This pair of cockpits are the typical display output of Allied Force using my Toshiba 42"...
AF display settings are set to 1024:768 -32 bit
Graphics set to full w/all option on, including Ultra-32bit
Naturally, when I set the output to a tighter resolution, say, 1900:1080 or any 16:9 ratio, then I'm back to the 4:3 cockpit.


My widescreen pit isn't the worst eyesore. And I kinda like the Ashton Martin Suede look -
I first discovered the view below the knee map. It displayed all the base info, etc.. ya'll know-
Accidently pushed down again and the wider-stretched cockpit revealed itself. Discovered the 'Sht-2' key combo by accident-
and whammo- good to go on the cheap...err...uhh...never mind cheap.


Toshiba-$800
Adobe v7-$1000

One question, why are you flying AF? Have you tried BMS yet?

Yes, and I love what I see.
I've spent about 3 weeks evaluating FreeFalcon5 and it's been nothing but CTD....sorely a disappointment.
I do enjoy Allied Force as it closely resembles the Falcon4 that I spent years using.
I have BMS and my only problem is that my system is the bare minimum to fully enjoy it.
At best, BMS will do about 42 fps...I know a better video card would help that but I just bought this card
and I want to wait awhile before I turn around and buy another one.
Allied Force gives me about 28 fps in the most graphic situations and around 76 fps when all is calm.
83 has been the highest, but that is before I engage high graphic settings in the app and on the v-card.

I read that BMS is very stable, but that its stability is for multiplay gamers and such. I assume this means that the solo user as myself would find BMS to be stable across the board. There's nothing worse than being in the middle of a mission and you get a CTD because some people are working with old codes and are really just hackers at best. That's my research regarding FreeFalcon5 and all of the goodies that one can add on to it.

One thing for certain....Allied Force doesn't CTD here.
My system is new/old...
Intel D915GAG board
Intel Prescott 3.2 Ghz
Crucial Ram 2 Gb
Seagate SATA 200 GB
500 watt p/s
XP service pack 2
Asus GeForce 8400 GS
RealTek OnBoard Audio
Realistic STA-780 receiver (1982)
Rebuilt Optimus 1 speakers (1973)
Cheap Joystick Logitech Attack 3...hey....it'll do.

So, from above, you'll notice that I'm on the edge.
But this little system will run LockOn MAC, Flaming Cliffs and IL-2 1946 w/full graphics and very high fps. (75-120 fps)
And no CTD from those either. Flaming Cliffs 2 didn't fair so well w/full graphics on...
But I don't fly online, and I can't get geared up to create my own missions and then turn around and fly them-

I really wish some professional coders would take the Falcon4 concept and totally update it from the ground up.
As I understand it, BMS did some of this. But I tripped up on something the other day called 'Dark Falcon'

You know anything about it, other than it would take a current hi-end system to use it?

BMS is very stable in SP as well. Dark Falcon is what the community used to call BMS before it was released and there was no real information on it. There are professional coders in the BMS team and yes it is Falcon 4 totally updated. My advice would be to spend some time evaluating BMS as well, like you did with FF, as for your system if you can't run BMS with everything on, try turning stuff down or off. It will still look much better than AF.

Ya know...I'm glad you mentioned BMS. I had it over on the backup drive. I loaded it one time...didn't get under the hood for anything.
It gave me very low fps, so I deleted it and forgot it. Spent enough time in Allied Force campaigns that I never gave it a thought.
So I just loaded it...had to tweak the video card settings...set BMS graphics to medium for starters and I'm getting between 45 and 60 fps for dogfighting and NOE flying through the metros...not bad....best of all
NO CTD yet.
I think I'll give the doc files a good going over.
My fav munitions were the clusters, the napam, durandals, and of course, harms. Wild weasel was always a fav of mine.
Do you know if BMS will let me load something that'll penetrate an underground factory or did they model that for the F-111 and F-117-
Trying to remember...I think it is the GBU-27 and 28 series...can't be sure yet.

Anywhooo....thanks for bringing up BMS.
You motivated me to put some other things on the back burner and get a better video card....cuz I know my system isn't top flight by any means. But truthfully, it does more than I ever expected it to do.

