Recently I’ve been down the Eagle Dynamics memory lane playing their older games - Flanker, Flanker 2, Lock On. It’s nice to still have the ability to play them (those with Starforce DRM like Flaming Cliffs 1 and 2 might be problematic though on new PCs).
Since DCS World is not so young anymore - the first release was back in 2012, I was looking for a way to play those old builds again. I know that with the DCS Updater you can downgreade your DCS World version to earlier release, but AFAIK with the current version you can go down to 2.5.0 (earliest active branch).
I would love to be able to have latest release of DCS 1.2 and 1.5 available preferably as separate installs with access to the modules I owned in those versions (like Flaming Cliffs 3). I tried using the Steam version and Steam console to get to the older builds (you can use app_id, depot_id and manifest_id from steamdb), but had no luck with this approach. Perhaps it is possible currently using other method @SkateZilla ?
In fact it would be great if ED was able to release all of their back catalogue on GOG - I know there could be some licencing issues with SSI or Ubisoft, but considering that great legacy preservation it would be worth to at least try @wagmatt
I haven’t tried it, but if I would wouldn’t it removed my current up to date version?
IIRC you could have two versions of DCS installed at the same time - stable and openbeta (you would have 2 separate DCS folders in your Windows User folder), but since openbeta has been dropped some time ago I’m not sure how this would work now.
I used the updater to downgrade my version (back when 2.9 came out to drop back to 2.8 to test if degraded performance was due to something with my rig), but when you do this your current version gets replaced. Ideally I woudl like to preserve the latest DCS version and have the older one installed as a “separate game”.
you can use dcs_updater and manually initialize a new install in the advanced update functions, it’ll prompt for dcs updater exe path, path where you choose the install version and branch, Im out in the field so I cant post a screenshot, and it will go thru all stages to initialize and download the core.
last time I checked albeit it was a bit ago. 1.2.16 was preserved, but Im not sure about OB 1.5.x or OA 2.0.x versions.
But examples sake I have roughly 9 Installs, not counting dedicated server installs.
I still have DCS A-10C in Steam. I last played it Dec 24, 2011 it says!
A mere 7GB install…wow. Lots of old community screenshots and videos stored there, too.
I tried to do that, got response from their API that the requested branch was not found.
My steps were:
• make new folder e.g. “DCS World 1.2”, put DCS_Updater.exe inside
• init the folder by running command:
DCS_updater.exe --quiet init EN x86_64 1.2.16.43180@release
• running command to perform install:
DCS_updater.exe --quiet install WORLD
Tried latest stable releases of 1.5 and 1.2, both not found. Feeling that I might be doing something wrong I went to try downgrade my actual DCS install - I changed dcs_variant.txt for my main install and run it so it generates new DCS user folder (to preserve my original one) and tried to downgrade my main install to latest 1.2, still no-go
