if you can type the newly remapped keys.
  
• Also, pay attention to the line in this window that begins "MAPPER: Load...". You'll want to copy the address listed after "from" here exactly into the "mapperfile=" line of dosbox_tiecd.conf line so that it now reads mapperfile={whatever\your\address\was}. Mine is "mapperfile=c:\users\{myusername}\AppData\Local\DosBox\mapper-0.74.map". (The 0.74 is the version number of DosBox, so if you have a different version of DosBox installed than 0.74, yours will be different here).
  
• Save the dosbox_tiecd.conf file and close it. We were modifying this file only so we didn't have Tie Fighter overwrite our new keymap every time we started up the game.

By way of example, I had to change my key maps within Dosbox around to get a working configuration to the following:

1. + for throttle up got remapped to the Home key, since it was the nearest unused key that didn't require me to use the + on the num pad.
2. For the all important left bracket key that brings me to a dead stop, I put that on the Del key, since it is large and easy to find.
3. I could have ignored ' for dumping cannon energy to shields by using SHIFT + F10 as the manual suggests, but since I don't have a working right Shift, either, I moved it over to the End key. (Because when you need to dump energy to shields on a gunboat or tie defender, you usually need to do it right away and in as few keystrokes as possible).
   
4. I don't use the right Shift at all in game, so I left that undefined.

Your working key map may be different than mine, you'll have to mess around with settings in the dosbox keymapper to find one that works well for you.

Finally, if none of this is helping you please scroll up and hit up the vogons.org forum I told you about above, they should be able to provide more detailed Dosbox configuration info and help troubleshoot your keyboard.

I hope all of this info helped you to run Tie Fighter correctly. These are the steps I needed to take to get my own configuration up to the point where I could play comfortably. On the other hand, if you still can't get it to work, remember the resources I told you about in the guide:

1. www.vogons.org for DosBox help forums, and
   
2. www.dosbox.org/wiki/Main_Page for more information and specific settings.

Now get out there and blast a few rebel terrorists for the good of the Empire!