Run a 2nd Freelancer instance?
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Actually, guys, I’m simply trying to experiment with SP mods for my own use. But in order to avoid having the storyline interfere, I want to test the mods in a LAN MP environment. I’m also curious about how 2 different players (not characters) interact in MP. Since only online players can interact, and since I only have 1 machine in my network that has a graphics card capable of running Freelancer, I can run the server on a different machine and 2 (windowed) instances of Freelancer on the main machine. It’s strictly a testbed setup.
And, thank you again, M0tah, it works.
Ah, StarTrader, why do you insist on trying to make an old dog learn new tricks?
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Ah, StarTrader, why do you insist on trying to make an old dog learn new tricks?'Cos I’m an old’un too and if I still have the appetite to learn Linux, you should too - listen, when I get put into an old folks home (but I hope it won’t happen) all I’ll ask for is a PC with internet and some game or else a compiler, a comfy office chair, bathroom facilities, a comfy bed, 8 cups of tea per day, and regular meals!
Right - there’s one fundamental problem with the setup you outline here…
2 windows ok - but only 1 mouse & 1 keyboard! You need another PC, and another chair, and some bum to sit in it, my man! ;D
Alternatively get out in the sunshine now and then! ::)
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It looks like the specific function that’s causing you difficulty is used for saving the settings to a desktop shortcut. It would be easy to just remove that functionality, but I’m not sure if I have all the tools needed to build FL Hack.
Therein lies my problem. The last time I compiled something, it was, like, MASM v1.1 for DOS v3.3. At this point, it would probably take me weeks just to find out everything I don’t know, and don’t have, (and probably couldn’t afford), just to re-compile a simple game add-on. If I knew how to reach Jason Hood, author of FLHACK, http://adoxa.110mb.com/index.html, I’d inquire if he would offer a version for us poor backward types. Anyone have any contact info? Also, if he was thoughtful enough to include the source code, he might (!) not mind someone (anyone?) sharing a recompiled version.
As an alternative, M0tah, since you seem to understand the API far better than I, would it be possible to hack the existing executable, say rename the string “shell32.dll” to something like “blank32.dll” (and supply an empty dll), or no-op the call without opening myself up to major problems? Don’t mind a CTD, just don’t want to re-format my drive, or re-construct my registry. Not looking to make any work for you here, just some guidance. I could live without the program, I know it’s pretty much just a front-end for all those useful offsets in “Dev’s Limit Breaking”. I just hate re-inventing the wheel.
On the topic of “Dev’s Limit…”, do you think you guys might find it useful, if I put all that info into an Excel spreadsheet, and made it available? You know, sort by description, function, offset, etc.
I’d at least like to give back in some small way. I’ve only been a member here a week or so, and some people already think I’m a “pain in the tookis”.Now, on to the “Merry Prankster”:
'Cos I’m an old’un too and if I still have the appetite to learn Linux, you should too - listen, when I get put into an old folks home (but I hope it won’t happen) all I’ll ask for is a PC with internet and some game or else a compiler, a comfy office chair, bathroom facilities, a comfy bed, 8 cups of tea per day, and regular meals!
Right - there’s one fundamental problem with the setup you outline here…
2 windows ok - but only 1 mouse & 1 keyboard! You need another PC, and another chair, and some bum to sit in it, my man! Â ;D
Alternatively get out in the sunshine now and then! ::)
Ah, StarTrader, fellow fogie, my intellectual curiosity, and willingness to learn, has not been dampened by my steady progress towards that long good night. But, entropy increases. Time seems much more precious, nowadays, so I’m picky about were I point my energies. Linux is, I’m sure, the wave of the future, until Micro$ux figures out how to co-opt it. I just don’t see a big personal return on investing the time to get up to speed. But that’s me. For you, if it floats your boat, I say, “get jiggy wit’ it!”
You left 1 thing out of your “old folks home” scenario…. Nurses! (Gotta have eyecandy!)
Technically, not a fundamental problem, not planning to fly and fight 2 ships at once. Just for experimenting. Running windowed instances, each loses focus, when you switch to the other. Fatal if you’re in a firefight, but I wouldn’t take them both into an NPC hangout, unless, I was experimenting with AI wingmen, and that wouldn’t apply to a player character, and has already been and is being explored. It does work. On my rather limited machine, I was able to get an Explorer window, MP Acct. Mgr, a text window with alternative MP accts for copying and pasting, Flserver, resource meter, and 2 instances of Freelancer (with all graphics and detail settings at max, but no music) , all to run concurrently, in addition to the normal Win background tasks, firewall, etc. and still have about 20% resources left. (Mouse flight is a little sluggish, and tricky to control, but once I move the server and minor apps to another machine, I think that will be less of a problem.) The Ioncross server app, unfortunetly, ate about 40% of my resources, before I even fired up the Acct. Mgr., so that was out.