Good Mornin' to ya

I have noticed one thing though...
In BMS, my cockpit fonts ...esp the MFDs ...they appear to need some antialiasing or something.
Difficult to see clearly w/o shifting downward for the bigger views of the MFD.
Still have to see what needs to be tweaked in the video card settings.
Man do I miss the days when I had a Voodoo 5500. Seems like the settings were simpler to understand back then.
This little video card has 20 some options and triggers to fiddle with...it can become a choir finding the right settings.
I would have thought by now that everyone was on the same page as far as viewing graphics on a computer.

BMS will allow you to load up bombs to hit a underground bunker, I think the GBU-12's. I just got into dropping guided/laser bombs and i must say it is fun. My system is pretty old also 2.4 dual core, 8800GT and 4 gigs of ram. I'll be getting a new system within a few weeks. BMS is the only Falcon that I have been able to play, the graphics were the main thing stopping me from flying OF and I never tried AF. From what I have seen of AF, it didn't look good.

What settings are you using? your set up is stretched!

Guilty!
You passed judgement on AF because of still images. Screenshots always fail to catch the beauty
in motion, don't you know? And the few youtube AF movies out there are plain horrible.
AF's graphics is old for today standards, there's no doubt, but it is coherent in every aspect.
When viewed as a whole, you just accept it. It is clear that they did put more efforts in
'normalizing' the graphics than it is apparent at first glance. The tricky thing is... you don't
notice it because it looks so natural (as a whole). Look instead at BMS. Its beautiful lighting
(if not a bit garish) is in stark contrast with the shabby terrain. It's not coherent.

I'm sure they're working on it. Remains to be seen for how much longer you'll have to play with
pretty lighting and shabby everything else, on the promise that some day you'll receive better.
Yeah, promises promises... BMS has been around for ages. And the most part of the improvements
you play with, in BMS 4.32, are from the decade old BMS versions.
Turn off the hype, turn off the enthusiasm. Turn off the "everybody says it's cool" thing. Try to
be neutral and objective: how much of the actual BMS is truly 'new' stuff?
If we exclude the graphics, there is very little 'new' left.

I'm not saying that BMS is a fake. Gods, not at all. It's promising and the people behind it are
competent (what they have done speaks for itself). The problem is that they produce new stuff at
a snail's pace. It'll be months before you get to see terrain adeguate to the pretty levels of
the lighting and the cockpit. It'll be months before you get a proper and working 3D cockpit (lke
that of the F16) for each of the different jets they allow you to fly.
And it'll be months (to not say years) before you get to see the many bugs plaguing the new BMS
avionics finally squashed and buried.

Don't look down on AF. The LP guys made a choice. They chose to rid F4 of the infinite bugs it
had. And they chose to improve things while still keeping the product as accessible to pretty
much everybody-and-their-pet as was possible. They have succeeded magnificently. Top Score!
BMS, instead, by design, is not going for accessibility. They target people with modern hardware,
as they openly state somewhere in their main page or where there are the system requirements, I
don't remember, but it's there - just read around the front page.

With all that said, if you like BMS so much, do keep playing with it. Nobody says you should stop.
Just do not look down on AF because it hasn't the same graphics. There's more to Falcon 4 than
graphics. The many F4 mods in the last 12 years and counting have taught the world whole new
meanings of the terms 'CTD'.
AF doesn't CTD - barring system instability / hazardous mods on your part, that is.

Sometimes I wonder. If there was no AF, would there be a BMS 4.32 today?
Can't count on OF and FF to keep Falcon 4 alive. Their tendency to crash for the smallest thing
is the worst ads they could make to the simulator.

Well it seems you didn't spend much time wih BMS.
Really they did tons of really hard work.
- first complete technology update for GFX engine, it's not about shiny things, but also autogen, shadows, ability to push hi-polycount scenes, proper 3d pit etc... It's huge task on its own
- new flight model engine - correct edge-of-envelope and stall behaviour
- new weather and athmosphere model - wind gusts, turbulences
- lots of improvement in F16 systems modeling.

I think you've reall missed lots of things.
F4AF was good in it's time, but it over.
And yes BMS would be there without F4AF, my guess it'd be released even earlier than it was.

