DID F22 Games Collection

DID’s Air Dominance Fighter and Total Air War.
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Menrva
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DID F22 Games Collection

Post by Menrva »

Hi, gents! As previously shared on Discord, this package includes all language versions of F22 ADF/RSO/TAW I was able to find and install on a proper Win98 system thanks to a VM (with few exceptions, check notes at the end):


Please take note of the following, it is rather important:
  • For some reason there was a special CD-ROM EU release of ADF bundled together with Intel hardware, and it includes all EU language versions only. It is labelled as designed for Intel MMX and it installs D3D versions of executables, it doesn't offer the opportunity to install Glide ones (even though Glide .dat executables are found inside the data.z file and could be extracted). Even more odd, those D3D versions couldn't be patched with the official ADF patches, so it is not possible to get the latest patched executables for them! They aren't patched to the latest neither as the RSO installer refused them for French and German installations. They all feature the Intel MMX logo in the main menu screen. As a consequence, those I labelled as "MMX Original". The ones using hidden Glide executables (thus not meant to be installed officially by the installers) I labelled as "MMX Hidden".
    For French, German and Italian versions, the Glide executable extracted from their data.z could be patched with the official patches. The Spanish and English "MMX Hidden" versions are even more interesting, because the extracted Glide executable couldn't be patched by the official patches, unlike for the previous languages.
  • The Intel 3dfx Patch was released by DID for the English Direct3D MMX version of the game; this version I labelled as "Glide MMX Original". It's the most interesting .dat executable we ever found! Unlike the others being usually 3MB in overall size, this one is half the size! It is definitely compressed, since 7-zip can open it like an archive.
  • The ADF Multiplayer Patch is a weird one, the _f22.exe that is provided actually is an f22.dat executable; it doesn't work as is, while by renaming it to f22.dat it seems to work to an extent, I tried it very quickly and didn't bother about it.
  • The Union Reality Gear patch for ADF was applied to the English version only for reference; it's pointless in my opinion so I didn't bother installing it for the other EU languages. Just for information, it has to be applied after the v5.144 Patch.
  • English RSO versions already include the Training Missions Fix, it's just the Add_ons folder containing the simultor.txt file. The French and German RSO versions don't seem to need the fix since that was only released for English and the provided simultor.txt file wouldn't be in the correct language for those versions.
  • Apparently TAW got patches to the latest version only for English, German and Japanese languages. I wasn't able to find French, Spanish and Italian versions of the patch.
  • TAW apparently received two demos, one from gaming outlets such as PC Gamer and the other being included in DID's Wargasm. The demos only differ in the dates mentioned inside the Readme files, as well as the demo from Wargasm including an additional executable for Union Reality gear. As such, given there are no differences in the game data nor in the executables, I decided to include only this demo from Wargasm.
  • Japanese version of TAW features a CD check and more interestingly different ACMI replays and an additional FTSRCH.DLL file.
NOTE:
If you wish to play the games, make sure to rename their directories to shorter names like "F22ADF" and "F22TAW" first. With the arbitrary long names I gave them, they are prone to crashes to desktop in a matter of seconds. Graphics wrappers are also required.

From the above collection of installed games, the following are missing:
  • Original French ADF release that can be installed both in D3D and Glide and updated with the official patches. The French installations in my package come from the D3D-only Intel MMX patched release of January 1998 featuring the Intel MMX logo in the game's main menu, so they are not the true first releases of 1997.
  • Original TAW releases in Italian and Spanish, both D3D and Glide versions. The Italian one in the package is Glide only and was recovered from an already installed copy, so it's not fresh from CD installation like I personally did for all of the others. The Spanish one is D3D only and comes from a 2002 re-release by FX Interactive (nothing special about it apart from the HTML manual in Spanish).
  • Special Japanese releases of ADF and RSO; those are the most interesting in my opinion.
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