New patch (reverted everything else for now):
0xD4AD 66 -> EB
0xD4AE 26 -> 2B

This one jumps over some code that is directly responsible for the spam AND initial reaction time, this one feels VERY good in the campaign and seems to scale with AI levels and gameplay setting as well.

It felt almost too easy now, but playing the same campaign mission in the disk version again shown me that it is still even easier there.

Powershell: -> I have no windows machine any more, but nice catch :)

enable:
$strike = Get-Content -Raw -Encoding Byte .\STRIKE.EXE
$strike[0xd4ad] = 235
$strike[0xd4ae] = 43

restore:
$strike = Get-Content -Raw -Encoding Byte .\STRIKE.EXE
$strike[0xd4ad] = 102
$strike[0xd4ae] = 38

Hope that makes sense ? (I guess the values are DECIMAL ?)

ACE pilots in campaign still drop lots of counter measures, but the frequency is highly reduced and the time they drop them stretched a bit far for my taste (sorry , did not find the variables for the AMOUNT they drop yet).
Aim-9J target track is very bad, so thats ok I think, but target track for ALL missilies and maverick/gbu15 in disk version seems more stable on higher cyclles as well, if I ever find the missile tracking code, that would be a really REALLY great day.

So many timing problems with the CD version and so much code to go through and stuff to try out ...

P.S.: It helps if you state what amount of cycles your dosbox ran, as stated I test everything on 50000 cycles now

I played at 25000 cycles.

Good job, guys, especially you, Harr-Nuta. I can confirm that it seems to work. In my unscientific tests on the three versions, the AI evaded about as often with these edits as it did in the floppy version and only half as often as the AI in the unpatched CD version.

I wanted to make it easier for users to apply the patch, so I went ahead and uploaded a pre-patched version of Strike.exe. This makes things a lot easier for average users than messing with PowerShell for probably the first time. I uploaded it to PCGamingWiki and updated the Strike Commander page there with a link to it. I hope that Harr-Nuta doesn't mind. I gave all credit to him in the Readme and a link back to this thread. He did the work. I'm just spreading the word so that people can learn about and use what he did.

Here's the link: https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/922-strike-commander-cd-missile-fix/

In case anyone is interested in doing it in PowerShell, instead, here are two ways:

1. Go to https://pastebin.com/TvWVAKFS. This is a PowerShell script that I whipped up that includes the code listed by others, above, but can be run from anywhere and prompts you for your Strike Commander folder.
2. Save those lines to a text file with a .ps1 extension.
3. Right-click on the file and choose Run with PowerShell.
4. When prompted, select your Strike Commander folder. It'll then apply Harr-Nuta's edits to Strike.exe.

Alternately, you can do it the already-prescribed way:

1. Go to your game folder (where Strike.exe is) in File Explorer.
2. Hold down the Shift key while right-clicking on an empty area of the folder and select Open PowerShell window here.
3. Copy to your clipboard the following five lines (I added a line to backup your original Strike.exe as Strike_orig.exe):

$strike = Get-Content -Raw -Encoding Byte .\STRIKE.EXE
rename-item -path .\STRIKE.EXE -newname .\STRIKE_orig.EXE
$strike[0xd4ad] = 235
$strike[0xd4ae] = 43
Set-Content -Encoding Byte -Path .\STRIKE.EXE -Value $strike

5. Right-click in the PowerShell window. That will paste the five lines into the window.
6. Press Enter to execute the lines.

Either method should do it. You can verify that it worked by checking whether Strike.exe's "Date Modified" is now today's date.

Just decided to try Strike Commander again and wow, I can't believe a fix was found for this. Harr-Nuta, jnisbet, you guys should get like, I dunno, a credit or a paycheck from GOG for this or something.

This is an amazing patch!

Thanks! (:

My youth....

I second this. These 2 guys should be commended . Hell of a job by both

And GOG people should take notice here, as to always provide floppy versions of games released in the pinnacle of the CD era.

Thanks, guys, but I don't deserve much credit. Harr-Nuta is owed the credit for solving the problem and detailing how to apply it. I simply followed his instructions and uploaded the patched executable. I'm glad that you appreciate that I did so, but Harr-Nuta is the one who did the "hell of a job."

say jnisbet, besides being now possible to hit enemy planes with missiles, I also noticed that enemy planes are a lot more aggressive towards not only wingmen, but other friendly planes that are mission objectives (and if they get destroyed, it's mission failed). I guess it's most probably due to the high cycles (and nothing to do with the hex edited .exe), right? I'm currently at 50000 cycles , but if I drop it to half of that, the game doesn't run as smooth (which I guess is the reason this thread was started after all). Any suggestions on an ideal cycle value?

If one asks me again, I still think GOG should upload the floppy version of the game... ;)

I don't know. I haven't played through the game's missions in a long time. I simply tested the patch with the skirmish generator, which doesn't have wingmen, friendly planes or mission objectives.

I second that , the game has so much more problems than its missiles, I'm still not satisfied and in search of the actual missile tracking code (mavericks in the floppy version track 10 times better on high cycles, also chaff/flares do not immediately throw missiles off target, thats the main reason I tried to decrease the spammed amount), but that one is a much harder nut to crack (incidentally there is a variable in the exe called 'crackthe.nut', its mocking me....)

I just started playing this game recently (with your patch), and it warms my heart to see such dedicated people fixing old games like this.

Seriously, you guys rock.

I've been playing a bunch more than I did during my first spotty attempts, which rarely got me past Stern's part, and it feels the game was broken even by version 2.1, which is floppy + speech pack + TacOps. That was supposed to be the last "good" version, before CD (2.3, GOG's version).

Having just beaten the Germany set of missions (must be something like 8 sets in), playing at 30.000 cycles on DOSBox 0.74, I'm seeing air-to-air missiles go from unreliable to increasingly useless as the main campaign goes on (even AIM-9Ms), whereas enemy ones become increasingly unavoidable even though I bank hard and drop the corresponding decoys (flares for IR, chaff for radar) several times. It's come to the point I'm having to restart missions often since being hit once renders you several flavours of useless, be it from rapidly leaking fuel, inability to steer or plain engine death.

It's two things, mainly: in addition to the aforementioned missile issues, I'm very often seeing enemy planes suddenly dying. One might think they collide against each other by dumb AI, but more than once I've seen them burst into flames and scream, right in front of my eyes, being a good distance away from each other and everything else. It mostly happens right after leaving autopilot.

It leaves me wondering whether some patch broke the game, it was always broken, there's still some ancient copy protection scheme in play, or DOSBox has some emulation glitch which keeps consistently screwing up Strike Commander.

EDIT: I think it might be DOSBox's CPU core setting, at least for the missiles issue. 9Ms suddenly became a lot more reliable (perhaps too much) against modern enemy fighters such as Tornados, F-15s and F-18s when I set the core to normal instead of auto, which might've been defaulting to dynamic.

Not sure if this is relevent but according to the page I found here:
[url=https://web.archive.org/web/19990502003111/http://www.infima.cz:80/vpc/sc.html]https://web.archive.org/web/19990502003111/http://www.infima.cz:80/vpc/sc.html[/url]
there are two patches for this game. Perhaps the CD version didn't include them?
Unfortunatly I could not find them anywhere onine.