Hello.

Why don't we resume this in a year from now and see what major *new* features can be listed further
along with those you just mentioned? You'll see what I mean when I say snail's pace.
Nothing to argue about the things they have *done*. I have said they speak for themselves, in case
you missed it in my post. The problem is that you aren't going to see much more than that anytime
soon.
When the current hype about BMS will subside we can see, facts at hand, what's been actually
accomplished and what's been promised but is still to come.

As for F4:AF, it is not over.
It's still by far the most complete and, at the same time, accessible + polished + bugfree package
you get to play with today. When and if BMS shall surpass AF in every regard, then we (me too) will
say that AF is over. Until then, it's not fair to declare its death just because you don't use it
anymore (I assume you don't).

But don't let what I said ruin your day. Not my intent. We're just exchanging opinions.

Hmm, Why FLY falcon AF ? no flight model, its flying like train in trails. But if you care just systems you can go with AF.. but my choice is bms because i like feel the plane and motion when i fly, no ctds (yet), 90% single player and bit multiplayer too. And terrain looks about 10 times better (i own AF too) =)

Did you noticed thes "few" features means overhaul most of the sim part of F4?
It's huge task. Just look at Il2/CloD. Team of full-time developers, workining on quite solid base of Il2 code for almost as long as BMS team stil can't get things right. They still has to fix their gfx engine, fix broken AI/campaign and add weather that is still missing.
Don't you understand major features aren't gonna happen in couple of weeks/months?
F4AF was way less revolutionary than BMS, most of the things you can find in SuperPak4. Yet it took 2 years to release and 3 years of patches to get to the point it is now.

Kinda funny, BMS terrain is still better than F4AF one, but you see it as con of BMS and not F4AF. New terrain engine didn't make it into first release so what. It's tremendous task which would delay release for another few years, it was perfectly releasable without it. You don't like it, learn to code and write your own, better. Go ahead, let's see how long it'll take. Maybe then you'll appreciate what you got.

Well it's not good even for that, if you're into systems moddeling F4AF can't stand a chance incomparision to BMS, the difference in level of details is outstanding.

F4AF was meant to fill the gap between F4 as it was in 2002-2003 and next big thing. Pretty good at role it had to perform but nothing more. The only reason one wouuld like to stay with it, is BMS is not working right on his rig (due to higher requirements or incompatibility)

I may be totally wrong, but isn't BMS done buy fans who "hacked" the code and made it better? Point is == "fans," as in guys who do this on their spare time. And BMS is free. Compared to AF which had an entire team who sold their product afterwards. So I have a little respect and patience, seeing as I am currently enjoying what other people have done for free and during their precious spare time.

As an AF pilot years and years ago, my biggest gripe with AF was having to switch from 2D to 3D just to flip switches in the cockpit. Then again, I wasn't as serious about simming back then as I am now.

Right now I am enjoying having just one cockpit (switching 'pits just killed so much of the immersion for me, nevermind the SA view), being able to throw switches like I do in DCS A10, and having fancy new toys to play with (TGP, -9X). Like you, I am a bit disappointed about the "lack of polish" with regards to in-'pit shadows and the ground textures... I was a mud-mover in AF, and have been enjoying the DCS A10 terrain, so the BMS terrain is glaringly ugly, but there are guys working on it... unfortunately, these guys have lives, families, jobs, and hobbies so progress will be slow but I have all these as well so I understand where they're coming from

I'm eagerly looking forward to what new surprises the BMS dev community can come up with, especially since the price for this is something I'm very much willing to pay -- FREE!

It seems your resolution is pretty low, so yes zooming in is pretty much necessary in this case. However check if the "double resolution cockpit displays" option is checked in the BMS config editor and see if unchecking it helps a bit.

Since its hard to convey tone through a forum, let me say first that the following is said in a completely friendly manner. I only write this because there seems to be some misinformation about what BMS is or isn't in these forums. I have never looked down on AF, I have flown it quite a bit as it came out just when I was returning to flight sims after some years of absence. Now..



