Question about Falcon 4.0 if anyone plays that

[Blacklight]

Question for any of you Falcon 4.0 players out there.

I recently dug out and installed an original copy of Falcon 4.0 on my windows XP system. I set the program to run in Windows 98 compatability. It runs fine and wonderful until I end a mission. It crashes to desktop and has me send the little error message to Microsoft through that little clicky box.
I'm assuming that it may be a bug that can be fixed by patching it up to the latest version that it was while still supported.

My version is 1.0.0.2

I found the official patch for it to bring it up to version 1.08. It's an executable file.

I try running the patch but it doesn't seem to want to run even when I have it set to run in Windows 98 compatability. I also tried copying the file directly to my Falcon folder and ran it in there with no luck.

Could I just have a corrupt patch ? Can anyone familiar with this direct me to a patch that works or help me figure the problem out ?

(I never thought it was possible for a manual to be larger than the Dangerous Waters manual. I was wrong ! Hehehe !! At least in Dangerous Waters, usually you have the ability to look away from the screen to glance at the manual. In Falcon, when I take my eyes off the screen for a seccond, I plow into the ground at supersonic speed !)

[NeonSamurai]

Before i move this over to the flight sim section ill take a stab at it.

First off are you installing from the original cd? are you using the correct patch (not sure if there are localized patch versions or not).

But I would bet odds are you are trying to apply a corupted patch if your not getting any dialog from the program.

I will also add most people who still play with the original falcon 4.0 (not allied forces) typicaly play with one of the superpacks available for it which try to fix alot of the problems with the game (im avoiding mentioning them by name due to some legal "issues" with one of them in particular).

You may also wish to take a look at Falcon 4.0 Allied Force http://www.lead-pursuit.com/

Lastly I will mention that you may be better off digging around www.frugalsworld.com and www.simhq.com for F4 info as they have a much larger community for that game then we do (most of our virtual pilots seem to mainly fly either IL2 or MS Flight Sim)

[Blacklight]

Okay. Thanks. I'll take a look there and see what I can dig up.

I can't seem to find any patches or anything for just plain Falcon 4.0.
All I can find are patches for Falcon 4 Allied Assault.

[Skybird]

Falcon 4 AF is payware. there is a free mod that installs with one-click installer, it is called SP3. Ask at Frugals.1.08 leaves you with the basic patching only, and that still left much to be done and in no way has been complete. there are other free mod/patch projects, but I lost track of them in the past two years.

[NeonSamurai]

The last superpack was i belive sp4.2

Btw I would ask people not to mention that "other" mod/pack (you know the one I'm talking about if your a f4 nut) here for I think obvious reasons (and if the reason is not obvious to you, its because of the very grey legal issue involving it, which last I am aware of was not resolved.)

Here are some other links i dug up that you may find handy, in no particular order.

http://www.geocities.com/kamox/#Newbies
http://www.simmersworld.com/default.php?page=default
http://forums.frugalsworld.com/vbb/s...d.php?t=115795
http://www.freefalcon.com

[Blacklight]

Thank you very much ! I'll go check those sites out. I really should get this thing patched up to the latest version.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Blacklight

Thank you very much ! I'll go check those sites out. I really should get this thing patched up to the latest version.

Indeed!

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by NeonSamurai

The last superpack was i belive sp4.2

Btw I would ask people not to mention that "other" mod/pack (you know the one I'm talking about if your a f4 nut) here for I think obvious reasons (and if the reason is not obvious to you, its because of the very grey legal issue involving it, which last I am aware of was not resolved.)

I may be forgiven if I touched a sensible issue. I am pretty much out of routine and havenT checked the community develeipements for two years, if not longer. Only the number of patches for AF I counted. currently waiting for the soon-to-arrive new poatch, and give AF abother go - after the first three patches, I left AF due to too many critical issues. Meanwhile, superb FS9 aircraft kept me busy, and I am waiting for a dedicated soaring simulation to arrive next week. when I have worked myself into that (I know nothing on gliders), I will remember to check F4AF.

[Blacklight]

That's the catch.. I keep only finding patches for AF and not for the original Falcon 4.0.

It's like everything for plain old Falcon 4.0 dropped off the face of the Earth and got replaced by Falcon 4 AF patches and stuff.

All I keep finding so far relating to patches or sites dealing with the original game, not AF, all turn out to be dead links and the one patch I do find doesn't seem to want to run at all.

Looks like I have an OLD nitch game that doesn't have much in the way of Internet support in the advent of Allied Force coming out.

[NeonSamurai]

Ok well falcon 4.0 headquarters does have the 1.08 patch

From that geocities site, only mirror c seems to be working for the sp4.2 download

This site also has them all other then the one not to be named
http://www.fourthhorseman.net/paveway/falcon.html and the links i tried did bring up the download box, though it does not have the sp4.2 one click installer (it does have 4.0 and the 4.2 patch however).

As for why this stuff is so hard to find, well it directly has to do with F4AF, and them leasing (pretty sure they dont own) the rights to falcon 4.0 and trying to put a stop to all the ""Illegal"" modifications to the original which competes with their product. However technicaly the mods that came before allied force are quasi legal (like any mod), its the one that came out after (that unnameable one here) that they realy activly tried to squash.

