20th Anniversary. (Falcon 4.0). 12-12-1998

Checking…checking…nope, I’m not surprised. Not the smallest bit, going down to the subatomic level. Not a single quark in my body is.

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I just dusted off DCS 2.5 A10 and flew with oculus rift. Great immersion and fun but I also have the Samsung odyssey before I trade them out what do you fine folks think is better for DCS?

Wait, you’re giving one away? Care to sell it over here?

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Bidding war! Lol

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Back on thread…

Did anyone play the F4 original Korea campaign all the way through? Any secrets or suggestions…as I reload F4 and Allied Force and whatever patches I need to bring it up to date.

I started it a couple of times. Great fun and I liked that there was some choices in missions. However after about 2 to 3 missions, I seemed to get stuck…tough missions that I couldn’t get through.

I got farther with Allied Force. Having participated in the real Allied Force at the HQ level, I can say that the missions were fairly accurate, albeit you had to accept a greater SAM and AAA threat…which made it more fun/challenging. :grin:

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For Falcon 4 you could do the dance but I personally just run it vanilla (GOG version + nGlide) it works on Win 10, GOG version is already patched to latest official 1.08 patch, but keep in mind it still have some original issues, like CTD’s from time to time.

You can even increase the ingame res in the 3dfx wrapper - my best preference is to set 640x480 in game and double that - 1280x960 in nGlide settings. That way you will get all the 2d art (cockpit) display nicely (1pixel=4pixels) while upping the 3d world res to 1280x960. If you have bigger monitor you can probably set it to 1920x1440 or even higher, but keep the multiple of the 640x480 for best results.

For Allied Force be sure to install the latest official patch (1.0.13) I have it linked in my video, the LeadPursuit site is gone but I archived the official patch on my google drive:

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Only 20 huh

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Yup, BMS really transformed the sim. Just compare the videos from my last post to this:

Still looking good!

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To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the original Falcon 4.0 I uploaded a clip of a mission I have flown about a year ago. I recently was browsing through my old videos on a portable HDD and found one I was planning to post but never did (I forgot!). So here it is - vanilla Falcon 4.0 1.08 in 1080p 60FPS showcasing full mission and some bonus cutscenes from the campaign.

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Ok I will admit to just watching the first 10 minutes. But what an informative 10 minutes! I came to Falcon starting with AF and moved on to Free Falcon and BMS. Seeing some of the vibe and layout of the original did much to finally explain what I was seeing and hearing in the later versions. After all these years the “OK listen up!” heard when you click the Mission Briefing still makes me a bit giddy. What a great, great game!

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This is one of those sims I really regret not playing at the time. I remember standing in the shop with this is in one hand and fallout 2 in the other.
I don’t think I made the ‘wrong’ decision buying fallout 2. But I wonder if I made the right one.

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Well Falcon 4.0 took years to get even playable. For the first few years all it could do was tiny training scenarios and very small instant action like things. The much vaunted campaign just would not work. It crashed, or ran like a dog and then crashed.

I think Falcon 4.0 would have benefitted greatly from todays bussiness models (early access releases, content packs for sale). But it was fifteen years too early for that.

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Well I did more or less the opposite of your choice and my feelings are that Falcon 4.0 is one of those rare titles that, in hindsight, went the opposite way normal games do…

Was a great collector item that turned out eventually be a great game!

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I second that. I have the binder edition, and to be honest it was a complete dog for a long time. Really for me BMS was when it came into its own. The binder sure looked great on the shelf with the rest of the Falcon family of game boxes, but that’s all it was for a long while.

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a dog that wouldn’t hunt! It was like the Korean Conflict slide show. I kept my binder and by the time Allied Force came around, it wasn’t that bad. Second the cuddos to BMS.

I would say the game became usable when 1.08 came out, which was the final patch before Hasbro shut them down. Some time after that the source code leaked, and that enabled the SPs and RPs and later the BMS/RV stuff.
F4:AF was a direction I’d hoped it would keep going. There has been no expose’ of what happened with LP, that was a company that seemed to snatch defeat from the jaws of success.

In short, the product worked well, was critically approved, sold beyond whatever expectations Atari had at the time, and was liked well enough by users (although some still preferred their particular F4 modded version)…and then the company withered away and eventually vanished with no fanfare, no warnings, other than increasingly infrequent communications about what was going on until there was nothing.

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I remember making some headway in the campaign in 1.07 already, but at 1.08 it seemed the worst of it was ironed out. They had such great plans for the future (F-15E, A-10, etc)

Yeah, the game was basically released 12 months too early (even though it had already been delayed so often, coming 7 years after F3).

For basic playability, yes. However, as “Mr.Average Performance PC” much of my life, I didn’t have a system that could really handle it until the mid-to-late 2000’s. By then my attention had turned to FSX (an early purchaser of Aerosoft’s F-16) and LOMAC.

Which brings us to today…DCS or F 4.0?…can one do both? :thinking:

yes we can! :+1: world peace :+1:

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