A brief description of all TESTED and READY FOR USE
customizations and innovations in Comanche Gold

- Fourth CG MOD from Kevin Bax and Flyboy - allows the game to run on Windows7 and Windows Vista directly!

- Third CG MOD from Flyboy - changes the original comanche sounds with the sounds from Comanche4

- Second CG MOD from DavidC99:
unlocks in game menu and gives a possibility to save your game,
an option to watch, takeover and continue your saved game,
dives no damage player.

- First CG MOD from Flyboy:
unlocks in game menu that allows 1024x768 res and doubles
the terrain and object details.

- Virtual Computers:
VirtualPC,VirtualBox,Parallels Workstation and VMware Workstation
allow the Game to overcome all hardware and OS limitations.

- PPJoystick by Deon van der Westhuysen for real or virtual 98,XP,Vista,7 OS
allows to use in the Game your mouse instead of a joystick.

- 5 custom missions from "Command Group 07"
and Theron Jackson - standard
Mission Editor.

- 2 custom missions from DavidC99
with many innovations.

- 1 custom mission from Dolores
with many innovations.

- 13 custom missions from ufolev - standard
Mission Editor.First New Custom maded
Comanche Gold Campaign.

- Online Multiplayer via KALI with the great help of ADHS.

Add the following features:

• TCP/IP support.
• Manual IP selection to join.
• Automatic IP selection via Novaworld.
• Windows 7 multiplayer support by way of TCP/IP.

Forgive the poor quality as I was in a hurry, but here's a sample of the game running in Windows 7 in multiplayer via TCP/IP:



I tested this myself, and have cracked the IP encoding scheme that was used by the game. Now we can join by IP and use TCP/IP. This means, if we choose, we can effectively ditch Kali.

Now granted, I had a whole list of connection issues and troubles, but I did manage to get it to connect by placing both machines on the same subnet, disabling all firewalls between them, etc. etc.. It may not be perfect, and it may take more testing, but I did manage a connection, and that is the important part.

What is the point of having TCP over IPX? Well, for one, Windows 7 doesn't support IPX, so that means Windows 7 users can't play over Kali unless they do this hackish IPX installation which has only been reported, to my knowledge, to work for the 32-bit version of Windows 7. Windows 7 users can, however, play over TCP. By figuring out how the game allows for TCP/IP, we can now include Windows 7 users in the game for online sessions.

The next steps:

• Make the game run on Windows 7 with the CD.
• Figure out if we want to switch to TCP/IP to accommodate some Windows 7 users.
  • Bad side:Hosting will be a major issue for some, as the host has to make sure all of his settings are perfect.
  • Good side:People joining won't have to worry about most connection settings. Just set it and go. Practically all issues are placed upon the host.

I say we give it a try at least!

You got it to connect! Congratulations! By the way, DavidC99 and myself spent over 5 hours last night on Kali discussing and testing all this. When it got to 4.00am my time, I decided to bug out. I'm pleased David stayed on and got some success.

I think I'm almost there with the connection issues.

Ports needed by hosts and clients:

• Inbound and outbound 2300-2400 TCP

Port needed by hosts only:

• Inbound 47624 TCP

Port needed by client only:

• Outbound 47624 TCP

There may be more ports to open. I believe that users with simple network environments will be able to work this out just fine in general. For those who care, this is what the game actually appears to do:

1. Host begins waiting for connections.
2. Client attempts to join.
3. Connection is made, or else the entire attempt dies.
4. Host attempts to start a new connection to client.
5. Connection is made, or else the entire attempt dies.
6. Client attempts to start a new connection to host.
7. Connection is made, or else the entire attempt dies.
8. The client has now joined the session.

This is a very stupid method in my opinion. The host should be receive a connection, accept it, and that's that. There's no reason for multiple connections like this -- and certainly no reason whatsoever to have the client and host each initiate their own connections, as that requires clients explicitly to open ports for incoming connections -- and it sounds like it'll make it difficult for people on the same LAN to get in on gaming sessions.

Nevertheless, this appears to be what we've got. If all goes well, we'll be able to use either NovaWorld's system -- which still appears to work to some degree, by the way -- or else I can provide a program later that will enable a player either to host a game or join by IP, or even both.

