This 14 year old game still looks good. Too bad Flaming Cliffs 1.12 has this awful StarForce DRM crap, which makes playing on Win10 impossible to my knowledge. Even on Win XP I had some issues with it few years ago. Couldn’t play for a week after purchase untill SF support finally did something on their end making the game playable for me. It would be nice if they put all their older games on GOG or Steam without that PITA-DRM.
I tried reinstalling it on my Win7 system a while back, and it did something that wrecked my DVD-ROM drive. Never did get it working again properly.
That’s a bummer. My Flaming Cliffs 1.12 installer is digital, so I don’t need optical drive to run it. Nevertheless older StarForce drivers that are bundled with that install supposedly don’t work on anything higher than XP. I have Flaming Cliffs 2 from Platinum release (on physical DVD disc) which also has SF but some newer version which works fine on my Win 7 laptop, I didn’t tried running it on my Win 10 desktop. And since I don’t have DVD-ROM drive in that PC, only portable USB one I have big doubts about getting it running on that machine.
I’d like to put FC2 onto my older PC (now also running 10). I have the downloaded installer but haven’t tried it yet.
Getting FC1.12 to work on Win 7 (or Vista) was never a problem for me, and I’m pretty sure I read recently on the ED forum that there are guys using it on Win 10 as well.
Yup:
Yeah I saw that thread the other day, although they say that they got FC2 and first Lock On running on Win 10. Flaming Cliffs 1 (Lock On 1.12b is the latest version) is the one that causes trouble with its SF drivers.
I got Lock On 1.02 working on my Win 10 which is the version shown in the vid (it has no SF-DRM). And the FC2 from Platinum works fine on Win 7 which I can confirm.
I will have to try running FC2 on Win 10 and see if that works, there is finite number of activations/deactivations for this game and I don’t remember if you can have it installed on more than one PC at the same time? My last installation wasn’t deactivated as I had a HDD failure on my Win 7 laptop where I had it installed so I wonder how would that go?
I’ll be trying both (as time permits - so much to do and so few hours in a day) as well, so I’ll let you know how I get on.
My truly honest question is:
What can you do in Lock On that it’s not doable in DCS World?
Nothing, although it’s in a different environment. The Crimea peninsula. And since many of us have been flying for a long long time it might be nice to revisit those old sceneries!
Acknowledged!
Also, I’m pretty sure the old Crimean Air War stuff is still up at Lockonfiles. Lot of great content there.
Yep, we lost Crimea in favor of the southern Gergia when the Black Shark and Flaming Cliffs 2 came out. But if I’m not mistaken the Crimea will return with new Black Sea terrain coming with DCS World 2.5? Or did I made that up?
Thanks Brix, if I get it working first I will post the results here. But for now I have a whole A-10 campaign to fly in Lock On 1.02. 
It was heavily speculated for a time, but ED has confirmed they won’t be bringing it back with 2.5. Which is disappointing to say the least
I’m guessing there’s some political considerations there too…
Spot on imho - in fact I always surmised that is why it was removed in the first place.
Anyway, I still have dozens of missions and campaigns for FC1, which probably work in FC2, that I never had time to fly, also as mentioned, the CAW mod. Still got all the briefings in folders here on my shelf! If anyone needs any bits for CAW, I’ve got them all, so just shout.
I was never able to get it working back at the time, which is why I never flew it - but I will.
It was removed for Black Shark, and I believe the reasons was that they wanted to expand the map into Georgia, and the 32Bit executable couldn’t handle a map that size. The Inguri-Rioni plain is still the most object heavy area of the map. As for why it’s not back shrugs shoulders. I’d imagine politics has something to do with it, though I’d more assign the cause to lack of man hours. Between Nevada, Hormuz, and what looks to be a substantive update of the existing map with the addition of Northern Turkey if recent screens are to go by (still lacking objects though, grumble).
I still want the Crimea back: It’s the home to one of the four major Russian naval organizations, it holds nostalgic value, and it opens up long range missions that don’t really exist right now.
They will not. Lomac/FC1 use one mission format (.bat, .cmd, ?), and FC2/DCS use the .miz format (which is essentially a zip). The two are sadly incompatible.
I remember Flaming Cliffs having eaten two DVD drives due to StarForce many years ago when I got it. That was probably the key reason why I never got into DCS.
Never too late to start.
I know optical drives are pretty cheap these days, but I’d prefer not to have to replace it every 1-2 months. 
pfft. casual. I haven’t had an optical drive installed for coming on four years, not that I can say DCS has ever killed one.