BladeFireLight

I dont know if this is relivant to D2D, however it does effect XcomUtil and Xcom CE Now as for Vista. If your program is in the "Program Files" or "Program Files (x86)" folder then all changes made my windows programs are in c:\users\%username%\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\ As nice as this is from a businss security standpoint it sucks from a gamer's perspective. You can never find the saved games or INI's older games stored there. Now hers is the Catch.. The Command prompt dosent have access to the Virtualstore and so any dos program gets a Access Denied trying to access the files, To top that off Xcom CE also has some files flaged as ReadOnly. to get anything to work you first have to as an administrator grand the Users group write access, then you can remove the ReadOnly attribute. One the bright Side XcomUtil 9.7 will be able to do this automatically. I have no plans to get the D2D version at this time so I have no clue if 9.7 will work on it

Daishiva's XCView should be able to view them.

You actually had to purchase another copy? I thought you would just dust off the old 3.5's and install it in dosbox

I was going to ask for you to do that. thanks.

I have a new version of the patch that works with Vista and windows 7 and sets affinity to CPU 0. -Blade FireLight Xcom_Vista_Patch.zip

Actually 0.72 was what I developed under. 0.63/65 don't have file redirection and a few other basic dos functions. according to the release notes batch file processing got a full overhaul in that 0.73 now reopens a file for each line. this totally killed the shift statement (fixed in the current cvs), something I am using. and seemed to make the call function having unpredictable issues. for now I'm doing a test if the shift statement doesn't work then setup will exit with an error asking the user to upgrade. not elegant but they release a broken version. Now I need to work with there support people to create a simplified batch file that can replicate the issue. If I don't it may not get fixed in the next release.

ugg.. it gets worse. the call function has been overhauled in 0.73 and is totally broken. causing my new xcusetup to crash dosbox calling another file. xcusetup would be ten times more complex if I am forced to rewrite.

I know some of the distro's of xcom now out there come with dosbox. Does any one know what version? 0.73 has a really annoying brake in the SHIFT command I'm using in the xcusetup and it's going to be a pain to work around it. -Blade FireLight

the system requirements list xp and vista. Does this mean they fixed the probe bug?

its the sonar unit. same as the one one in the cargo section. and it has 2 chairs on either side of it. -Blade FireLight

I only have Scott's notes on the issue and the code he uses to generate the random ship floor plans. If your looking to validate it just replace all the ships with the same number of levels full of empty floors. -Blade FireLight

Just weighing in. Xcomutil changes the placement of units in all the xcom craft to fix the placement bug, Although the default adds more spots so you can cram in like a sardine. and some times it's a little off on placement. a bug i'm trying to track down. The placement of zerbite is hard coded. For that reason when xcomutil builds a random ship map it is suposed uses the placement of zerbite as the starting points and places a IBA in that place. I have not delved much into that code as I am planing to replace the Battle Scape generator with my own once I fix the other bugs (like the xcopy /y issue) As for missing Zerbit in every craft. Zerbit is an object in the Battle Scape each ship has a hard coded amount and hard coded placement. you can pick it up, and you can also destroy it with explosives. If your really aggressive taking out the aliens you can destroy what is placed. -Blade FireLight

I only have the "Totally Unauthorized" Guide. by Jeff James and Bernie Dy. Jeff mentioned he consulted Chang on it. While the books mentions a patch is in the works no name is given. The v2 and beta names come from the file names from ftp.microprose.com, where the official files resided until it went offline about 4 years ago (I cashed their whole system about 6 years back so see if there were any other TFTD files of interest and found the beta file also packages as v3), and therefor the names used in the version detection by Scott T. Jones on XomUtil. This is actually the first I have seen the 1.x used in the patch names and I figured it was due to some confusion by some one who was not around when the game first came out. -Blade FireLight

The file section has the patches for TFTD listed as 1.4 and 1.5 Microprose only release 2 patches. v2 and a "beta" that fixed one part of the research tree (sometimes referred to as 2.1 and v3). -Blade FireLight

one of the webmasters need to take a look

Sort of what I meant. I did read the files in the archive. Does it just split the file into chunks or does it find the first instant of any of the values and then grab a chunk after that point? how to you make sure the values don't span the chunks selected for search? -Blade FireLight

Interesting program. You should post the basic logic so we can see how it ticks. I spent all last night trying to use a regular expression in my hex editors search to find just a small subset of those values. If no one else get's to it first I will try to mess with the values and see if it works, or crashes the program.

That would have to be the strangest structure I have seen. If you sign each entry in the code a number you get a stair step in the way the numbers are stored in a table. X13 246 57 8 most arrays store either 123 456 789 or 147 258 369 besides most of the data stored in geoscape that is in an structure is the same between windows and dos making it as simple as finding the starting offset. I get the feeling seb is going to have to start from scratch.. Hope he has a debugger that speaks WATCOM's version of C. I hope he can though. It would bite to only be able to mod the minimums in only one platform. -Blade FireLight

that is probably no joke NKF. thoes spawn points were orphaned to make the game harder just like the sniper balcony over the entrance on one of the othe subs. do you know the way point on the top of the triton was originaly a spawn point? In beta testing it was decited it made the game to hard. you would loose you hole squad before the alian ran out of reaction shots. -Bladefirelight

OK This one is clean. The functionality is no different then the original patch, it's just the installer that has been updated. It now triggers UAC, extracts the files into a temp dir. Then asks to install or uninstall the patch. The uninstall will remove any of my previous patches. Can an admin post this to the file section. What this patch does: It installs a Vista Compatibility "database" into the registry. This registry keys tell vista the signature of the main game executable. So when you start the game, Vista turns off Hardware Acceleration just for that one application. UFO still suffers from an auto abort of every interception, making it impossible to shoot down UFO's. Making UFO basically unplayable. (unless you are in for a challenge) -Blade FireLight Xcom_Vista_Patch.zip

What I'm really looking for is pre-modified exe's I rememver there being a few CE replacements that included hq2x and speed control. I'm wondering if there are others. anything that would make mess up the offsets used for spliting the exe

Does any one have an idea of all the different releases and fan made modified exe's and patches the program there are out there? -Blade FireLight

This Patch replaces my previous released Vista Patch. It comes with an installer and should trigger UAC to allow the installer to run. -Blade FireLight **EDIT** Seems the packager I used to create this included some code that is being detected as a virus. Once I have a clean version I will re-release.

My original zip includes the commands needing to be called. the location of the game is un-nessistary. Vista looks at the content of every executable at launch time and compares them to the settings in the registry created by the ACT database to determine if any adjustments need to be made. The ACT database can only be installed by the an administrator account. however when the execution switches to Administrator it triggers a second command prompt using the built in administrator accounts credentials, and placing the Current working directory to %systemroot%. This leads to the need to pass the full path of theACT database. So, in summary. and installer just needs to extract the ACT database in a temp folder. trigger sdbinst.exe <path to ACT database>. at that point causein a prompt for elevation of privileges. and installing. and uninstaller luckily does not require that. That batch files I provided are enough for any user. but I suspect they want a full installation package. probably so they can provide it as a "patch". I wonder if I will get any credit for finding the solution? Probably not because there is no proprietary code. -Blade FireLight.

Ah... your don't need the ACT to install this the only file the installer calls is part of Vista. Could you please correct this in your read me. No reason to load that extra bloat into everyones comp. -Blade FireLight