I got this up and running on my end despite all of my own security issues. I'll need someone with a fair bit of knowledge of being able to open ports on his own system to test this with me, preferably on TS3 so we don't have to worry about seeing a chat window while the game is running and we're messing with settings. Once we have this set up, we'll be good to go live.

Good news is that Windows 7 users will be able to play Comanche Gold multiplayer natively without all of this virtualization and go-between software, as long as someone else with a CD is playing on the session.

So it would appear you're not thinking of using Hamachi then? I thought with that it would basically be objective complete.

Hamachi is more geared toward private groups, being a program essentially to create a VPN. I was under the impression that we want a more public atmosphere, allowing anyone to get in on our sessions. If we use Hamachi then anyone who wants to game with us will have to be allowed to join our virtual network -- and that's not the ideal solution.

If we can get this to work with just opening a few ports, it's probably a safer and more advisable option.

I got Comanche Gold to Load and Play / Fly in Windows Vista. It needs some modding and work, taking time, but doable and should be repacked in a week to play with all terrains / missions unlocked.

First install the Comanche Gold Demo and then open it's root folder to do the modding / have your Comanche Gold Disk in the Disk Drive....




You have to mod the Setup.cd file to where your Comanche Gold Disk is at: Default was C: for the Demo. D: or consecutive for your CDROM or another one pertaining to where your game runs from. This plays the intro videos and unlocks the folders to play the missions.

It involves modding the Demo folder, using Ravens PFF Utility and finding the file in the Cgold.PFF called IDEMO.MNU and placing Fly Boy's WC3.MNU in the demo root folder ( as it over rides the packed one when loading) and renaming it to IDEMO to over write the IDEMO.MNU and then some editing by notepad in the top of the file headers of Fly Boy's file WC3.MNU file to open all missions / unlock them for play so the default menu will have all missions available to click on.

It loads and runs fine and has the higher resolutions without problems / lag.

The PFF file in the demo called: Cgold.pff needs to be repacked with the files or replaced by your disk's PFF files using the PFF packing / Raven's Pff utility.

Endstate: It loads and runs on Vista. It will require repacking the Cgold.pff from my Comanche Gold's game's cd pff for all of the mission guidelines and to run when comparing the WC3.MNU to IDEMO.MNU and going into the terrains / files of the .PFF.

It is doable and will just take some time to repack the appropriate files to meet the coding parameters.

Thanks DavidC99, FlyBoy and ufolev for the initial ideas and talk throughs.

Additionally, you can use 7Z zip program to look at exe's and unpack accordingly to mod.

El_Lobo - you might just be a genius! If you could write up a step-by-step guide on how to do this procedure and provide the modded IDEMO.MNU, I will surely - if it's OK with you - add it to my site where you will get full credit for this particular find.

I had got so far with this idea of using demo files in the full game, but got stuck after I got a revert to main menu after the mission should have loaded.

Does the menu music and in-game music work?

Awesome dude!

Oh, and welcome to the forums!

I tried to run some simple tests with simplifying some of these steps on Windows XP, but I naturally could not get it to load a mission because I didn't repackage nor did I extract everything as required (since this would take a really long time). One problem I was able to identify with this is that the Demo exe doesn't appear to allow for the secondary DirectSound option. No matter what the Wsetup.cfg file says, it appears to grab the primary one. This mainly means comms are dead in the water for this new patched version unless I'm missing something... Since the demo is stripped down, I imagine we might be missing other features as well.

The underlying issue is that the Comanche Gold executable is doing something stupid (ie. probably bug-induced stupidity) soon after it detects that you have the CD loaded in the game. This is causing a crash on Vista and Windows 7, but not on Windows XP. The ideal solution is to identify what causes the crash and then provide a patch for it.

I would be all over this solution provided here today, but for two reasons:

1. As already stated, the Demo exe lacks.
2. The amount of work to downgrade CG to be Vista/Windows 7 compatible is a lot. It requires a massive restructuring of the PFF files -- or at least a lot of extracting.

Nevertheless, this might be a sort of simple fix for those interested. Not only that, but we could seriously write an auto-extractor or auto-repacker tool that could apply this fix as needed.

Won't the extracted/modded files simply work if placed in the CG Demo install folder like for the full game?