CaptSopwith

Very nice! This music still takes me back. Menu 3 was my favorite of the lot - which comes at the end of the clip. I still catch myself whistling it from time to time!

If it's of any consolation Widow, I've been stuck in my apartment since last Thursday. We've been bombarded with snow, high winds, ice, and below zero temperatures. It has been miserable. Thank God I haven't had to go anywhere! And yet, I've still had a mountain of writing and grading to do. Cheers! And here's to getting out soon!

Someone actually made MIDI files of the Wings of Glory soundtrack and uploaded it as a zip file. I can't remember the site I found it on, but it's out there! So were you playing Dawn Patrol and Flying Corps Gold in the 1990's?

I completely agree. And not just the feeling of responsibility but also the sense of utter futility and helplessness in the air when you see a wingman go down in flames. What a horrible feeling. No wonder they drank so heavily!

Wow, gorgeous skinning work as always, mate! Bet your glad not to have to deal with a 256 colour palette anymore!

I was wondering the same thing... James, where are you mate?

Lou, I had to write you a note of thanks for sharing your WWI aviation library. I had not seen these posted until today and I'm in the process of downloading them. Set 1 looks brilliant and I'm really looking forward to reading these volumes. It's just too bad that I'll be away from my PC for winter break and I don't have access to a Kindle or else I'd take the whole collection with me. Many thanks again, this is a HUGE contribution to the community. Cheers!

Thanks for sharing Carrick. That's a nice N-17. RC flying was always a hobby I thought was cool but could never afford. It's much cheaper to get a $1500 computer and a copy of OFF than spend $1000 on a plane and then repair it after crashing over and over again! Also... the bloody thing sounds like a lawn mower taking off! Me thinks the pilot should install Creaghorn's sound mod!

From your account, I think you did everything that could be reasonably expected from a Quirk flight leader. Sadly, the Be2 was simply not equipped for aerial combat the likes of which you encountered. And with 3-1 odds, I'd say that fact that anyone made it home alive is pretty exceptional. So - unfortunately - I think you did everything you could, short of equipping yourselves with Bristol Fighters! PS: Just out of curiosity, what attacked you? I'm assuming it was a flight of EIII's but I could be wrong.

Wow... well, dramatized or not, that brought a tear to my eye. Thank you for sharing that Olham. Here's one of my favorites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikekLJdY_kE

Looks like Rise of Flight is trying to sweeten the pot and attract some new pilots with a new release of ROF dubbed ICE (Iron Cross Edition). Here's the press release. http://riseofflight.com/Blogs/post/2010/06/03/ROF-ICE.aspx

Here's my Windows 7 desktop.

I was just thinking the same thing James. So how old are you now Shred? Are you finally 30? Happy Birthday mate! You've always been one of the great board members to know over the years. Cheers!

Well, it only took fifteen years, four computers, three more hours of work this morning, and a lot of guess work, forum searching, and teeth gnashing. But this morning, after a decade and a half, I managed to get this classic working: (Note: The video isn't mine, but a great example of Wings of Glory in all its well... glory.) It works pretty well, and that trademark scream when you down an enemy is too good to pass up. It's also amazing to see how far we've come. After a few missions in the pixelated world of Wings of Glory, OFF feels like a true High Def sim. Just wanted to share with my fellow sim enthusiasts. I should also add that this was the sim that introduced me to WWI aviation and started the itch I've been scratching since I was 13 years old!

I'll chime in again and mention another possibility: browser. I just had my system lock up three times this morning using Mozilla Firefox. I had the same applications open each time, iTunes and Firefox, trying to perform the same task each time, and each time it locked. The computer booted to a black screen the second time, and the third time I got a full on BSOD. Just restarted, and I'm using Chrome with no issues.

Wow... and done! I knew it was an N28 and I knew it was a Twilight Zone Episode but I do belive nbryant wins the thread!

I had a hunch the Snipes would find their way in...

Origin made some amazing, under appreciated, and finicky titles in their day. But what they did release was generally quality stuff. Sadly, WoG was actually too large for my first computer's hard drive. There literally was not enough space for Windows 3.1 and a minimum install of WoG. I was crushed. It's been nice to go back and see what it would have been like. Granted, I'm playing it on a 22" flat panel monitor, something not even dreamed of in 1995. But I like to think it's close. Just out of curiosity, do you ever go back to RBII and have you had issues running it on newer hardware? I think the "old gal" is going to be in mothballs for the foreseeable future. After all, I have too many OFF pilots to kill... erm... I mean, train. ;) Hope you get that PC issue sorted soon mate.