That it looks coherent is fact. However the graphics were barely updated from the various F4 flavors floating around at the time so I don't think it was such a monumental task. On the other hand, what BMS have done and continue to do with the graphics is a monumental task, which is one of the reasons why things take so long. They could have waited until every aspect of the graphics was updated, which means the release would be around 2020 (have you counted how many 3d models are included in F4 for instance?). I don't think anyone would want that. Things like these are being worked on though.

Also:



BMS has a new terrain engine which already looks miles better than AF.



To clarify, the current BMS team is not the same that made the older BMS patches. Some people are the same but not many. And no this BMS has not been in development since the last BMS patch, its much younger, the dev time is not nearly a decade as you suspect.



The above are much more relevant to AF actually, which just took the best stuff of the mods that were already out there. Very little has been developed from scratch for AF. How much of BMS is new, well if you could see the (literally) hundreds-of-pages long changelog you'd know. And that is a changelog from OF, which was already probably the most advanced F4 flavor. Just to point the big stuff out, there is new terrain engine (not entirely new but significantly different from other F4 versions), new FM / physics / weather (this is entirely new), transition to DX9 gfx engine (also entirely new), new MP code (entirely).



Months? I'd say never, it is not one of the team's goals. And I don't know of any hardcore study sim that features more than on aircraft in full detail.



That makes it sound like a bug-fest which it isn't. Keep in mind that what works in AF works also in BMS. Its just that BMS has 10 times more stuff implemented, and some aspects of some of this stuff do not work 100% correct under some circumstances. The percentage is pretty small.



That is true, BMS looks to the future and develops the sim to be as good as it can be, no holds barred. If you don't agree with this approach then I can't say you're wrong, anyone would like something that runs perfectly on medium hardware. Same goes with bugs, AF chose to remove a ton of features to spare users the bugs. BMS instead choose to include those features and fix the bugs. As you say, its a matter of choice. BMS chose to have a longer developing time but end up with a better product. One of the team members made a great post about development on the BMS forums. I won't quote it in it's entirety but I'll write the resume. Commercial products have limited resources (money to pay the staff), and a deadline. For free products money is not an issue. So with a long enough dev time, a free product will always be better than a commercial one. I say with a long enough dev time, because commercial products (like AF) are worked on full-time, while the BMS guys work on it on their free time. On the other hand, AF had a deadline as I said, BMS does not. They can keep developing it for 10 more years and we can only imagine what the results can be.



Nothing has ever been promised by BMS is all I can say on that.



And there's more to BMS than graphics, dear lord so much more! I think you're in denial man! Joking aside though, it sounds like you have not tested BMS much or at all. One other reason I've written all this is that personally I think you're just seeing the tip of the iceberg and you're seriously missing out. As far as I can tell, the biggest thing AF had was stability. BMS is rock solid on my current and previous machine, never had a CTD. Then again I only had 2 (two) CTDs in the 2 years flying OF (again on 2 different machines) so maybe I'm really really really lucky? Hmm, somehow I can't believe that. BTW, that is the exact same number of CTDs I had with AF too in 2 years. Every other aspect besides stability is simply incomparable between the two versions. I say try it out a little. Try and see what has been changed, to what degree and to what fidelity to RL. I believe you'll be very pleasantly surprised.

Sorry for the huge post and the derail.

Hilarious - pretty sure you never even installed BMS judging how clueless you are. Any work done for free on this sim is a bonus - its already surpasses AF in pretty much all areas - not only that it actually gives you a feeling of interaction with the environment as a flight sim should - pretty important if you have flown planes before.

Totally stable as well for me - its fantastic work! - and in a years time I'm sure LP will release Falcon 5 for you to buy - yeah good luck with that.

Well, I go back to Falcon 3..and all of the addons available back in the early '90s. When I saw Falcon 4 on the shelf..picked it up for a closer look..noticed the weight of the packaging...I rushed it to the checkout stand.
Brought it home and I truly believe I have NEVER seen such a gorgeous piece of marketing assembly on any product in my entire 50 some years.
So, like most of us here, we have Falcon4 running in our blood forever.

