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This help file has been provided as documentation for Wing Commander IV. It details key commands, features, and the most common questions asked and their answers.
Welcome to Wing Commander IV. This latest installment in the Wing Commander series puts you back in the shoes of the Terran Confederation's Colonel Christopher Blair, to investigate the skirmishes with our long-time allies, The Border Worlds.
This demo has a promotional trailer which loops endlessly or until the Escape key is pressed, at which point the Demo switches to gameflow mode. From gameflow, one can choose to fly the demo mission or review the trailer. Upon completion of the Demo Mission or hitting Command-X, the demo returns to gameflow.
When you select to fly the demo mission, you will be at the helm of the Confederation Hellcat. The mission has a default time limit of 5 minutes. You start on the BWS Intrepid. Use A to take off from the ship, or fly out manually by using + to increase your speed.
To autopilot to where the enemies are, press A once. You will see a view of your ship flying by on its way to the enemy. Once you reach the second action sphere, a pirate frigate and its escorts will be continually jumping in until the time limit expires, or you die.
The circular display with the red dots on it is your radar. If you maneuver the ship so that one of the dots is in the center, you should be able to see it in front of you. It will be bracketed by a red box. Maneuver each of the enemies into the crosshairs on the screen and fire. If you hit them, you will see a blue shield effect. Fire until their ultimate destruction! You can also fire missiles at it using the Return key.
To exit the Demo, press Command-Q from gameflow or spaceflight.
Wing Commander IV features many new improvements over Wing Commander III.
These include :
o Digital Music
o Realistic textures for the spaceflight objects
o Cool cockpit huds
o New weapons/missiles
o Improved movie player allowing the playback of 16-bit color/16-bit
The only Extension you need to run the Wing Commander IV Demo is Sound Manager 3.1. This is available from Apple at their Internet Web site: http://www.info.apple.com.
Turn off all other Control Panels and Extensions to get the most memory for the program.
You can play the demo from either your hard drive or the CD. To play from you hard drive, simply drag the "Wing Commander IV Demo" folder to your hard drive. You must have an additional 20 megabytes of disk space to run the demo (this is needed for the virtual memory swapfile).
If you play from the CD, the loading times will be slower and there will be pronounced pauses in spaceflight as data is loaded from the CD.
If the game crashes inexplicably or there are sound and video glitches, it is probably because the game is still in development and not all of the bugs have been worked out. Sorry.
[6.1] Questions and Answers
Q : I get the message "Malloc returned nil". What does this mean?
A : This means that the program has run out of memory. Try giving the program more memory by changing the numbers in "Get Info" window. To do this, select the file "Wing Commander IV Demo" in the Finder. Choose "Get Info" from the "File" menu. Increase the number in the "Preferred Size" box.
You may also need to free up more memory on your Macintosh. This can be done by quitting all open applications and restarting your computer with as few Extensions and Control Panels as possible.
Q: Why do my movies start and stop?
A: The movies pause because data cannot be transferred from the CD-ROM drive (or hard drive) to our game at a sustained rate. The following may be attempted to help alleviate movie pausing.
Try a different movie playback setting. Small Size, Good Quality, and 256 colors are options to allow you to view the movies if your machine is not fast enough to play them normally.
For example, if you are using 16-bit full screen, and the movies are pausing, try 16-bit with Good Quality, 16-bit Small Size, 256-color full screen, 256-color Small Size, etc. until you find a combination that you are satisfied that has no pausing during playback.
Q : The game runs slow on my Macintosh. How can I make it run faster?
A : Try changing the screen size (Command-R) and the texture detail (Command-T). Turning off music will help a bit as well.
[7.0] Miscellaneous
[7.1] Can I play the game from my hard drive?
You can play the demo from either your hard drive or the CD. To play from you hard drive, simply drag the "Wing Commander IV Demo" folder to your hard drive. You must have an additional 20 megabytes of disk space to run the demo (this is needed for the virtual memory swapfile).
[7.2] What files accompany the Wing Commander IV Demo?
If you would like to contact Origin Technical Support, please call 512-434-HELP (4357) M-TH 9:00am to 1:00 pm, 2:00pm to 5:00 pm, F 9:00am to 1:00pm, 2:00pm to 4:00pm. All times are Central Standard Time (CST).
