Playing Steam's Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 on a modern machine

Question

I purchased and downloaded Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 via Steam not too long ago. It's been nearly 20 years since I last played, and I was feeling somewhat nostalgic. Unfortunately, I found that it wouldn't work all that well out of the box.

There's only one option for display resolution, and it's only a few-hundred pixels. I don't think it's 320x240, but it's pretty close. On a large screen, this means everything is a cluster of pixels. Hard to see the other players. 3D acceleration also doesn't work; just turns my entire screen black.

I've seen people suggest things like dgVoodoo online, but I know too little about this app, and the places often feel too shady, for me to proceed confidently.

Surface Book (i7)
NVIDIA GeForce GPU
Intel(R) HD Graphics 520
Windows 10 Pro (15063) x64

How can I resurrect this game on my system, and once again live out my childhood?

Answer 1

From various Steam discussions, dgVoodoo seems to be the program of choice to get things running properly. If you're concerned with viruses and risk to your system, it's up to you if you want to install the program. Perhaps try it on a machine you're willing to wipe if something does end up going wrong, though from the various testimonials on the discussion forum, the program seems legit.