Upon picking up Allied Force a month ago, I knew in my heart that the main product would be to remove buggy coding...even before I loaded it. I didn't bother going to YouTube and viewing AF videos...no need on my end. I put this little system together w/the limited funds I have these days. So I assumed Allied would be a smart choice (hardware wise)
I wasn't disappointed.
Lemme give ya'll my take.
Reflecting back, Falcon 4 was/is coherent- it reminds me of someone taking a comic book and turning it into 3d...and bringing it to life.
And all the while, its totally in your face. And you still jump at the sound fx now and then I don't care how seasoned you are.
I would hate to admit to someone just how many hours I've got in Falcon3 and 4 together. I'll just say that it would warrant an investigation by an entire team of psychiatrists.


As for FF5 crashing....I laid in bed and pondered the matter. And I believe the crashing 'could' come from the fact that I'm asking too much from my video card. Or maybe it's the 5.55 patch. There's so damned many options one could point the finger at, then you begin to realize what a daunting task is in front of anyone attempting to take the Falcon 4 to the next level.

Falcon flight sims are fluid and they need to remain fluid. When you're at the merge w/an enemy aircraft, you must get the sensation of things moving at Mach. You snap your finger, and just that quick, your enemy is gaining on your tail headed for lead pursuit. Falcon always fulfilled that emotion. No other sim I've used was as fast & furious.
I liked the Janes F15 & 18, but they felt like slow motion compared to Falcon.
And when the heat is on, your butt's on the edge of your seat, and you're ham-fisting your joystick...That's the real success of a flight sim for me. Honestly Jane's would put me to sleep with their fly-bys. You turned away for a few seconds in Falcon4 and your next view was an empty sky with the whistle wind ablowin'....
Yep, the comic book graphics I'll always hold dear to my heart.
It'll run on any system today...no CTD whatsoever...High graphic settings are good enough.
Because, when the heat is on....noone is paying attention to graphics.
And you find your butt is sore from the edge of your chair.
And you dust yourself off and fly again.
Yep. Falcon, no matter what your flavor.

*after reading the whole*

Know what? Let's pretend I never said anything and drop this ball.
I can see already where this is going and I don't like it. Sorry for the guys that took their
time to respond me - really sorry, because I won't respond in kind. Don't take it as a personal
insult, but if I keep replying here the next step shall be to label me Troll for having stirred
such a reaction. And that's not going to happen. A polite: 'forget it'.
Everyone keeps running his favorite sim (not that I ever said stop BMS) - end of the story.

A nice day to you all

You know very little about Falcon if you think that. Now, if you compare BMS to say, OF, then, yeah, it incorporates a lot of stuff that OF had because well, OF was essentially a alpha leaked version of BMS before the amazing stuff like the fully simulated flight model based off NASA's data.



Sometimes I wonder if there was no SuperPack 3/BMS 1.0/2.0 would there have ever been an AF? The answer to that is a 100% no.

Yeah AF is coherent - the #%&*$# cockpit/models match the #%&*$# terrain. At least with BMS we get nice things but still the terrain remains bad but at least it's not ALL bad now.

Likewise with the avionics. AF is coherent and "complete" because it's avionics don't aim high. It that regard it matches the terrain, 2d cockpit and models. BMS at least has set their bar high.

AF not finished yet? Ok, show me what LP are doing to improve AF to make it better than BMS.... I thought so.

But you're right to each their own but with the updated gfx, avionics, MP stability, campaigns and no sign of LP ever improving AF then it's very obvious that BMS is the superior product.

I'll add that its all about how fat one's wallet is these days.
Mine's so thin, I can never keep up with it.
Falcon5 is stunning but who gives a rat about CTD...? Noone I've met lately.
BMS has it going on strong, but I'll need someone else's wallet for that sweet dog.
At this age in my life, I don't know if I'll ever have a trip to the moon system (again).
Savings tanked...economy looks promising (that's a joke, folks)
I simply have to work with what little I have left..and trust me, it ain't much.
Love, Peace and Falcon4Ever

Now eveyone, pour up some Turkey.

Sorry, but does BMS require a different system? I mean, I thought if your rig ran AF, you could run BMS, right?

