I am keeping the few manuals I have. But by the time I finally got BOB WOV, all I could find was the CD. Meanwhile, I need to throw out a couple of boxes of sailing magazines and other sundry outdated articles.

Gents,

Pleased to report that JRT came through this morning. He has been offline while upgrading to Win8 etc., and should be with us again soon. Seems that he will now be able to experience the delights of RoF and Cliffs, too, as well as WoV! Lots of cockpit time in the pipeline...

Folks:

After a very long swim in the Channel; I am once more returned to our happy Hall. It is most gratifying to find everyone still kicking, hale and hearty. Even more gratifying perhaps to find some booze left in the bar, Dux.

After a major crash and melt-down I'm using a brand-new SOTA laptop for my evil shenanigans. It has been instructive if a bit frustrating at times getting to know a new computer and the latest OS all at the same time. I've loaded most of my old sims and managed some minor magic getting them running on Win 8.1. Like all MS OS it has its quirks. It loses my USB joystick every time it shuts down. That is a known flaw. I'm researching a fix that does not require tweaking and fiddling with the registry. A minor irritation. All I have to do when this happens is go into the control panel and re-identify the joystick. Then it works until the next shut-down.

I've saved the best to last I guess. WOV. Now I must load WOV and then patch it. Most of the patches were unavailable to me using XP. Any suggestions?

And, yes, I am considering trying to run ROF and COD. They are both listed as incompatible with Win 8x however I know people are doing it. I found a copy of COD on Amazon for 13 bucks so it isn't much of a risk. I don't like the idea that ROF requires a continuous Internet connection even for single player mode. Yes, I realize it is principally a multi-player game but I don't like being forced to do that. I have never used STEAM either and prefer to have an actual disk for backup. OK, maybe I'm unrealistic and senile if you like but I've had years to develop my intractable, stubborn, archaic nature and I'm comfortable with it.

Good screenies Dux
Fittop:

I'm so glad to find my fellow American present. Forgive me if I've missed something in the dialog regarding "Star Gazer" for I have not read all the posts I've missed.

As you know, Horkheimer passed away a few years ago. I've missed his program ever since. The fellow was a rather strange looking dude complete with toupee. He seemed to know his stuff however and really made astronomy interesting. My grand kids would have enjoyed the program. However it came on rather late in the evening here on UNC TV/PBS. I wonder why no one has filled the vacancy? Perhaps they have and our station does not carry it?

Hmmmmm. I'm just wondering aloud here mates, if I can manage to return twice from a watery grave, why can't our Fearless Founder SNAFU also manage it? Gulp! You don't think he's really um "Had it" do you?

Folks:

In mentioning patching BoB. I should make it clear I do not have a copy of WOV. I have the original BoB and I'm going to have my hands full finding the complete set of patches Rowan and BDG for that if any are still to be found. Maybe Mauser's BoB site will have some?

Welcome back Roger!

And flying a new crate eh? Congrats on the new Windows 8.1 laptop. You are now possibly the single one and only squadron member, amongst the "B" flight lads anyway, to run such modern equipment.

If you need some of the old BDG patches for Rowan's BoB, I still keep some of them locked up .... er backed up in my RAID NAS so they can be available if need be. I' m not sure there are any sites left, dealing with the BoB patches and user made addons. Usually the BDG updates were nice packages containing all-in-one compilations of the best addons. The latest one I have i 0.99

On the subject of BoB, I've finished the Vincent Orange biography of Sir Keith Park and interestingly, Arthur "Butch" - "Bert" - "Ginger" - "Bomber" Harris was offered Fighter Command 11 Group but turned it down. So I wonder how the Battle would have developed had he and not Park been in charge.

Chaps,

JRT,

Back sooner than expected, eh? Good show! Now, that long delayed presentation ceremony and monumental, nay, biblical piss-up can finally take place! I am of course referring to your award of the coveted Golden Mae West Award for Accomplished Channel Guzzler and Breast Stroke Champion. Even as I type, I can see a convoy of brewer's drays heading for the Prince and Polecat and...yes...as usual, groups of sixth formers from the Lady Mountfast Academy are gathering, eager for your autograph. Rather puzzled as to why they should be carrying overnight bags though? Perhaps they are going on to the Church of St. Jugsmauler for residential confirmation classes...

As advised in today's email, all my Cliffs sorties have been single player which have been repeated ad-nauseum. I tried a couple of scrambles in multi-player but at that time I was not au faux with the cockpit drill and suffered accordingly.

Folks:
Dux,

Hmmmm. Nothing to it really. After a strict regime of salt water the booze up sounds right up my street.

Thanks for putting me up for it, but Dux, dear chap, isn't the GMWA always a posthumous award? Oh well, after the grand celebration at the fabled P&P it may actually be appropriate.