Though, if your suggesting I let someone into my Fortress of Solitude… NO! We hermits only allow the spiders to intrude. (Though, occasionally, my better half can be enticed to bring food.) Sunshine? Eww, yucky stuff, never touch it. Skin starts to turn black and smoke. Very disconcerting.
And now, since you (gently) rapped my knuckles for hijacking another thread, for your blatant attempts to convert we heathen MSWin people to Linux, I decree the following punishment. Google “Ultimate Universe” (computer game). Follow the Wikipedia link. Check the external resources. Download the game files, read some of the included history, check the current abysmal state of the fansites, then find your way to the personal site of Garth Bigelow (the author), and shed a tear for the fate of a brilliant programmer/game developer/human being.
On a side note to all you modders out there. This is a brilliantly executed BBS, ANSI door game from the days before Al Gore invented the internet. Though it’s central design would probably not be compatible with the Freelancer engine, it could offer a whole new perspective on what you might want to try and put into a mod.
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Well, his email is at the bottom of the main page (look at the Jason Hood link).
As for recompiling/reassembling the sources, all the software needed to do it is free. I have a working MinGW installation - the only issue is MASM, which I’ve never used before.
I could probably make a simple dummy user32.dll that just exports ShellExecuteA and SHGetFolderPathW (the two functions FL Hack uses from user32) so you can actually run the program. Getting it to work by modifying the exe would probably be harder - since FL Hack uses compile-time linking to call the functions, I’d have to edit the imports table of the exe for it to not attempt to find those functions on startup, which is something I don’t have experience doing.
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Not a super fan of politicians no matter the party, but no matter how loud I laugh at it, I just overlook Al Gore for that greatly remembered claim. After all, compare him to the others and as former Vice Presidents have gone. Not only can Al Gore spell “Potato” but seems to be determined to show us we are cooking ours without trying to get a contract to clean it up.
But the best news, I don’t feel nearly as old now, Someone else remembers dial-up BBS’s with the “cutting edge” colored ANSI Door games!!
However good the memories, sorry to muddy the topic.
As a piece offering how about a obvious and simple solution. ÂIf you need two connected Freelancer Clients to test your LAN Server using a second windows box.
It is only as far away as the “Start Menu” / “Log Off” / “Switch User”EDIT: But, Ahh… Geez… Lancer Solurus already posted that and I somehow missed it…
On a side note to all you modders out there. This is a brilliantly executed BBS, ANSI door game from the days before Al Gore invented the internet.
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Well, his email is at the bottom of the main page (look at the Jason Hood link).
As for recompiling/reassembling the sources, all the software needed to do it is free….
I could probably make a simple dummy user32.dll…
Hm, I did miss that contact info. It only shows as a link if I hover the mouse over it.
Well, it’s been, probably 12, 15 yrs., maybe more, since I used MASM, but as I recall, assembling & compiling were fairly straight forward, IF you understood the options you needed to set. (Trust me, I was often confused.) The other problem was deciphering the errors, but that was much less of a problem if you were dealing with tested source code, as opposed to writing new code. I think I understand the problem with hacking the exe. Using the dummy dll approach, would it be safer to give the dll a unique name, put it in the flhack folder, and change the dll name string in the exe? I’d hate to try to keep track of a user32.dll mod in the Windows directory.
Unless you want to try this as an exercise, let me try to contact Mr. Hood first. He might even have some earlier version that would work just fine. (At least for my purposes.)
BTW, M0tah, I really do appreciate the help. I do try to do things myself. You say all the necessary tools are free. Can you point me to some resources where I can find the tools? I’m not sure what I’d be looking for nowadays. I was under the impression that Windows programming required a proprietary (and pricey) Windows SDK.
@Grey:
I just overlook Al Gore for that greatly remembered claim.
But the best news, I don’t feel nearly as old now, Someone else remembers dial-up BBS’s with the “cutting edge” colored ANSI Door games!!
However good the memories, sorry to muddy the topic.
As a piece offering how about a obvious and simple solution. ÂIf you need two connected Freelancer Clients to test your LAN Server using a second windows box.
It is only as far away as the “Start Menu” / “Log Off” / “Switch User”Actually, Grey Wolf, I wasn’t trying to make fun of Al, I was carbon-dating myself. There actually is some merit to his claim. He was a member of a congressional sub-committee that authorized the creation of the DARPAnet/ARPAnet backbones.
But I’m glad I could give you a lift. I remember, back in my salad days, seeing triple-digit monthly Compuserve bills, matched by comparable triple-digit long-distance bills. Printing on-line sessions off on a 3" wide, 40-character thermal printer. Ah, the good ol’ days. These yungin’s don’t know how good they got it.
I don’t mind muddy topics. Since I started the tread, you have my permission to splash in the mud puddles.
