Hi, new to GoG after seeing a post regarding Privateer in another games forms on steam and as I couldn't afford a PC back in 90's and missed out on games like wing commander and privateer. My knowledge about dos etc is non existent I was wondering if any of the Wing Commander or Privateer games would work on Win10 and playable via mouse and keyboard (mouse for steering ship). Reading the forums I see things like dosbox any other patches needed to make things work which at my age I wouldn't have a clue to get to work heh!

How did you guys do it before the net and YouTube heh....must be an age thing :)

They all support mouse and keyboard, much less intuitive than a joystick but it's viable, not entirely sure about Prophecy though.

The GOG versions mostly work out of the box, I only had issues with 4, the movies being much quieter than in-game audio but it was easily fixed by downloading an AC3 codec that allowed to amplify the sound volume.
I did apply a few unofficial patches to Privateer 2 and Prophecy but they aren't strictly necessary to run the game since they just improve a few things.

Thanks for the reply. Never got into pc gaming early on due to first mortgage crippling me and a kid on the way heh. I've found a few keyboard reference cards on the net but Privateer 2 seems not to support mouse steering? Also seems from GoG reviews it's a buggy mess (posts are really old so not sure if they're relevant or not now)

Would be really cool to play these games now. The privateer series I would love to try....if I could be sure they worked heh

There is a fix for the bugs in Privateer 2 though it's not really a good game, it's fancy cutscenes intercut with quite a mess of a game(bugs or not, there are a lot of questionable gameplay choices), at least the other FMV Wing Commander games are somewhat competent in their game design albeit a bit basic at times.
The first privateer is a much, much better game.

I literally, like, grew up with Privateer and learned english / got my interest for english from that game, so I knew english even before I could write my own name. That's the amount of importance this game holds in my life.

Privateer 2... well, I knew it was supposed to be bad and ignored it for years, until I got bored and tried it out like 2 years ago. HOOOOBOY. I tried, I really, really did. It's an entirely different game and feel to what I love about Privateer, and after it didn't even respond to any key presses / mouse / joystick movements in flight in a slightly understandable way, I just binned it. SUCH a damn shame. I fiddled and attempted to wrap my head around how I was supposed to find my way around for the good part of an hour, even the bases were a mess. That, and maybe it bugged out on me, I really don't know what happened there.

I had to print the map to get around the game without getting lost, what really broke me is the impossibility to jump without killing all the enemies in the sector and the fact that they often just keep spawning.