Hmm. W8.1? You know it's the devil, right? BoB2 will
not run on it, and considering how much BoB2 has in
common with BoB1, the latter may not run either.

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3712922/BoB_2_and_Windows_8?#Post3712922

If your hard drive is big enough, while the machine
is new there is always the possibility of carving out
a partition for a dual boot to W7, as I presume you
must have a copy kicking about from the previous machine.
That way BoB2 is perhaps also a possibility in the future.
...if the machine is found to run CoD, it should certainly
run BoB2.

Folks:

PV1,

Thanks for the info, though disappointing, there seems to be some slight hope. I don't have a copy of 7 however.

Everything was so stable with the elderly XP machine though it would not accept newest BoB patches. In fact I was told it wouldn't run WOV at all. It ran the orig. BoB patched as high as it would accept beautifully and I was happy with it. As I was in at the beginnings of BoB and, like all the rest of you, I have made it part of my life, I shall miss it if 8.1 truly gags on it. Was 8.0 any better? I've read 8.1 was an improvement for some bugs and tribulations. I gather 7 was better. They fix one thing and break another.

I managed to get IL2 1946 running this past weekend. I have gotten Strike Fighters 1 to run smoothly wide screen until the mission is complete and I try to esc into 2D then it freezes and I have to close to the desktop with Ctrl-Alt-Del. Even with that I gather I can consider it at least a minor triumph getting it to run on 8.1. After that I had very high hopes for BoB and COD until now.

I have 581 GB free space at the moment on the one HDD. Yup, after a decade and more of enjoyment I'm gonna miss BoB if I cannot get 8.1 to run either old BoB or WOV. Maybe I'm asking too much from an OS? Maybe consoles are the future for games leaving PCs for less fun and exciting tasks, eh? Back in the 80s when I got my first computer it was just an already obsolete PC Jr. with a little memory upgrade on a sidecar. My brother-in-law worked for IBM and got that for me. The BIOS was screwy and I had to learn not to be surprised when it would not run a desirable game or program. Looks like after all these years things are about the same in some ways.

Of course, in the present case, I suppose one cannot be too surprised when a new OS is not infinitely backwardly compatible. I have read online that others are running COD under 8.1 but no details regarding how or how well. As I typed before, both ROF and COD are listed as not compatible by MS. Ironic, I think, that I could not run these programs before on the old machine and now that I've up-graded I still cannot run them.

OK, I'm almost as old as the venerable Dux and therefor I should not be greatly surprised. It's all a matter of timing.

As the old man who had been wearing the Santa suit asked the beautiful but gullible young woman lying beside him (to whom he had promised a car load of presents if she would sleep with him): "That was fantastic; but aren't you a little old to still believe in Santa?"

Folks:

To paraphrase that great character actor Strother Martin: "What we have here is a failure to standardize PCs and games."

Since that seems unlikely if not totally unpractical, there seems to be a verified "fix" for COD (CLODER)from 2012 for Win 8 here: http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=36078

I found a link to it on A2A. Certainly it may not work with win 8.1. Anyone have a comment or any experience with this "fix"?

Gents,

JRT,

Got this mornings mail, thanks.

I've finished repairing that fuselage well enough for the trimming flight but one of the tailplanes has warped, too. The six-strand motor is now three-strand with the rest flopping about loosely but it will have to do for the time being.
I have noted that there is just on patch of cow crap in the entire meadow. What's the betting that the Fokker will find it with an accuracy that guided missile technicians can only look upon with envy...

Folks:
Dux,

As Teddy Roosevelt might have observed, I am Deeeelighted to read that the Fokker is coming along and soon it will be soaring high above the sun dappled, summer-green fields of Derbyshire. She is a lovely war bird.

LOL. Yes, like the kites of my youth that always seemed to seek out the tallest tree or power line, the Fokker will possibly find a way to land on that particularly unpleasant spot. More importantly perhaps, mind you do not step in it. That reminds me of the little possibly brain challenged boy who came into his mother's kitchen holding a pile of dog crap in his hands. "Mom", he said, " Boy, was I lucky. Look what I almost stepped in."

I tried loading BoB last night by just copying the archived directory from my original game installed on the old machine. I didn't really expect it to load but it tried. Then I got an error message complaining it could not find my registration code. So I'll have to dig out my disk and reg. key. I'll try installing the game and then overwriting it with the already patched version from my archives. It might work. There are many reasons why it might not of course.

I WONDER WHERE Jens is? I'll pop off an e-mail to him in a bit.

Hullo

Gents, I've been busy on the search for a new bicycle as a hard look at the old one told me that the only person happy to ride this thing proudly would be someone in a very poor country, and with a length from floor to crotch of approx. 100 cm and a very fat bottom. Not the country, the person.