CuMelter, I don't know exactly what your upgrade options are (not familiar with your specs above), but if your motherboard accepts DDR3 RAM and PCI-E video cards, you could be able to upgrade very cheaply. 4GB RAM is dirt cheap now, so much so that an 8GB DDR3 kit is very reasonably priced. As for a video card, a lot of people are selling their GPUs here every now and then... right now there is a 6950 2GB up for grabs and though it is expensive, it is a "just behind the bleeding edge" card and it will run anything with no sweat. Other cards can be had for cheaper (less than $100), you can even try eBay.

That's a huge a## tip, Ice...moocho appreciated. I just got this video card in Feb. I didn't know HOW to BUY a damn vcard.
And I still don't. 64 bit this....128 bit that.....256 bit over yonder.
I mean..WTF?
Later, I discover that the GeForce 8400 is frowned upon by the 'In The Know' crowd.
I've been out of the loop way too long. The card works(it is a pci-e deal)...and I do believe another couple cards of ram should help.
My system runs BMS, but I can't enjoy all of the work that went into BMS with this system.
BMS eye candy is spectacular. And stable.
To my eyes, FreeFalcon5 wins the marbles in eye candy. But CTD=WTF=FTS....
Allied Force doesn't CTD. Period.

I'm glad to have helped, CuMelter. Sorry, I forgot you just joined SimHQ. If you look, we have a Hardware & Software - PC section and if you post there, a lot of "in the know" people will help you out. Whether you are buying a whole new PC or just upgrading one component and are wondering if XXX hardware is a good deal for $YY.00 price, people will be glad to help.

Let me point you to Tom's HW Graphics card heirarchy chart. It is not 100% accurate but it gives you a rough guess as to how your card performs in relation to everything else out on the market. You will see that your 8400 is ranked way down... in fact, it is around the same ballpark as my ATI 9600 that I had on my old PC which was built 8 years ago, incidentally the same PC that I played AF on. If you search for "5770," you will see it is about 17-18 "tiers" above your current system. That is what I had just recently and I played DCS A10C on it with decent framerates and good eyecandy on a 1920x1080 screen. If you were to upgrade your GPU, I would suggest aiming for around the 5770 area, which a quick Newegg search gives me a price range of about $100. Tom's HW still rates the 5770 as one of the best buys for it's price range, as shown here. Obviously your final choice will depend on how much cash you have, but the general advice for GPU purchase is "buy the best you can afford."

A quick search on RAM shows that a 4GB (2x2GB kit) DDR3 1600MHz can cost a whopping $28.99 for the Kingston HyperX variant, while a 8GB (2x4GB kit) seen here can cost up to $49.99 for the Kingston variant, although the Mushkin, Crucial, and G.Skill variants can be had for less. With RAM, my advice is get the most GB you can afford, 8GB being a nice sweet spot (anything above is overkill) and 4GB being a decent size. For an additional $10-15, if you can double your RAM, why not? So, find a decent size and try for 1600MHz if you can (nice if you want to overclock later) and find the tightest timings you can, from a reputable brand. However, in the overall scheme of things, premium RAM does not boost the performance enough to justify the extra cost, IMHO. BTW, it is generally advised to have a "kit" installed rather than mixing up RAM sticks, hence my recommendations.

As for the eternal AF vs BMS argument, let me just say that BMS has its own merits as well. If you have to upgrade your PC to enjoy BMS, that's not BMS's fault, as the modders just seeks to optimize the sim as much as possible since "modern" PCs can handle it. Plus if you upgrade your PC, all your other games will benefit as well. Win-win!


Sorry for the long post. Hope to have given you some ideas, and hopefully convinced you that a "powerful" PC need not be expensive.

You're a gentleman & a scholar. This ol'bird is grateful.
Have no doubt.
Now I have to determine what kind of ram this intel board will accept.
I don't know if DDR 2 is in there or 3....or if I'm limited to what type of ram to buy....???
And lookie here- this board will only give a video card 75 watts of power.
Now I feel cornered here.
All The Best-
Ed in 'Bama USA
PS-just ran utils for this board.
FSB is only 200...sucks
Max Install Ram is only 4 Gb...oh well
Current ram is 2 Gb of Kingston. Vendor told me he installed Crucial....hmmm
Isn't Kingston lower on the scale compared to Crucial?

