...anyone? 😒

I've confirmed that there's another error that pops up; seems to occur after I lose my fuel if I keep flying for longer: my wingman and any other friendly pilots suddenly decide that I've turned traitor, and they attack me.

At a wild guess, possibly some memory's getting doodled on that shouldn't. The thing is, I've run this under proper DOS... so if it's an error in the game it must be exploiting DOS's slack approach to memory management...

I could also be an error in the emulation of arithmetic instructions. A couple of months ago, Qbix(?) fixed an error in (I think) the handling of Binary Code Decimals (BCD) as generated by some old Borland Turbo Pascal compiler. An obscure problem like this could also exist in Strike Commander and could turn the game-logic up-side down.

Just a theory....

Heh. I've just remembered that I'm still using DOSBox 0.62. I've just downloaded 0.63, and I'll see how it goes...

[edit]...damnit! No change.[/edit]

[edit again]Ok, a bit more detail about what configs I've tried.
priority=highest, low
memsize=64 #at present; tried with 256 as well - didn't help
frameskip = 0
cycles=7600 #Intel Pentium 4 2Ghz
rate=22050
blocksize=3048
prebuffer=900
mpu401=false
[sblaster]type=sb16
gus=false
pcspeaker=false
disney=false
xms=true
ems=false #same story as Privateer
modem=false
directserial=false
ipx=false

As for the core: dynamic terminates immediately, full runs slowly with skipping sound, simple and normal both run fine with the sound skipping slightly with normal (none fix the problem, of course). For the record, I'm running Strike Commander on it's own lowest detail settings as well.

I also tried loadfix, which didn't help either.
[/edit again]

[another edit]Using loadfix to allocate all but the 4mb Strike Commander needs to run didn't help either...[/another edit]

Grr. Tried the CVS, which didn't work either.

SC was one of the most heavily copy-protected games of it's time. It sounds like the game thinks it's a prirate copy rather than an original game. I believe the symptoms you describes were designed into it so if someone tried to copy the game and play it, it would so the pirate thought he had managed to do it, but would then the gameplay would degrade (fuel gone, friendlies attacking etc, performance of the plane dropped dramatically so it was very difficult to take off etc).

Hope that helps.

That doesn't really help at all - why does it think it's pirated and how can I tell it otherwise? It's installed from floppy disks, so it should be expecting files to be on the hard disk.

[edit]Come to think of it, the version I'm trying to run might not be my floppy disk version. One of the disks was slightly stuffed so I tried another version I found online. So maybe this is what's going on...[/edit]