Key points
- The source code was leaked in 2000.
- It is highly recommended to play the game with a joystick
- The manual is required to fully understand the underlying game mechanics
- Most of the community has switched over to Falcon BMS, a heavily upgraded fork of F4's source code.
General information
- GOG.com Community Discussions for game series
- GOG.com Support Page
- Steam Community Discussions
- Falconpedia - A wiki dedicated to Falcon 4.0
Availability[edit]
- SafeDisc retail DRM does not work on Windows Vista and later (see above for affected versions).
Essential improvements[edit]
In-game audio settings (BMS Mod)
Patches[edit]
The Version 1.08 Patch provides bugs fixes.
BMS Upgrade[edit]
BMS is the latest and greatest Falcon 4.0 mod currently available.
Released September 2011, it brings total Windows 7 compatibility and support for modern gpus among many other bug fixes, graphical enhancements and avionics and realism improvements such as completely new Flight Modelling, DirectX 9.0c support with Shader Model 3.0 and HDR to name a few. More info regarding BMS is here: BenchMarkSims webpage
Game data[edit]
In-game general settings (BMS Mod)
Configuration file(s) location[edit]
| System |
Location |
| Windows |
|
| Mac OS (Classic) |
|
| Steam Play (Linux) |
<Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/429530/pfx/[Note 2] |
Save game data location[edit]
In-game graphics settings (BMS Mod)
In-game control settings (BMS Mod)
| Audio feature |
State |
Notes |
| Separate volume controls |
|
|
| Surround sound |
|
|
| Subtitles |
|
|
| Closed captions |
|
|
| Mute on focus lost |
|
|
Localizations
| Language |
UI |
Audio |
Sub |
Notes |
| English |
|
|
|
|
Network[edit]
Multiplayer types
Issues unresolved[edit]
Graphics glitches[edit]
Graphical bugs are experienced during gameplay while running in Windows 7. Some textures will show bright purple sections with and without the patch and with the patch, text is unreadable while using hardware rendering. Switching to software rendering solves this but the game slows to a crawl while the cockpit is in view. Sometimes the menu screens will bug, certain elements not disappearing when changing menu - running in Windows 95 compatibility mode could fix this (most prominent on Allied Force re-release).
VR support[edit]
| Devices |
Native |
Notes |
| TrackIR |
|
Supports: Yaw, Pitch. |
Other information[edit]
| Technical specs |
Supported |
Notes |
| Direct3D |
5 |
|
| Glide |
2.54 |
|
| Executable |
32-bit |
64-bit |
Notes |
| Windows |
|
|
|
System requirements[edit]
| Windows |
|
Minimum |
Recommended |
| Operating system (OS) |
95 |
98 |
| Processor (CPU) |
Intel Pentium 166 MHz
| Intel Pentium II 450 MHz |
| System memory (RAM) |
32 MB |
128 MB |
| Hard disk drive (HDD) |
175 MB |
600 MB |
| Video card (GPU) |
High Colour graphics card
| 8 MB of VRAM |
Notes
- ↑ SafeDisc retail DRM does not work on Windows 10[1] or Windows 11 and is disabled by default on Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 when the KB3086255 update is installed.[2]
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 File/folder structure within this directory reflects the path(s) listed for Windows and/or Steam game data (use Wine regedit to access Windows registry paths). Games with Steam Cloud support may store data in
~/.steam/steam/userdata/<user-id>/429530/ in addition to or instead of this directory. The app ID (429530) may differ in some cases. Treat backslashes as forward slashes. See the glossary page for details.
- ↑ When running this game without elevated privileges (Run as administrator option), write operations against a location below
%PROGRAMFILES%, %PROGRAMDATA%, or %WINDIR% might be redirected to %LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore on Windows Vista and later (more details).
References