As for your suggestion, though, I think you miss the point. I’m running Win98SE. If I log off, it closes any non-OS related running processes. I want to alt-tab between the 2 instances. And it works just fine that way. I’m not testing the server, I want to test game mods, and multiplayer interaction.
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Feel free to poke away at Al, he is a big boy and I laugh at all politicians as a rule myself. But now you got me wracking my ole brain to remember to the name of the two primary “Packet Switch” networks we used to hop as a gateway to get to a BBS in a far away city without that big phone bill. I always saw that as the precursor to what we have now myself. As for carbon dating, and a bit of “self mutilating” humor at the same time. My dear wife made the foolish mistake of buying me on our first anniversary a blistering fast 1200buad modem. She didn’t see nearly as much of me over the next few days as she had expected, until the phone bill arrived!
BTW, Glad to see someone has the patience to still use Windows 98SE for gaming. But with Freelancer and MOD’s you will have issues with DLL referenced “Infocard” descriptions on the larger MODs. Â Names and Descriptions will start to come back with only “IDS” where text should be.
Actually, Grey Wolf, I wasn’t trying to make fun of Al, I was carbon-dating myself. There actually is some merit to his claim. He was a member of a congressional sub-committee that authorized the creation of the DARPAnet/ARPAnet backbones.
But I’m glad I could give you a lift. I remember, back in my salad days, seeing triple-digit monthly Compuserve bills, matched by comparable triple-digit long-distance bills. Printing on-line sessions off on a 3" wide, 40-character thermal printer. Ah, the good ol’ days. These yungin’s don’t know how good they got it.
I don’t mind muddy topics. Since I started the tread, you have my permission to splash in the mud puddles.
As for your suggestion, though, I think you miss the point. I’m running Win98SE. If I log off, it closes any non-OS related running processes. I want to alt-tab between the 2 instances. And it works just fine that way. I’m not testing the server, I want to test game mods, and multiplayer interaction.
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@Grey:
… now you got me wracking my ole brain to remember to the name of the two primary “Packet Switch” networks we used to hop as a gateway to get to a BBS in a far away city without that big phone bill. … My dear wife made the foolish mistake of buying me on our first anniversary a blistering fast 1200buad modem…
BTW, Glad to see someone has the patience to still use Windows 98SE for gaming. But with Freelancer and MOD’s you will have issues with DLL referenced “Infocard” descriptions on the larger MODs. Â Names and Descriptions will start to come back with only “IDS” where text should be.
Well, I never found out how to “hop” a gateway, but I remember having an out-of-date list of such, and trying to explore their command structure. I think 1 of them was GTE. (Your wife sounds like a keeper. She gave you a modem, not a tie?!)
I really do think there are a lot more Win98 users out here than people think. The whole XP activation/registration fiasco turned off a lot of people. Though I can understand Micro$uck$ reasoning, it was way too “big brother” for many people’s taste. And while I don’t spend a lot of time in forums, when I Google around on various topics, I see a great many “Your problem relates to Vista…”. As a demographic, I think we are ignored because we are seen as cheap Luddites, and the developers are pushed into keeping up with the ‘latest, greatest’.
While I have dl’d a few interesting looking mods, I haven’t yet installed any, so yes, I understand there may be issues. I’ll worry about that later.
BUT, let me get back to the topic:
M0tah, I contacted Jason Hood regards FLHack. His answer:
“Yeah, I never thought anyone would still be running Win9X. I have just put up a new version on my site which should now run in that environment.”
A very responsive gentleman. The new version works on my Win98SE. For any one interested, the link for FLHack v1.33 is here:
http://adoxa.110mb.com/freelancer/flhack.zipSo, to summarize the state of this thread:
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It is possible to run 2 instances of Freelancer on one machine by,
a) Hex editing offset 0x1e6dcc of the Freelancer.exe, replacing “F” with 0x00
b) Using FLHack, by Jason Hood -
If FLHack returns the error,
“A device attached to the system is not functioning.”
“The FLHACK.EXE file is linked to missing export SHELL32.DLL:SHGetFolderPathW.”,
you need to update FLHack to v1.33. -
There is a wealth of useful information in http://the-starport.net/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=26&topic=403.0
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Running 2 (or more) instances is primarily a testing environment.
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There are knowledgeable, patient, helpful people roaming around this site.
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There are a lot of crazy old coots roaming around this site.
Thank you, Motah, Grey Wolf, Lancer Solurus, StarTrader, foxUnit01. You’re pretty good guys (or gals, who knows?).
I would guess that “officially” finalizes the topic. So, if anyone cares to, feel free to spin off on other tangents.
foxUnit, I believe you are maintaining the “Limit Breaking” thread? Any interest in my putting it into a spreadsheet, and making it available? I’m planning to do it anywy, for my own use. If so, any thing you’d like to see in it?
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