ArcticFox bug (and F19 fix)

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starfires
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ArcticFox bug (and F19 fix)

Post by starfires »

Good morning! (First post -- someone recommended finding a place like this to discuss my problems and peddle my solutions.)

I am thwarted by a bug in Arctic Fox: destroying Air Converters seems to speed up the oxygen conversion instead of slowing it down. This nixes my goal of clearing all the enemies in the game area (not just taking out the main fort) before the oxygen runs out. Two questions:
  1. Can anybody confirm this? (IME running DosBox at 1333 cycles, the O2 meter goes down one point per 9.6 seconds at the start, but per only 6 seconds after I take out 15 air converters.)
  2. If I were to fix this by patching the game binary, would anybody besides me want the fix?
While I am on the subject of fixing binaries, once upon a time I made a fix to F19. The problem was that on a (relatively) fast machine the directions of gunfire were "quantized". (More verbosely, say your crosshairs are pointed precisely at a radar you're trying to strafe, but when you shoot, the shot goes a couple pixels to the left. So you start veering to the right, but the shots keep going a couple pixels to the left of the radar, until you turn far enough and they start going five pixels to the *right* of the radar -- there is no in-between.)
I spent some quality time with debug.exe and made a fix, after which the shots went to exactly the pixel I was aiming at. I still have the patched binary and my notes, with which the patch could probably be ported to other games sharing that codebase, e.g. F15 (1985) and F117. Would anybody want that fix?
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