I Just Downloaded Wing Commander IV

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
When I was fifteen years old my dad brought thirty-odd 1.44" diskettes that I'd salvaged from AOL offers and old school projects to work and, over the course of several days, downloaded the 44 megabyte Wing Commander IV demo for me. He pkzipped it over all those disks and brought them home... and then repeated the process several times as disk after disk went bad. I was absolutely amazed that technology could let me do something like that.

... and then this morning, eleven years later, I downloaded four gigabytes of *WING COMMANDER IV ITSELF* from GameTap in an hour. Wowee - we've come a long way, baby.
 
Oh, how I fondly remember rooting through junkmail for those AOL diskettes, so I could save stuff to them.

I didn't have the luck to bring home a WC4 demo on one of them - but one time at school, I forgot to put in a bootdisk while instlaling Armada and the game simply rewrote the Config.sys file, so all the system would do was boot straight to Armada.

Oh, those were the days...
 
And yet, I still don't have my flying car.

My fifteen year old self would probably be pretty darned disappointed to learn that there haven't been any new Wing Commanders since he entered the time-hole and that they've since cancelled Star Trek.

He'd probably be pretty impressed that you can put images in the background of your mIRC window now, though.



Edited to add: Wing Commander IV runs nice and smoothly! I *think* it's the Win9x port - at least, it doesn't run the same GameTap DOSBox equivalent emulator when it starts up.
 
That's very nice. Do they use the original videos? They probably could save a lot of space using new codecs. But, then again, it only took one hour.
 
Wow, yeah, I have the same sort of memories. I had been online as early as 1992, but I actually got interested in the internet at school, in 1996, to download cheat programs for Privateer!

I still have a bunch of my old floppies from back then, and it is a treasure trove of nerd memories. :)
 
I remember how annoyed I was when AOL switched to CD's.

For that matter, I remember how annoyed my parents were when I filled up so much of our family computer's hard drive with Wing Commander games... :)
 
I remember how annoyed I was when AOL switched to CD's.

For that matter, I remember how annoyed my parents were when I filled up so much of our family computer's hard drive with Wing Commander games... :)

I was talking to my dad a week or so ago, and I asked him how much hard drive space he thought games took up these days. Sixty megabytes. Wing Commander IV's shocking requirements stuck with him to this day!
 
I remember me and my best friend fiddling for ages to get the Wing Commander IV demo to work on his NT4 machine. :)
 
I was talking to my dad a week or so ago, and I asked him how much hard drive space he thought games took up these days. Sixty megabytes. Wing Commander IV's shocking requirements stuck with him to this day!

wow. my first PC had 420MB hard drive - in 1994 it was VERY big HD, at least here in Poland...

BTW I remeber when i got my first CD-ROM drive first thing i did was going to my friend and borrowing WC3 :D then after days of playing I found out that disc 4 was so scratched it won't work - so i kept asking my father to buy me WC3 for so long, that he eventually did - although game was EXTREMELLY expensive than...
Great Times:D
 
Here's a funny little thing I noticed yesterday. The scene where Pliers pulls the Flash pack out the Dragon he is inspecting and drops in on the ground. Pliers and everyone around him are wearing modern day "float coats" a piece of personal gear which as a former F-14A Tomcat (RIP) maintainer I am intemently familier with. It consists of a canvas vest (color-coded by the wearers job) with reflective tape, a CO2 cartridge with a capsule that dissolves in Sea Water causing the vest to inflate, a Salt-Water reactive Dye Pack, a whistle, and a Strobe Light. Now I relize I'm reading to much into this, and only someone like me who spent many many hour wearing the damn thing would care... but exactly what ocean where they worried about falling into?
 
Hehe - well, it might have helped the Concordia's crew:

concordia.jpg
 
Another thing... did anyone else ever notice Casper Van Dien of "Starship Troopers" fame greating Blair during his arrival to the Lexington? I totally never noticed that before...
 
but exactly what ocean where they worried about falling into?

Obviously, this is just an assumption but could it be a variation that reacts the same way when someone ends up in vaccuum? (Lets hope that the poor guy has an air tight helmet somewhere in there!) :)

Another thing... did anyone else ever notice Casper Van Dien of "Starship Troopers" fame greating Blair during his arrival to the Lexington? I totally never noticed that before...

Not only that - but Mark Hamill showed up for the world premiere of Starship Troopers.
 
I just registered for Gametap yesterday and plan on downloading WCIV soon. I just don't know what type of account I should get.
 
Another thing that after 10 years and countless play-through I never knew about... the Evil Ending!

I mean, first time through I had to play the nice-guy hero and flash-packing the confed super-base is obviously just wrong on so many levels, and on subsequent play throughs I always knew that Flash Pack was garanteed one-shot against Vesevius, and it never occured to me that that one mission would give you a completely diffrent ending.... in fact I always assumed you either won or died.
 
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