I actually use DOSBox and D-Fend to make things a bit easier. Even with that, it took a few hours of work to get WoG to work. For whatever reason, it was a touchy SOB to get working back in the day and still is now. You have to set EMS memory to false and set the core to normal / auto. And even then, I had to play around with the sound drivers, mount the CD drive in DOSBox so it could read the speech files, (copying them to the HD and pointing DosBox at it caused WoG to crash when you calibrated the joystick), and then I got it work. Once I got a mission to load and realized I wasn't doomed to my hundredth "Dosbox has stopped working and will close" dialog box of the morning, I cheered. I know, I'm a bit strange.

Windows 7 is a lot better. In fact, 7 comes with a system imaging program that will image the entire hard drive. My strategy was to reinstall everything exactly as I wanted it, then image the whole thing. I back up documents seperately once a week and if anything ever happens, I follow two steps: re-image the hard drive with the old, good version of Windows 7, and restore my documents. Done in two. It's really simple and a hell of a long way from Format C:, Reinstall Windows 98 via boot disk and CD, install drivers... etc...

Hey Otto, Sounds like most everyone here has given some sound advise. My 2 cents relates to Windows 7. I'm running Win 7 Professional edition and can't recommend it highly enough. I installed it on my circa 2008 Vista rig and the machine runs much smoother even with the same hardware. OFF runs better. In fact, I recently updated my nVidia drivers for my 8800GT card and it erased all of the little tweaks I had copied from Home Boy a few years back and OFF wound up running a few notches higher on detail and ran at a higher FPS as a result. As far as the random lock ups, the only experience I had was when my processor's heat sink had actually become dislodged and the computer started to randomly lock up. No rhyme or reason, I even tried a reinstall of my OS before it occurred to me to look inside the box. When I did, I found bits of shrapnel inside the case from where the heat sink which was mounted vertically over the chip, had fallen out of its mounting, broken its fan, and hung by a strip of glue off of the MOBO. Check inside and make sure everything is okay. If it is, I'd say you've got either a memory problem, or a serious case of malware. If it's the later, I would highly recommend nuking the hard drive and starting from scratch. Just thought of a good experiment - try running the machine without internet access and see if it still happens. If it still locks up, it might be something else. If not, I would definitely pin it on malware. Hope you get back up and running soon mate!

Yeah, for its age the game play actually isn't terribly bad. The major issue is the incredibly antiquated control system. If I had 15 year old controls with serial port rudders, I'd have it made (for what that would be worth). As it stands the throttle and rudder control is done on the keyboard while the rest of the flying is done on the joystick. Which means in a dogfight, if you need to yaw the plane left or right to get a good firing position, you have to reach forward, press and hold the rudder control on your keyboard for the right amount of time, and continue firing while flying with the stick. It's a juggling act of joystick, mouse, and keyboard commands that more than keeps you busy. Graphically, its blurry, pixelated goo that is difficult to distinguish. That said, for a 15 year old game, Wings of Glory had movable control surfaces, wired planes (something the original RBII did not have), and an early padlocking system. And for 1995 standards, the gameplay is actually pretty good and the AI isn't bad either. They managed to down me a few times. That said, wow, have we come a long way. A quick back story on why I wanted to see if I could get this thing working in the first place. In the summer of 1995 I picked up a copy of PC Gamer that had the then ubiquitous demo CD included, and sure enough, there was a one mission demo of Wings of Glory included. I got the demo running and for some reason, I became completely obsessed with WWI aviation. From that one mission, which I flew some 600 times, I started reading books on the topic, watching TV programs, and learning the odd names WWI planes had. Flash forward three years later (seems much longer than that) and I picked up Red Baron II. Six months after that, I became CaptSopwith on the old Flight Sim Forum and the rest is history. In short, I'm a professional historian and a flight sim fanatic all because of this one demo mission on one CD from one game. It's nice to finally play the sim that started this long strange trip, even if it took nearly half of my lifetime thus far to get it working! Ironically, I should point out that Red Baron 3D still refuses to run properly on my system. The First Aid kit actually got it working, sort of. The dgvoodoo setup included makes the game choppy but stable. Swap out dgvoodoo with Glidos and you get much better in game performance, but the game will CTD upon quitting a mission every single time. Go figure... thank goodness there's OFF!

Couldn't have said it better myself. It does add to the immersion. Otherwise you're looking at empty rudder pedals and wondering where your feet went.

Olham, I haven't checked the map in a while. I'm amazed at how many pilots have been added! OFF has quite the following!

Congrats Creaghorn! That's fantastic news! :drinks: