STAR WARS™: Dark Forces

STAR WARS™: Dark Forces

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How to edit the controls and settings the correct way
By Cyrix
If you want to know how to edit the settings with the Dark Force setup utility, just like we did in the good old days, this guide is for you.
   
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Setup
You grew up in the glorious days of DOS, and want to relive the days when Lucasarts made good games, through the excitement of editing settings in a separate DOS utlity. Or you want to know what life was like for your parents in the dark ages before you could control devices with touch screens and voice commands. This guide is for you.

You need to open Install.exe to access the game settings, but it will only open in DOSBox. You'll have to open it manually.

Step 1
Right click on Dark Forces in your Steam library. Click Settings or Properties or whatever it says there. Go to the Local Files tab and click Browse local files.

I'm not going to ♥♥♥♥ about trying to enter the entire folder path in classic DOS syntax where you have to abbreviate folder names that are more than 8 characters. If you want to do so, go ahead. Otherwise, copy the Game folder into the root of your C drive. Now it should exist at c:\Game

Step 2
Back in the Dark Forces directory, open DOSBox. Enter these commands, one line at a time

  • mount c c:\game
  • c:\
  • Install

Now you're looking at the setup utility. It's self-explanatory. Change the settings however you wish, and then exit the utiliy. Type exit to quit DOSBox.

Step 3
From c:\Game, copy Jedi.cfg. This is your newly edited configuration file. Paste it back into the Game folder in your Dark Forces Steam directory.

Now when you launch Dark Forces through Steam, you'll have the settings you entered earlier. If you need to edit the settings again later, repeat steps 2 and 3.

Ah, the good old days.
4 Comments
Ryan B 27 Nov, 2020 @ 2:47pm 
If you didn't already know, you can just drag your DOS executables onto a DOSBox desktop shortcut and it will open the file in DOSBox easily. By the way, I need to spread the word, for every DOS game on Steam, you should always go into the configuration files and launch the game in your own version of DOSBox installed on your computer by putting the game's path in the autoexec area of the game's config and your game will look amazing. This gets rid of the fuzzy image quality from Steam's DOS games.
Cyrix  [author] 16 May, 2020 @ 1:04pm 
@Rashkavar Actually, that's because "Jedi" is what Lucasarts named the engine that they developed for the game.
Rashkavar 10 May, 2020 @ 10:10pm 
Interesting to note that they called it Jedi.cfg, even though the only allusion to Kyle Katarn's force abilities is a single line from Vader at the very end of the game. Shows they already had at least a vague idea that Jedi Knight was possible as a continuation of the series.
gbone13 18 Jan, 2020 @ 3:01pm 
It seems that the controls for selecting weapons or headlight and goggles are not reconfigurable, only the movement and main controls. But thank you anyways.