Recently I explored the obvious compatibility issues with Fighting Steel on modern systems, and NVIDIA video cards. I've seen several others on various message boards detail issues with missing ship textures, guns, "psychedelic" mouse cursor/ocean textures, etc. I have seen a few people interested in keeping this game running, or those that wanted something WWII naval to play.
Here is what I found for reference:
I received a response from the main programmer for the FSP at NWS. I'll link to it and quote it here:
http://nws-online.proboards.com/thre...-compatibilityPer
williammiller at NWS:
"I was the primary developer of the Fighting Steel Project. While we did patch the graphics engine to run better in DX8+ the (rather serious) root issue was that the game engine was originally programmed using an alternate graphics mode (a subset of the old 'Retained' 3D mode) in Direct-X. Unfortunately, support for this mode was dropped by Microsoft less than 18 months after the game was released (starting with DX 7) and later DX updates have rendered that mode even more un-useable/unstable.
It would have required a 100% complete re-write of the game engine to have solved this issue, the best we could do was to patch the code to make it as compatible as possible - however, given the very serious issue of the dropped support and the massive changes in DX over the last few versions, the game simply is not going to be stable, even when running on some virtualization machines - be aware that such machines may *still* have DX overlay issues that can cause serious corruption to the graphics with retained-mode engines such as FS, while older engines that use other modes may not suffer those issues at all."
So, for those with NVIDIA cards or on Windows 7/8, there is no way to fix the missing textures. There have been reports that AMD/ATI cards may still be compatible, but I have no way of testing this. Of course, a Windows 98 "retro box" with allow you to play the game as well. I was hoping for a way to fix or update the game, but that will not be the case.
