Posted December 15, 2012
Hey all,
I've been kind of a lurker around here for some time now. The Wing Commander games are the ones that originally got me to start buying from GOG, I guess it's nostalgia but I spent one hell of a lot of time in my youth with a confed fighter strapped on. Anyhow, I finally got around to digging out my old disks, and thankfully I had both the SM packs and the Deluxe CD edition of Wing Commander II that includes the SO packs. So, here's what I did to get them working with the GOG edition of the WC games.
For the Secret Missions pack, I took each of the floppy disks (ugh, I know, right...) and put them in my network server (an ancient P4@2GHz), which is the only computer I own that still has a floppy drive. Since that machine runs linux, I used dd to make an empty file using a command like dd if=/dev/zero of= wcsm1.img bs=1M count=5 that made a 5MB blank file, formatted a vfat (fat32 filesystem) onto that file, then loopback mounted it onto the filesystem so I could copy the files from floppy into it, then wrote the final contents of that mount point into an ISO image with mkisofs and ended up with WCSM1.ISO and WCSM2.ISO (ISO images are easy to mount inside of dosbox, I'm not so sure of arbitrary size raw disk images). Then I copied all of the ISO image files onto the network drive where my windows machine can access them.
Ok, back on the windows machine, copy the ISO files across from the network drive and plop them onto the desktop for the moment. The SM1 and SM2 images are directly usable as they are. The WC2 image still needs some work. It turns out that the WCII Deluxe Edition CD is made so that you can play it off of the disk and it puts your saved games on a local disk. Which means that I don't need all of it to make this work.
So, I from the \wing2\ directory on the cd I copied install1.exe, install2.exe, install1.dat, install2.dat ,so1.exe and so2.exe plus the entire gamedat\ directory into a folder on the desktop. Now, select everything and turn off the read-only attribute on the files, for safety's sake I also entered the gamedat directory and double-checked that the operation worked recursively. Back out to the desktop and name the folder WC2, then using 7zip I compressed it into WC2.zip. Open the zip file and make sure that you see only a WC2 folder inside of it that contains everything else, it makes it easier later.
Ok, so, now I copied the zip file and ISO images into the Wing Commander 1 and 2 directory where the game is installed to, go to the dosbox directory and start dosbox.
At the Z:\ prompt, type 'mount c'
then 'c:'
then 'imgmount a WCSM1.ISO -t iso' which loopback mounts the iso image onto the dosbox as drive a, so
'a:' to change to the virtual floppy drive you just created and then
'install.exe' to start the installer for SM1 making sure that you install it to c:\WC and the source is a:, choose sound blaster for your sound card, this will take a moment to complete, then type
'mount -u a' to unmount the iso image again
then 'imgmount a WCSM2.iso -t iso' like before, then 'a:' , then 'install2.exe' to run the installer for SM2 similarly to you did with SM1. When that completes, you can shut down dosbox for the next step.
Now, since the Deluxe Edition is technically already "installed", all I need to do for it is open windows explorer to the Wing Commander 1 and 2 directory, right click on the zip file and from the context menu choose 7-zip -> Extract here. Then go back to the Dosbox directory and start dosbox again. Make sure to 'mount c ..' , then 'c:' and 'cd WC2' and run install1.exe and install2.exe each in turn to make sure they're set up correctly and choose sound blaster for your audio device. After this you can shut down dosbox again. Now onto the dosbox config files and shortcuts.
Then, I went to the directory where WC1 is installed and copied the dosboxWC.conf file to dosboxsm2.conf and changed the last line of the file to read 'loadfix -1 sm2' . Now, go where your WC1 shortcut is, mine is on the desktop, and copy it and then paste it right back in the same place so that it is called Wing Commander (copy), I renamed it Secret Missions 2. Right-click it and choose properties from the context menu, on the shortcut tab, select in the Target box where it says dosboxWC.conf and change it to dosboxsm2.conf. Now that shortcut should start SM2.
By the way, SM2 has copy protection, so I hope you have the manual and/or quick reference card that originally came with it. Seriously, if you have a hex editor it's not too hard to find directions to fix the stupid out of the exe. By the way, SM1 is actually launched from the Wing Commander shortcut, it changes the menu at the beginning of the game.
The operation for SO1 and SO2 is similar. In the WC2 directory, copy the dosboxWC2.conf file to dosboxso1.conf and dosboxso2.conf and change the last line of the file to read 'loadfix -32 so1.exe' in the dosboxso1.conf file and 'loadfix -32 so2.exe' in the dosboxso2.conf file and then copy and modify the desktop shortcut similarly to how we did with WC1 but twice because both SO1 and SO2 have their own executibles. By the way, the Special Ops have no copy protection on them.
Easy, right?
PS... My appologies in advance for any spelling problems in there. I'm still nursing a broken finger back to health and it's kind of clumsy trying to type with it.
