It Begins...

In my excitement I unzipped the files and started the game right up. Oh, how I had missed the beep music of Starflight's theme song! I quickly realised, however, that even the old hand-me-down Pentium laptop was too much processor for Starflight. Certain of Starflight's aspects run perfectly fine regardless of processor, but others, like exploring in your terrain vehicle planetside or, heaven forfend, encountering hostile alien vessels in space, quickly led to an ugly doom. A bunch of green bees buzzes around your ship for about half a second, then you see "HULL DESTROYED - GAME OVER". Bummer. Fortunately, I had a copy of DOSBox handy. After turning down the CPU cycles a bunch of times, the theme music stopped hiccuping and settled down and I knew I was ready. Since I played this game in the old days and I am Nostalgia Woman (TM), I set the speed to fairly close to what I remembered it being when I originally ran the game on my Tandy 1000. This seems to be somewhere between 600 and 1000 cycles, give or take. I tweak it every time I load the thing up so I don't remember what the best or most authentic number might be. I tested the speed planetside first, just to be sure. I'd rather lose a crew member than my entire ship! A bit of tweaking later and I was ready to go talk to the Veloxi. Give them tribute indeed! I told them to shove off! They didn't take too well to that. They still don't like me, six game months later. Well, who can figure insects, anyhow? But the speed settings were fine for space combat. I decided to spare them my meager wrath (I'd only just started out, after all!) for the moment and made a hasty retreat. Withdrawal. Fighting withdrawal. I went away. Darn Veloxi. Don't listen, Orlash.