Hello good forum-people!

I have been trying to get one of my very favourite childhood games going; Tie Fighter. It took a bit of fiddling, the guides I could find were mostly for Win 7 or earlier, and I'm running 8, but I got it started, and it was EXACTLY as awesome as I remembered it!

...then something happened. I played for about an hour, took a break for food, and now I can't get the game to run again. At all. I try starting it in Win95 comp. mode with 256 colours and the game runs for a split second, then it minimizes and gives me this error message: "Direct Input Keyboard Acquire FAILED". The game looks like it's running in the background, in fact when I try alt-tabbing back to TIE95 I can sometimes hear a second or two of the sound, but then it flashes back to desktop.

I tried googlig the above error message and I got exactly one result, which was basically someone from 2005 saying "I've had this error message" and someone else saying "Huh? Re-install, I've never seen that error message before." Followed by the eerie silence of the dark corners of the internet.

I've naturally tried reinstalling Tie Fighter, rebooting, I tried to fiddle a little with my joystick settings and Directx cause I thought maybe that was the problem. But I'm stuck.

I got the damn game to work, why did this happen? Can anyone out there help me?

I recommend using DosBox, all I had to do is adjust "cycles" to max, other than that the game works fine (Win 7 64bit)

When you installed the game, did you use the fixed installer package? It may not make much difference since I believe it just bypasses the 16 bit installer that won't run on 64 bit systems.

Also, there is a patch out there for both the X-Wing and TIE Fighter Win95 versions that fixed some compatibility issues. If you search XWTIE95.exe or Tie95 compatibility fix you should find it if you haven't already.

Aside from those two things I have no other suggestions since I'm running Win7 64bit still.

Good luck with getting the game back up and running.

Another suggestion is to not ALT-TAB out of the game at all. In my experience a lot of DOS games will puke and die in various ways if they get ALT-TAB'd out of in DOSBox (or otherwise). I end up having to save the game and exit it, do whatever I need to do, then relaunch the games again.

same error with the x-wing gog release

Did anyone ever help with this problem? DId you ever get it working?



I am experiencing a similar problem (win7), when I start the program, the screen flashes and I get that error message. Around 2 seconds of sound comes from the speakers, but then it switches to my desktop.

There was a post on the game specific board where someone claimed to have been able to correct the error:

http://www.gog.com/forum/star_wars_tie_fighter_special_edition/direct_input_keyboard_acquire_failed

Is this with the GOG version? Then the support staff might be able to help. Or if it isn't, please tell us more about what version you are using (DOS version using DOSbox, or the later Windows version using some compatibility mode).

edit: ninja'd by yyahoo :-)