VOGONS


First post, by Procyon

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Hello everyone,

I wanted to bring this game under the attention of the Dosbox crew, since it isn't in the compatibility listing and I had some trouble to get it work. I got my copy of this game in a CD-ROM collection (Megapak 4) and it has a very sparse manual with no instructions on how to get the game running.

The first problem I ran into was the installation program, it said that I hadn't enough disk space. The solution was to simply copy all CD-ROM contents to the harddrive.

Then when starting the game the introduction would run nicely, but when you select a mission from the menu (training, single mission, etc.) the game crashes with the message: Error: FIPATH.DAT is not in your BK directory!
The solution is to make a file, with notepad for example, with the name FIPATH.DAT and put it in the installation folder. This problem is not caused by Dosbox, I vaguely remember having to do this on old dos too. 😀

Simple enough solutions, but I thought to post this so if people had problems with it they had a solution. I haven't tested the game thoroughly any further, but it seems to run smooth on Dosbox 0.74 apart from some minor soundcrackle.

Cheers, 😉

Reply 1 of 4, by ripsaw8080

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The installer on the CD has a bug with hard drives that have a 32K or larger cluster size, causing it to think the drive has negative free space. It is a fault of the installer, although DOSBox could prevent the problem by reporting a smaller cluster size for folder mount drives. Note that the FIPATH.DAT file is created with the correct contents of the installation path by the installer, and manually creating the file was only necessary when manually copying files.

There is a v1.33 patch on Patches Scrolls that includes an updated installer that can make a new installation from the CD and apply the patch at the same time. The installer on the patch disk does not have the same bug as the installer on the CD, so using it to install the game is an effective workaround for the free space problem... and it's probably a good idea to apply the patch, anyway.

Reply 2 of 4, by Procyon

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Thanks for explaining. It never occured to me to look for a patch for such an old game. For good measure here is a link for the patch if someone decides to download it.

http://www.filefront.com/3450609/bkupd133.zip

Reply 3 of 4, by damson

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Filefront link is not working, I uploaded the patch to my google drive, you can still get it here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PyNcgXEKkIJr … iew?usp=sharing

My youtube channel - flight sims new and old

Reply 4 of 4, by ripsaw8080

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I mentioned Patches Scrolls in my decade-old comment, but for some reason the thread starter went to FileFront instead. Anyway, Patches Scrolls is still around:
https://www.patches-scrolls.com/dl.php?file=bkupd133.zip