I'm happy too report that I've found a new mount and I've been deedily making room for it in the shed. Cleaned out the shed first, laid almost wall-to-wall carpets and threw out a few things that could go in a barn sale except we don't hold such events over here.

I'll take delivery of the new wonder on thursday and I expect/hope to ride it home from the dealer.

Yesterday was the centenary of the outbreak of The Great War, Great Britain declared war on Imperial Germany on Aug. 4th 1914, and the occasion was commemorated ed by moving events near Mons and all over Britain. I especially liked the choir and the musical interludes from the commemoration from the battlefield. Butterworth's Shropshire Lad, and Anthems suitable for the occasion.

Jumping completely to another subject entirely, I've been reading quite a lot recently about Mars, sending humans to Mars, and terraforming the Red Planet. I see some legal difficulties I must admit:

Terraforming the red planet by sending out o2 in the atmosphere and somehow creating oceans I wonder if little green men will not suddenly appear saying Thank you for making it livable again now sod off and leave the planet to its original inhabitants.

If such a scenario is not found to be played out then surely, some native life will start and while it may not be terribly intelligent right from the start a) it is alien and b) what could it possibly evolve into given a few 100 million years?

My friends, I have suddenly been hit by great inspiration: Let us send all the lawyers on the first non-return trip to Mars!!!!

Folks:
Jens,

Glad you finally found one. Kindly send me a pix of the new bike...well, I mean once it arrives.

Send lawyers to mars? Wouldn't that ruin a good thing? Mars once had water and an atmosphere so why not return it to its natural state? If it can be done most likely it will be. Man does what he can do. Earth's iron core turning creates the magnetic shield that protects us from the suns solar wind. Does Mars have that or is it dead?

Quote: "If such a scenario is not found to be played out then surely, some native life will start and while it may not be terribly intelligent right from the start....." Hmmmmm. Considering the wars and other follies of the human race so far; that would seem to mean the Earth is still in its early stage of development right now.

Folks:

Found my BoB 2 WoV game disk. If there was a reg code it must be on the box. Now I have to find the darn box. Anyone remember back that far? What if I've trashed it?

The good news is if I can't find the box I've just now managed to resurrect the old XP machine to what passeth for running order. It isn't connected to the Internet but I can play BoB on it just not with all the lovely patches and PV1s amazing er... pardon the expression, ground work evident.

Everyone but me has just returned from a week enjoying Disneyworld,SeaWorld and Universal Studios Florida. That vacation package ad I see below reminded me. Harry Potter World was a big hit. I am now the proud possessor of a genuine magic wand from the famous Olivanders (makers of fine wands since 482 BC). Anyone want me to wave them up a personal Spitfire or 109? I'm dying to test it.

Jens, curious you are delving into Mars, as I am currently
half way through the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy. It
has a lot of really interesting stuff on martian geology
("areology") and terraforming, unfortunately it is told
as a backdrop to an annoying story of the interpersonal
melodramas of a collection of seriously broken individuals,
whom we are asked to believe are highly intelligent and
carefully screened. Well, it's not defamatory and outright
insulting to the intelligent and educated, like the movie
Prometheus (which I am strongly advised to avoid, for what
little good my boycott might do), but it is still pretty
annoying.

Anyway, I have contemplated the mechanisms for terraforming
Mars ever since the first good data on its current state started
to trickle in many decades ago. The KSR Mars books have
some good ideas, but they invoke some optimistic imagined
resource discoveries, and are also rather optimistic about time
scales and infrastructure development (written in the early 90s I
think, they are already wrong on their dating). Any terraformed
open planet the size of Mars has a shelf life of only a couple of
million years, max, before the low gravity allows the atmosphere
to be robbed by the solar wind. That may be long enough to think
up clever solutions to the problem, I suppose, but my tendency
would be to shoot for terraforming large deep valleys first, under
sealed covers. It would be much less ambitious, and faster, while
the larger project could proceed in parallel. And perhaps the best
strategy would be to wait a while til we have better mastery of the
manipulation of small orbitting bodies, so we can start out by
dropping a large quantity of useful materials onto the surface, rather
than having to locate and dig them out of the planet. A few comets'
worth of light elements might get things jumpstarted quite effectively.

JRT, I don't think (though I may be wrong) that there is any requirement
for a code to activate BoB2; A2A doesn't believe in that stuff. It might
be that there was something attached to the GMX cd, but I think the
A2A patches defeat it (and I think it was only that you had to have the
disc in the drive for the game to run). What you do have to do, is do
an install of the cd in order to get the necessary strings implanted in
the windows registry, so the game can find its parts as it boots up. And
I have some memory of people having trouble running both BoB1 and
BoB2 on the same machine, or perhaps from the same disc, as the
registry entries want to only point to one of them (one install may
overwrite a pointer lodged by the other). It has been many years since
I needed to know about that stuff. ...I'm pretty sure this is correct,
as I got a new machine running about 3 years ago, and as I recall I
simply installed the BoB2 disc (no BoB1 on the machine) and patched it,
and it ran up happily.