As for F4AF, well they are currently at patch 13 (1.0.13) which is supposedly the last patch they are going to make, 12 was suppost to be the last, and i think the one before it as well . Not sure though what bugs and issues are still outstanding however. This patch was infact released just yesterday.

[Skybird]

There is a report on that a very old problem of missiles not triggering the RWR earlier than on impact is back with F4AF 1.13.

A single unfortunate player's fate, or true?

[Blacklight]

I can see one thing that the Official patch cleared up right away.
I was getting some serious jerky movements of the mouse and horrible frames per seccond. Following the instructions for that patch, (I think the deleting of the msvcrt.dll did it), it made everything run nice and smooth. I havn'e really taken the plane out for a spin too much yet but I can already tell that there's improvement. And I no longer seem to crash the program when a mission ends.

Now I'm looking at the supermods. I'm going to download them both and try each out individually. You guys rock for helping me find this stuff !!! Now at least I'll have a copy I can toss on a CD or DVD of these things so if they go "missing" or "hard to find" on the net any further, I'll at least have copies.
My next goal is to actually fly the thing without plowing at supersonic speed into the ground. I'm used to slow moving naval sims. This is.. a whole new ball game. I can't believe I had this sim collecting dust in my closet all these years without realising how cool it was.
Any other suggestions you guys have for downloads or tutorials or anything to enhance my sim experience ?

[CCIP]

Welcome to Falconeering!

I hope I can set aside some time to get back to it one day, but you're in for one wild ride. Just take your time to learn it and don't rush. Put it this way - it took me six months to really learn that game. I thoroughly enjoyed that learning experience and the game is still usually installed on my HD.

Just go through, train yourself, practice lots of instant dogfights, make sure you know your weapons from A to Z! Don't jump into the campaign right away - you will be LOST. Try to learn the sensors as well as you can so you and get off the labels (if you're using them) as quickly as you can. Falcon is at its most satisfying when it's a game of SA (situational awareness) first and foremost, one that you can really win with practice.

So do you only have the patch or...? If not, well, go get yourself modded and fast! Post-SuperPak, the game is probably more different (and better) from un-modded than GWX2.0 is from stock SHIII. I'm not up with the latest RedViper and OpenFalcon developments (two teams that are still modding F4), but the older SuperPak is still a good bet. The last version is SP4.2 which I believe you can get as SP4.2 OCI (One Click installer), but I really hope someone pitches in on those new developments first since I think they're even further ahead.

[Blacklight]

I just downloaded everything for Free Falcon 3, and now I'm in the process of downloading everything for SuperPAK 4.

What mod is the GWX of the original version of Falcon 4.0 ?

[CCIP]

Originally Posted by Blacklight

What mod is the GWX of the original version of Falcon 4.0 ?

Oh, these days I'm not sure :p

Basically, my understanding of the falcon legacy is uh...

Stock F4 begat RealismPatch, a series of releases that began improving it.

Realism Patch eventually begat SuperPak releases, which really reached a peak by the SP3 release.

Around the time when SP3 appeared, a group called BMS did an exe mod which could be installed on top of superpaks. It was allegedly made with permission of Atari which held F4 copyright at the time, and it may have inadvertedly introduced a few glitches which it didn't have a chance to fix as their permission to continue work ran out when rights to F4 were purchased (and eventually made into Allied Force) by another company.

From that point, there was two development tracks - one was SP that didn't include any of the BMS code, which ended with SP4.2, a remarkably stable and functional release. It's quite old by now and graphically outdated, but is a very safe and full-featured functional bet.

The other was FreeFalcon, which disregarded the possible legal issues and continued to work with BMS and SP3 code. Eventually FreeFalcon releases were modded further to become RedViper, which is a fairly recent thing.

Whichever you choose, I believe SP4.2, RedViper and OpenFalcon all come with one-click installers that you can put on top of the stock game (patched to 1.08).

The only piece of the equation I don't get because of being out of the scene for a while is OpenFalcon. I do see that it uses BMS code and is also probably a FreeFalcon derivative.

Personally, I was always rather happy with SP4.2, but I may try these new releases sometime.

Otherwise, if you want an idea of the changes - look up SuperPak cockpits vs stock cockpits! There's about 5 times more functional switches, buttons and other tweaky things in the cockpit that all do their proper functions. If you're particularly thick-skinned, you can do a fully realistic 48-step startup procedure before each mission. (or skip to taxi or takeoff with all your systems already on). Still unparalleled in any sim! And the amount of systems, weapons, and other additions is massive. Not to mention improvements to AI, graphics, and all this other mumbo-jumbo. Basically it's a whole new game. Post-SuperPak, the game is the most realistic and full-featured combat flight simulator ever. Nothing even comes close to the level of detail it includes. Unfortunately my suspicion is that by "ever", it may well mean that we won't see anything approaching it anytime soon, if indeed ever.

One ifunny story I recall about one of the early SuperPak (or was it even before SuperPak?) releases was when it got held up by a couple of weeks - reportedly because there was concern over classified information on F-16 cockpit systems (I think it was something to do with countermeasures) being leaked via that.