Falcon 4.0

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Falcon 4.0

Developers
	MicroProse
Mac OS	Westlake Interactive
Publishers
	MicroProse
Mac OS	MacSoft
	Retroism
Release dates
Windows	December 12, 1998
Mac OS	June, 1999

Falcon

Falcon	1987
Falcon A.T.	1988
Falcon 3.0	1991
Falcon 4.0	1998
Falcon 4.0: Allied Force	2005

Key points

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

Source	DRM	Notes	Keys	OS
Retail
GOG.com		Bundled with Falcon, Falcon A.T., and Falcon 3.0 under bonus content.
Humble Store		Bundled with Falcon, Falcon A.T., and Falcon Gold.
Steam		Bundled with Falcon, Falcon A.T., and Falcon Gold.

Essential improvements

In-game audio settings (BMS Mod)

Patches

The Version 1.08 Patch provides bugs fixes.

BMS Upgrade

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

It can also be downloaded from here.

Game data

In-game general settings (BMS Mod)

Configuration file(s) location

System	Location
Windows
Mac OS

Save game data location

System	Location
Windows	<path-to-game>\campaign\SAVE
Mac OS

Save game cloud syncing

System	Native	Notes
Steam Cloud

Video settings

In-game graphics settings (BMS Mod)

Graphics option	Option	Notes
Widescreen resolution		See BMS Upgrade
Multi-monitor
Field of view (FOV)
Windowed
Borderless fullscreen windowed
Anisotropic filtering (AF)		See BMS Upgrade
Anti-aliasing (AA)		See BMS Upgrade
Vertical sync (Vsync)		See BMS Upgrade
60 FPS
120+ FPS
Color blind mode

Input settings

In-game control settings (BMS Mod)

Keyboard and mouse	Native	Notes
Remapping
Mouse acceleration		See BMS Upgrade.
Mouse sensitivity
Mouse input in menus
Mouse Y-axis inversion
Controller
Controller support
Full controller support
Controller remapping
Controller sensitivity
Controller Y-axis inversion

Additional information
Button prompts
Controller hotplugging
Haptic feedback

Audio settings

Audio options	Native	Notes
Separate volume controls
Surround sound
Subtitles
Closed captions
Mute on focus lost

Network

Multiplayer types

Type	Native	Players	Notes
LAN play		16
Online play

Issues unresolved

Graphics glitches

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).

System requirements

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	3D graphics card 8 MB of VRAM