I've been kind of a lurker around here for some time now. The Wing Commander games are the ones that originally got me to start buying from GOG, I guess it's nostalgia but I spent one hell of a lot of time in my youth with a confed fighter strapped on. Anyhow, I finally got around to digging out my old disks, and thankfully I had both the SM packs and the Deluxe CD edition of Wing Commander II that includes the SO packs. So, here's what I did to get them working with the GOG edition of the WC games.
For the Secret Missions pack, I took each of the floppy disks (ugh, I know, right...) and put them in my network server (an ancient P4@2GHz), which is the only computer I own that still has a floppy drive. Since that machine runs linux, I used dd to make an empty file using a command like dd if=/dev/zero of= wcsm1.img bs=1M count=5 that made a 5MB blank file, formatted a vfat (fat32 filesystem) onto that file, then loopback mounted it onto the filesystem so I could copy the files from floppy into it, then wrote the final contents of that mount point into an ISO image with mkisofs and ended up with WCSM1.ISO and WCSM2.ISO (ISO images are easy to mount inside of dosbox, I'm not so sure of arbitrary size raw disk images). Then I copied all of the ISO image files onto the network drive where my windows machine can access them.
Ok, back on the windows machine, copy the ISO files across from the network drive and plop them onto the desktop for the moment. The SM1 and SM2 images are directly usable as they are. The WC2 image still needs some work. It turns out that the WCII Deluxe Edition CD is made so that you can play it off of the disk and it puts your saved games on a local disk. Which means that I don't need all of it to make this work.
So, I from the \wing2\ directory on the cd I copied install1.exe, install2.exe, install1.dat, install2.dat ,so1.exe and so2.exe plus the entire gamedat\ directory into a folder on the desktop. Now, select everything and turn off the read-only attribute on the files, for safety's sake I also entered the gamedat directory and double-checked that the operation worked recursively. Back out to the desktop and name the folder WC2, then using 7zip I compressed it into WC2.zip. Open the zip file and make sure that you see only a WC2 folder inside of it that contains everything else, it makes it easier later.
Ok, so, now I copied the zip file and ISO images into the Wing Commander 1 and 2 directory where the game is installed to, go to the dosbox directory and start dosbox.
At the Z:\ prompt, type 'mount c'
then 'c:'
then 'imgmount a WCSM1.ISO -t iso' which loopback mounts the iso image onto the dosbox as drive a, so
'a:' to change to the virtual floppy drive you just created and then
'install.exe' to start the installer for SM1 making sure that you install it to c:\WC and the source is a:, choose sound blaster for your sound card, this will take a moment to complete, then type
'mount -u a' to unmount the iso image again
then 'imgmount a WCSM2.iso -t iso' like before, then 'a:' , then 'install2.exe' to run the installer for SM2 similarly to you did with SM1. When that completes, you can shut down dosbox for the next step.
Now, since the Deluxe Edition is technically already "installed", all I need to do for it is open windows explorer to the Wing Commander 1 and 2 directory, right click on the zip file and from the context menu choose 7-zip -> Extract here. Then go back to the Dosbox directory and start dosbox again. Make sure to 'mount c ..' , then 'c:' and 'cd WC2' and run install1.exe and install2.exe each in turn to make sure they're set up correctly and choose sound blaster for your audio device. After this you can shut down dosbox again. Now onto the dosbox config files and shortcuts.
Then, I went to the directory where WC1 is installed and copied the dosboxWC.conf file to dosboxsm2.conf and changed the last line of the file to read 'loadfix -1 sm2' . Now, go where your WC1 shortcut is, mine is on the desktop, and copy it and then paste it right back in the same place so that it is called Wing Commander (copy), I renamed it Secret Missions 2. Right-click it and choose properties from the context menu, on the shortcut tab, select in the Target box where it says dosboxWC.conf and change it to dosboxsm2.conf. Now that shortcut should start SM2.
By the way, SM2 has copy protection, so I hope you have the manual and/or quick reference card that originally came with it. Seriously, if you have a hex editor it's not too hard to find directions to fix the stupid out of the exe. By the way, SM1 is actually launched from the Wing Commander shortcut, it changes the menu at the beginning of the game.
The operation for SO1 and SO2 is similar. In the WC2 directory, copy the dosboxWC2.conf file to dosboxso1.conf and dosboxso2.conf and change the last line of the file to read 'loadfix -32 so1.exe' in the dosboxso1.conf file and 'loadfix -32 so2.exe' in the dosboxso2.conf file and then copy and modify the desktop shortcut similarly to how we did with WC1 but twice because both SO1 and SO2 have their own executibles. By the way, the Special Ops have no copy protection on them.
Easy, right?
PS... My appologies in advance for any spelling problems in there. I'm still nursing a broken finger back to health and it's kind of clumsy trying to type with it.
Post edited December 15, 2012 by rschwamberger
