I haven't tried it myself, but feedback from some who have, varies. I don't know the details, and it could have been coincidental, but one person has sworn never to go near Hamachi again due to it having "screwed up" his p.c. Others say it bogs down under graphic intensive games. Still, there are numerous testimonials from people who have been satisified with it, so take your pick.

We fly it with IL-2 as a squadron,had 10 on there the other night,no problems at all...thats why I was wondering about MA on it.

I finally backed-up my MiG folder and did a reinstall of MA to try the 0.85F beta. I've got an observation or two comparing it to my previous 0.80 installation.

My 0.80 install ran very well under XP Pro without having to select a compatibilty mode whereas 0.85F seems to require compatibility set to Win98. No big deal here.

Loading from the point of selecting the scenario is significantly longer with 0.85F than with 0.80. There were times I thought it had hung-up because there was nothing going on onscreen and the HDD light was only flashing sporadically.

0.85F does seem to hang during loading if I don't disable my antivirus prior to starting the game. It took a lot of key jockeying to finally get Task Manager and is showed the CPU was at 100%. Again, no apparent load progress onscreen and only occassional flashes from the HDD. At one point I had to hit the Restart button to regain control, but maybe my patience had run out after too many minutes.

While the addition of the BDG options page does add more game control options, I can't as yet say that 0.85F is superior to 0.80 based on the time it takes to get the game up and running. I fear the impact of the excessive load time will severely hamper whatever chances there may be for successful multiplayer connection, but I have not tried it yet. Thanks to TheSilkMan for his assistance with 0.85F. Looking forward to beginning some online testing. It might not be a bad idea to run MP tests with both 0.80 and 0.85F.

Addendum:
I did some timed testing on 0.85F load times. The first mission loaded after first starting the game took 4 minutes 22 seconds from the moment I clicked FLY until the ingame screen appeared. If I exited the mission, but kept the sim booted, the second and third mission loads took an average of only 1 minute 8 seconds. I noticed subsequent loads after the initial, barely accessed the HDD, which leads me to believe it must look to RAM.

I exited a mission and changed screen rez settings and the first load afterward took 3 minutes 35 seconds with subsequent mission loads at the same setting taking about 1 minute. Again, the HDD light indicated disk access most during the initial load or after a significant change was selected. In all cases, failure to disable my antivirus resulted in a system hang correctable only with the power reset button.

I don't have data on load times for 0.80 for comparison, but it was far faster.

Thanks for the feed back...

Can someone repost or post a link to the 0.85F BDG patch? All the websites I can find, including BoB's website and the links previously posted here are dead.

BDG_MiGAlley_0.85F.rar (3176KB)

http://rapidshare.com/files/98289797/BDG_MiGAlley_0.85F.rar.html

or

mig_085_f2.rar (2704KB)

http://rapidshare.com/files/98290369/mig_085_f2.rar.html

Don't ask me the difference. There's no Readmes or nfos and bob-ma.org is long gone. They're just sitting on my HD along with 0.85E. My joystick time is near zero so you may as well make some use of them.

Difference is that F2 should work for users with TrackIR + Windows 98 - not sure if any of these are still around. That is all. There was a description on my website but it's currently down.

Is it possible to use TrackIR vector expansion in Win98?

Had trouble finding the software.

Anyone?

I'm still waiting for an answer!

tag, in order to use the vector expansion you would have to:

1) Have TrackIR version 3, 3 Pro or higher hardware.
2) Have lastest TrackIR software version.

Since the latest version of the software supports the following:
For Software Version 4.0++ ::
Requires TrackIR 3 Series hardware or later
Windows 2000 / XP / Vista (32 & 64-bit)
Requires DirectX 8 or later
Pentium II 500
5 megabytes of free hard disk space
16 megabytes of RAM
USB 1.1 or 2.0 port

Based upon the above, I would have to say no. However, hybrid setup testing
(i.e., testing with diffent software version if you can find them) may
allow for such a configuration. Not sure that TrackIR tech support would
support any erroneous behavior though... More info may be found at their
website: http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/06-support/support-vector-expansion-help.html
or forum: http://forum.naturalpoint.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=postlist&Board=31&page=1

Hope this helps...