‘Star Wars: Dark Forces’ is now playable in 4K thanks to fan-made engine

Star Wars: Dark Forces, the classic shooter from 1995, has had a huge upgrade thanks to fan project, The Force Engine.

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The Force Engine seeks to reverse engineer and rebuild Lucas Arts’ Jedi Engine for modern systems, overhauling the games that used that engine, being Dark Forces and Outlaws. On December 19, The Force Engine released as Version 1.0 with support for Dark Forces complete, whilst the work on Outlaws is still ongoing.

The Force Engine is used to play the “vanilla” levels in Dark Forces according to a post on its website, but also includes support for “the many user mods developed for the original game”. There’s no longer any need for players to set up DosBox in order to launch the game, and introduces high-resolution rendering whilst also preserving the original 320×200 quality. This means those that seek the original experience can still do so, or those that want to crank it up to 4K on a widescreen monitor have the power It’s important to note that fans still need to own a copy of the original game to use The Force Engine for Dark Forces.

In the full list of current features, the creator lists the mod loader and high-resolution support alongside a GPU renderer which will improve performance at higher resolution, full input binding and controller support – although the menus still require mouse input – and quality of life improvements. These include but are not limited to full mouse look, aiming reticle, improved Boba Fett AI and more.

A new save system has also been implemented, meaning players can manually save to avoid the necessity of completing long levels in one sitting, but can also quick save “like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D”.

Dark Forces was the first FPS set in the Star Wars universe back in 1995. To play the game through The Force Engine, just set the source folder to your owned copy of Dark Forces and shoot away. In the future The Force Engine will include support for Linux and Mac, but for now anyone with Windows 7 and above is able to take advantage of this massive fan-made overhaul.

In other news, new research from Which? reports that the Joy-con drift experienced by some Nintendo Switch console owners is down to a mechanical fault.

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