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Falcon 4.0 Plus - Part 2
by Bob "Groucho" MarksOnce out on the web, however, it was as good as gone. To use a horribly-worn cliché, the Genie was out of the bottle, and there really was nothing that Hasbro or its army of lawyers could do about it.
Thousands of would-be master-hackers (and to Hasbro’s horror, more than a couple of competitors) have downloaded it. Unlike a stolen stereo, which doesn’t replicate itself, hours after its initial posting on the web there were thousands of copies. Trying to nail each and every violator with a Cease and Desist warrant would be like trying to knock down gnats with a .44.
The image quality of the eRazor patch is incredible.
Enter into this ambiguous ethical and legal ground a gentleman from Germany named eRazor and his new executable. Although he is understandably reluctant to admit it, his version is apparently a hack into the v1.07 source code.
What eRazor has done with the hot code in question is bring the graphics part of the circa late 1998 F4 code to mid-2000 standards by gutting the old proprietary MicroProse rendering engine and making F4 fully DirectX 7 (and soon, eRazor promises DX8) native.
No small feat for most developers, let alone by Some Guy in his spare time. The results are truly spectacular: incredible frame rate increases (in some cases of up to 120%), support for 32 bit rendering, anisotropic texture filtering, hardware T&L, 3d card support of ACMI files. All things that have been at the top of many a wish list since the introduction of the newest generation of graphics cards. These improvements have done a great deal to keep F4 current with the latest hardware and users' expectations.
eRazor’s advanced graphics settings
As much of a serious breakthrough 1.075 Rel 9 is, however, it does have its limitations. Being a modification of pre-1.08 code, eRazor’s version lacks the refinement and excellent realism tweaks found in the iBeta team’s series of patches. And, if your needed proof that Anarchy isn't always a bowl of cherries, most of the patches made for the RP2 version will not work with eRazor's executable.
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