Unfortunately, if you try to run BoB2 on an 8.1 machine, it simply
won't work; the reports are a crash after a couple of minutes in the
3D with a d3dx9 error or some message very similar to that.

Folks, Jens and PV1,

Mars has long fascinated mankind. We'll get there in person one day. An interesting conversation regarding the red planet. I have had an interest in the "God of War" myself ever since grammar school when I first read "War of the Worlds", first heard Holtz's "The Planets", and saw that Hollywood version of the book which was in Technicolor and SOTA in those days.

It was only a bit more far-fetched in some ways than the Ton Cruz version of more recent times. I've always liked the creepy intro. I can still hear Orson Wells reading it. (Orson created quite a stir when the story was performed on the radio back in the 30's. It caused a real nation-wide panic.) You'll remember the intro is about man going about his daily tasks unaware while being watched from afar. Those 50's movie war machines presaged the Star Wars "Walkers" by many years.

I still have archived somewhere a slightly valuable copy of the 50's magazine "Famous Monsters" that reviewed the WOTW film. To date me even further I have an original Buck Rogers atomic pistol with gold finish which I'm told is quite rare and at one time priced at $1,000 up depending on condition. I don't remember much about Buck rather than the old serials I've seen on TV and the mega crap movie from the 70's. I imagine Buck went to Mars regularly. Do you remember those Daffy Duck/Bugs Bunny cartoons featuring the little Martian? That U235 Modulator was quite a cap gun wasn't it?

Terraforming must be possible because I personally watched Captain Kirk and crew manage to do it and, unfortunately lose his son in the process. Hmmmmm. That process did seem a bit unstable now that I think about it. Maybe we should wait a little longer....

Folks:
PV1,

Thanks for the info. No doubt you are correct regarding BoB2. I truly regret that after all this time I cannot finally get to see your great terrain on my machine. Disappointed, I will pack my BoB 2/WoV disk away again. Thankfully after many days in the freezer with a tag on its toe I was able to get old XP fired up one more time yesterday. So with another veritable miracle under my cinched up belt, I could load the game last night and bounce some Do 17s. They seemed beastly hard to convince to fall. One can get rusty I suppose when on extended leave.

Is there Life on Mars? mused Major Tom as he sat in his tin can during Space Oddity. If there is, it would probably not be life as we know it, Jim because, certainly ap you say PV1, with not enough gravity to retain its atmosphere - and the core is dead too I guess, no plate tectonics either as far as I'm aware of, we are looking at one mighty dead planet.

Apart from KSR Mars trilogy which I think I have been intending to read for the last 20 years or so, of course we have Clarke's second novel; The Sands of Mars, as well as Greg Bear's Moving Mars (Bear's also published something called; The Wind From a Burning Woman - could that be Olga related I wonder?).

Wells' War of the Worlds is also available in the musical version by Jeff Wayne of course, starring such towering beacons of light as Richard Burton as the narrator; "No one would have known....", Phil Lynott as the crazed parson, Julie Covington, Justin Hayward etc. Sadly, the period's demand for disco rhythms permeate, like martian red weed, what would otherwise have be a timeless classic like martian red weed.

Then there's Total Recall, who doesn't fondly remember Sharon Stone, or the idiot Cabbie illustrating admirably the paradox of the idiot electronic savant in form of today's Goggle Now insisting to inform me in the middle of the night or during weekends and holidays, that my place of work is reachable by car in 12 minutes' travelling time. Or, having searched the net for offers on bicycles, now that I have bought one, I'm drowning in bike related ads when I surf the net for por.... ahem, culturally enlightening material to study.

Surely there have been numerous Mars stories in the classic pulps, but aside from them, and obvious cartoony "Mars Attacks" stuff, what other good stories do we know of, concerning Mars?

Folks:
MG,

Life on Mars? Maybe the better question would be: Is there intelligent life on Earth?

How about adding old Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" to your well written list? As you may remember that is a 1950 science fiction short story collection by Ray Bradbury that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans fleeing from a troubled and eventually atomically devastated Earth, and the conflict between aboriginal Martians and the new colonists. Isaac Asimov wrote at least one short story about Mars in the 50's. He was such a prolific author that there must have been others.

"Mars Attacks" had its funny moments I admit. On about the same level,let us not forget the 60's TV show "My Favorite Martian" starring the ill fated (died prematurely from cancer) Bill Bixbey and the veteran stage and movie actor (South Pacific), Ray Walston as "Uncle" Martin. No doubt that was before your time or maybe it didn't show in Denmark. Not all our greatest works of fiction get there....