Ohso

Weird, the whole thing is gone. Good thing I made a copy of it before it disappeared (except for the copyright search engine page). Even the comical "poll" on the front page of www.hwnd.net is gone now too. It was also Microsoft related. Hmm, hwnd.net is registered to TUCOWS.COM, INC. and it's DNS servers are located in the UK on FASTHOSTS.CO.UK Oh well. [This message has been edited by Ohso (edited 02-24-2001).]

Sorry guys but that page is not hacked. In fact, it's not even on Microsoft's site. Try replacing everything after the @ with the website of your choice. The previous part is ignored since that would be where a username : password should go. Do I get a cookie for spotting this? Oh, and be sure to click on the second link from the bottom that says "2000 Microsoft Corporation. All rights..." etc. The copyright search engine is funny. [This message has been edited by Ohso (edited 02-24-2001).]

Cool, gotta get out all my old BG action figures... Hey, read the responses to that BG article, especially the one by Evilsamneil... hehehe

The whole thing comes from an old (and not very good) Sega Genesis game called ZeroWing...

Sure, it works great for both Privateer and Strike Commander. Where do I send it?

Right, it's illegal no matter if it is being sold or not. I wonder who came up with the whole abandonware concept anyway? I buy my games anyway because I like the little things like manuals and maps and stuff...remember the Infocom games? They used to give out cool little things. I still have a lot of them.

That's a good point. Since the work I do pretty much required me to switch to Win2K and more specifically the NTFS file system, I pondered what to do about all my old games that were no longer working. I disliked the idea of multiple partitions and drive letters floating around as I have done that before and it quickly gets annoying. So I made a bootable CD that extracts and runs DOS games to a ram disk. Using several utilities for DOS I wrote a batch file that will run a game when prompted and check the NTFS drive for save games and load any found. The game then runs and afterward the updated saves are written back to the NTFS drive. If you do happen to have a FAT partition or two, the batch files will still work by rearranging drive letters allowing the game to still run from the drive letter it was installed to. So far it works with over two hundred DOS games that I have installed. It should give over 620K free conventional memory on almost any PC it is run on. The only real requirement is that you have a SB compatible card (works with a SB Live, AWE32-64, or SB16) I also have added basic network utilities to it including Web browsing, VNC, MS net client, Novell Net client, Ghost (can be used with a multicast server too). It has become my ultimate one disk solution for troubleshooting and dos gaming. So far the only game I have trouble with is the 11th Hour which seems to leave some junk in memory that the NTFS driver doesn't like as it reboots the machine when saves are written to the NTFS drive. Still you can play and save to floppy or FAT partition for that particular game untilI figure out a possible workaround (if there is one).

While I doubt Origin approves of Privateer related materials being available, The Elite games are an interesting story... As you may know Elite was done by Ian Bell and David Braben. Ian Bell has made Elite available to anyone who wants it at: http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/clara.net/i...webspace/elite/ There you can pick up a copy for virtually every platform it was created for! However Bell's site has shutdown and moved a few times apparently due to pressure from David Braben who apparently wants to release Elite only to paying members of "The Elite Club" For David Braben's take on things you can check out The Elite section under games at: http://www.frontier.co.uk

Thanks everyone. I definitely want to get into the fleet action. However, right now I'm more a liability than an asset, hehe. At least until I figure out what everything does... I should be finished reading the manual this weekend (about 2/3 finished now). Of course it's impossible to resist playing even while still reading the instructions, so I shall probably die a lot in the next few days.

Just a post to say 'Hello'. I have just started playing BC3K. I actually bought it a year or two ago, but work has kept me away until recently. Now I have a night shift network monitoring job with some free time, so I am going over all the documentation in preparation to have some fun. I have flown around a little and seem to have gotten the game patched and configured correctly. Heh, I read the FAQ. From everything I have read, I am going to love this game. I am also eagerly awaiting BCM. I noticed with some disappointment that I missed any chance of joining in beta testing BCM. I think I would have liked that. Anyway, in case anyone is interested; I started playing space sims back in the early to mid eighties with Elite (unless you count the Atari VCS Space Shuttle game), and then Origin's Space Rogue (both on my c-64), followed by the Wing Commander games, Privateer 1 and 2 (didn't like 2 much), X-Wing, Tie Fighter, and the sequels to Elite, Frontier and the buggy mess that was First Encounters. I would like to thank the Supreme Commander for making it possible for me to own a game such as this. Now for some serious playing...Wish me luck!