• Warbirds Library V4 (Resources for now) How to


    We just posted part one of the how to on uploading new files to the Library. Part 1 covers adding new files. Part 2 will cover making changes to your the uploads you own.


    Questions or comments please post them in the regular forums. Which forum is that... Well it is the one you spend the most time in.

    Thanks the Staff

    Library How to

Reporting back

SdC

SdC

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Hi all, thank you SOH for preserving the library!

I've been away for many years, and just got CFS2 running again on my new PC, thanks to the links to DDraw.dll i found on the old forum. And I must say, for a game that old, not too bad.

Had some serious health problems back then that may have seemed like I dropped off the face of the earth, and I almost did. The past 5 years, I've been in good health again, and now have some spare time to maybe finish up some of the things I was working on back then.
Thanks to many people I was in contact with back then; Richard Ludowise, Rhumbaflappy and others, I learnt pretty much all there is to know about the scenery and object systems in CFS2, and I was VERY close to being able to 1:1 convert the roads and coastlines of FS9; I seem to remember there was only 1 major bug left.
And there is also some Landclass trickery stuff on my harddisk that I don't think I ever properly released. In fact, the stuff I made that's in the library here now is just a random collection of beta's.
In parallel, I was making an add-on/configuration manager manager, that was still in its early stages. With the coding experience I have gained since then, I think that would still be a very feasible project to do; I'd love to be able to just create and load Playlists for various campaigns/missions.

Long story short, looking forward to catching up with you all and to flying all the old campaigns and stuff again!
 
Welcome back.

All of the old things should be here even the threads if you dig back.
 
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Thanks all for the roll call.
Having spent the time refreshing my memory and going through my local and online archives, it's a bit emotional.
Sadness for all the great people the community has lost; Rest In Peace.
Joy you are still here, and the library is still growing!
Hope and inspiration: CFS2 and retro-computing are two hobbies I can combine here, to attempt and make a contribution in keeping CFS2 alive for the next generations. For the next generation, I'm looking at people who are into retro gaming; that's a pretty big chunk of the gaming community at large.
We are at the point with emulation that is now reasonably possible to run cfs2 with (limited) hardware acceleration even on non-intel hardware with Windows 98 in DosBox-X and it'll get better in future. If not in Dosbox, then Qemu or Virtualbox or Wine in Linux. I'm sure there's enough demand for people to be able to run ancient code in the far future to drive those solutions.
At some point in the foreseeable future, it won't work on mainstream Windows releases any more, and emulation will guard against ultimate binary death.
However, the people that are going to play it, will probably not go through the whole learning curve and detective work to extend it to what we know it can be; as immense an effort as SOH has put into preserving the zips, there is a lot missing and super complex, and a minefield to work through all the dependencies and finding dead links, messing with config files, when they want to replay the events they saw in the documentaries.
No promises, but it does give me inspiration to continue on building the add-on manager I envisioned 15 years ago. But better, because I've learnt in the hiatus from using similar tools for modern games, and what i now know about the inner workings of cfs2/fs200x
I've spent the week recovering my archives and code and set up a VM with an ancient version of Visual Studio to keep compatibility with Windows 98.
Chocks away!
 
I have seen 86Box and PCem pop up on the Youtubes. Even watched a video about one of them. They seem to be Win95/98 able at this time.

Not sure how they would handle CFS2 and CFS2 with out hardware acceleration is kind of yikes looking.

CFS2 minimum requirements
Operating System:Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me
Processor:Intel Pentium 266 MHz
Memory:32 MB RAM
64 MB RAM required for Windows 2000
Graphics Card:SVGA graphics, 16-bit color, 800 x 600 resolution
DirectX:DirectX 7.0
Sound Card:DirectX compliant sound card
 
Howdy Sander! Glad to see you again!

And Allen, I'd say both the CPU and the graphics are "yikes" in that setup. I remember fiddling with CFS2 with a 500mhz CPU, either 16-32 MB of RAM (I think?) and an early Geforce 2, and getting maybe 11 FPS with some of the complex planes at the time, like the SimTech Dora. The stock aircraft could maybe give me 30 FPS.

I think about what it could have been if Uncle Tgt's scenery had been around, well lets say I would not be surprised if 5 FPS would have been the norm around Henderson Field. ;)

The "sweet" spot for CFS2 hardware-wise for me was an AMD 3200 Athlon with 8 GB of RAM and a 6800GS.
 
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