>>22617653>FreespaceJesus Christ I never thought I'd see something like this.
>>22622278>>22622448TL;DR: You'll be okay playing FS Port, but if you're married to the idea of the playing the original original, play the original, but know you'll need to be experienced in getting old games running.
Mechanically, the games are basically identical. While I'm a purist and I would say to play the OG Freespace if that's what your after, FS1 is a huge pain in the ass because while it's not THAT bad to get running, some missions have mission scripting that can be completely broken when run on modern computers. I've released patched versions of the missions that gave me trouble, but honestly you'd be doing okay with just playing FS Port. There's some minor differences, but I don't want this to be a gigantic 2000 word post. Let's just say that I've also submitted pull requests to FS Open/Port to fix certain problems I had with it that were merged because some of those differences really bothered me, but I don't know if they made their way to public FSPort releases.
You might also want to consider playing FS2 (the SCP/Open version) first instead though. You don't really need to have played FS1 to enjoy FS2 (though it'll help to understand the callbacks), and that FS2 has much better mission design and the iconic beam weapons you've probably heard of. It's much more polished overall. I started with FS2 first and didn't play FS1 until like a decade later.