For comparison purposes, my system that ran BMS at MAX was:

- Intel Dual Core 2.6 Ghz (not to confuse with Core 2 Duo, mine is a lot older, circa 2008 I think).
- 2 GB of some cheap DDR2 RAM.
- And a GeForce 9500 GT with 1 GB of RAM.

It ran in a perfect 1920x1080 resolution in that system. So with BMS in mind, you don't need 4 GB of RAM or a super graphic card. I see the same card for 50 bucks in Amazon, so some other a little better could still be affordable.

I do apologize. Of course you can run BMS with much lower hardware. How low? Dunno. Me, I prefer a slight overkill as I just want to sit down and play and enjoy the game, not figuring out how to get more eye candy or to push up framerates. I'm done with that (I hope!).

Cu, I did a quick search on Google for your motherboard. This is what Intel says and this is a pic I saw at Amazon. Is that what your motherboard looks like? If so, you are limited to the old DDR memory. Note that RAM comes in DDR, DDR2, and DDR3 flavors, so your MB are two "generations" behind. Unless I am sorely mistaken, it will be a pain to upgrade this board, you are better off upgrading to a modern CPU and motherboard combo which unfortunately costs quite a bit.

Here's another pic I dug up:



If you can, download CPU-Z and run it. It will give you specs of your CPU, motherboard, and RAM. As to brand rankings, I'm not sure. Kingston and Crucial are good brands though, and like I said, even the premium, bleeding-edge RAM kits won't give a significant, noticeable improvement so a good, quick, brand-named RAM should do the trick.

I do apologize again if I got your hopes up. Best bet is probably eBay or if someone here from SimHQ is getting rid of his old CPU and motherboard. I once got lucky and managed to get a core2quad 2.4GHz, mobo, and 8GB DDR2 RAM for a little over £120, which I used to build a PC for my son, so just keep an eye out!

I'm on the same page with ya. Trust me. I'm sick and tired of having to try to keep up with why this is different from that and that is this and this is NOT that....Jesus.

Yep...I'm afraid you're right. And Yep, that's my board, sorry to say. And it came w/a Gateway bios chip...no means to overclock anything-just enhance settings is all ya get. Even still, it runs IL-2 1946 really smoothe and of course Falcon. So I'll copy down the components you list and just phone someone and tell them to make me a package deal. Period. No second guessing around.

My Toshiba is fixed at 60 Hz freshrates...but it does allow a 'ClearView' setting that takes it up to 120 Hz if you use an HDMI port....So in a sense, what I've been doing is running Falcon at 1024...Ultra 32bit...and using the 'full-stretch' feature of the TV to get a widescreen display. It's really not that bad of a perspective. But Falcon will save screen prints in the resolution its running, so here's a snap of the cleaner HUD at my monitor's setting. Gone is that eyesore edge of the plexi-glass and the frame fingers that hold it in place.
At any rate, if there are any readers here that are using a 16:9 monitor-
I cleaned up the Balkan Cockpit as seen below. Ya just can't have enough viewing area in flight sims, IMO...



PS- No Offense towards Aeyes

I took one look at the two pics and though "Ugh! What a grainy pic!" Then I realized... AF 2D pit. Sigh... BMS has spoiled me.

Cu, I would strongly suggest you build your PC yourself. Not only will you learn a lot about how your PC works, you will also gain familiarity with the terms used and gain appreciation for your rig and your upgrade options later on. Pity you are on the other side of the pond, I would've happily built you one, pack the tower case properly, and ship it to you with no labor cost.

If you are serious about building a new PC (or even just spec-ing one out), I would suggest you post over in the Hardware & Software - PC section of the forums. Lots of guys will be happy to help. Before you do, you need to note your current specs, what games/sims you want to play on the new PC, and the budget you have for new parts. If you have any old hardware that you can carry over to the new PC (ie, monitor, keyboard, mouse, SATA hard drives), mention that too so we can "save" money from them and put them towards other parts.

Right off the bat, I am guessing you will want a new CPU and motherboard, RAM, GPU (though you can probably use your old one for now, as I would suggest saving up again and buying a beefy card around the $150-200 price range), PSU, and maybe a new case too, one that has proper airflow.

Good luck, and I look forward to you PC-build thread!