First of all, a quick introduction.

Strike Commander is an a flight simulator / graphic adventure hybrid by Origin. It was first released in 1993 in floppy disk and later a revised vresion appeared on CD-ROM. The CD version is the one to get: it's faster, has fewer bugs, includes the expansion Tactical Operations and pretty much every instance of dialogue is now spoken.

Having finished the CD-ROM version in real hardware a few times, Strike Commander has been for long a kind of white whale for me. I managed to play it with DOSBox, but not without issues.

Issues in all versions of the game..

For a long time, I've experienced mid-game crashes while playing the game. I made a few consults in this phorums, and it seemed like the problem relied in that SC uses its own memory manager, JEMM, also used in Privateer, also by developer Origin.

Therefore, the obvious solution was to disable UMB, XMS and EMS under DOSBox and let the game manage RAM as it saw fit.

However and after some more thorough testing, it seems that the key was in another setting. All versions ofthe game require core=full.

One of the reasons it took me so long to realise this is that the CD version also crashed a lot under real hardware. It wasn't until I tried the game with DOSBox-X and it refused to run without core=full that I figured out this was the problem. And indeed, the game feels now more stable and crashes much less.

Issues in the CD-ROM version of the game.

As I said, the CD-ROM version seems to have most bugs fixed. The only issue you may experience here is that the player's missiles miss too often. This is because the game calculations for the enemies' reactions take into account the CPU speed. And if you run the game with cycles=auto or cycles=max, well...

Luckily, some Harr-Nuta on the GOG forums developed a fix for this, which you can get here.

Issues in the floppy version of the game.

Now comes the pain. But if you really like the game you may want to experience the way it wasfirst released, warts and all. This means obtaining flopy disk images for the main game, the Speech Pack and the Tactical Operations addon. They install in this exact order.

And the hurdles here are:

1) Both the installation programs for SC and Tactical Operations are password protected.

It's not unheard of, and all you need to overcome this is a copy of the game manual, the one that comes in the shape of a Sudden Death magazine issue.

Members from another board (leniad and ntalaec) also figured out how to get rid of this protection with some hex editing, but I'm not sure if posting it here is against phorum rules.

2) Tactical Operations won't install unless you run the installation program with INSTALL -A . This disables a free spac checking and allows you to complete the install process.

3) A second copy protection scheme. Again, many thanks to leniad and ntalaec for figuring this one out. The game stores some system settings (OS version and harddisk serial number, although the second one might not work properly or was deliverately left unfinished) and if they don't match it triggers an in-game protection. The player's plane is left without fuel mid-mission or, according to another source, explodes middair.

It's a tricky one, but there are some cracks / programs online that fix this. Again, I don't want to break phorum rules, but I think I can direct you to the crack in Total DOS Collection or the program Unprotect Professional v5.0 and above.

4) And finally, there is some strange behaviour left in the game. Sometimes enemies will appear just to crash right after. This drove me mad for a while. Was it a bug? A second in-game protection?

Then I realised it was dependant on the game's internal difficulty settings (which you access with CTRL+O in-game, BTW). Set difficulty on rookie, and the "bug" appears now and then. Set it on ace, and not only the enemy planes don't crash, but they also tear me a new one. Repeat, the same result. repeat again, ditto.

I find this baffling. It has to be one of the most stupid ways of tweaking difficulty I've ever seen. Shall we give the player less opponents? Nah, just the same, but pilots so stupid they can't even flight.

One of the reasons it took me so long to figure this one out i that I'm more used to the CD-ROM version, and it seems they got rid of this behaviour when they revised the game. And for a good reason, if you ask me.