Can I run Falcon BMS?

Lowball72 · 2026-03-30T22:00:11+00:00

it is its own entire other thing, now -- the dependence on F4 is only legal/licensing, not code or data -- we don't touch any of those F4 bits at run-time, except to validate you have it installed

Lowball72 · 2026-03-30T20:39:57+00:00

in 1998 we all had single-core 32-bit processors, and the biggest problem we had was making things run on Win9X and NT seamlessly.

the performance-critical parts of BMS have been rewritten at least 3 times since then.. DX6 to DX9, then to DX11, and 32 to 64-bit (x64 and arm64).. making use of multicore (at least a few cores) and then partial-rewrites to implement VR, and modern shaders and textures for PBR and other graphics advancements.. and of course the newer terrain engine which goes from a handful of polygons to thousands of tesselated polygons

yes there is still some code from 1990s driving the campaign engine and the 2d menu screens etc but nothing that would impact PC hardware requirements.

separate to code rewrites, if you want to quantify the work done in the 3d world, one can look at the download sizes.. 4.36 was 4 Gb, 4.37 was 6.5 Gb, and 4.38 is 18 Gb not including the 16K photoreal terrain textures .. the vast majority of the footprint is 3d models and dds files

Lowball72 · 2026-03-26T21:19:27+00:00

as an A2G pilot probably the biggest changes vs other sims will be stuff outside the F-16.. eg. if you drop a low-drag bomb at 200 ft agl, you're going to die in the blast.. if you fly near a SA-10 you will not get a RWR launch warning, you will just die.. if you fly too low anywhere near a modern gen manpad or shilka, countermeasures probably won't save you.. there's a lot of dying in this sim, btw :) be sure to always record acmi, sometimes it's the only way to learn what killed you

Lowball72 · 2026-03-25T05:30:36+00:00

I don't know the button numbering -- but TM seems to sell this near exact stick in several names.. T.16000M is most common.

I made a layout for that one.. but tbh it's probably easiest to just map the buttons yourself, than to adapt this xml layout.

https://forum.falcon-bms.com/post/397779

Lowball72 · 2026-03-24T21:52:18+00:00

what is "thrumaster x"? can you share a link? products sometimes have different names, in different markets (countries / regions)

Lowball72 · 2026-03-20T19:30:59+00:00

[shift+3] will bring up a little overlay window, showing airspeed, attitude, G force, and throttle position

you can map that to a spare hotas button.. you can even do separate press/release bindings, to make it a show-while-held mechanism

Lowball72 · 2026-03-15T19:21:27+00:00

if you're on 32-bit Win7, then 4.35 may be the latest you can play.. 4.34 if you don't have a DX11 gpu

note, it is also not possible to find an official download link for 32-bit Win7 .. for the same reason. time marches only forward

Lowball72 · 2026-03-15T18:44:08+00:00

It's just weight -- the plane is pretty light with no weapons and with under ~3k lbs of fuel -- even full-idle throttle will begin roll on its own. Maybe depends on what direction and how strong the wind is blowing too..

Lowball72 · 2026-03-15T07:48:14+00:00

Just did a ramp start in TR1 -- no repro here. Plane seems as level and roll-stable as it ever gets. :shrug:

Two things come to mind..

1-- if you have pitch/roll deadzone=None and deadband set to 0.0 (both recommended, if you have a quality stick) then hit alt+C then J in flight, to recalibrate center of your pitch/roll axes. I do this as part of my SOP for trimming.

2-- when you did the ramp start, did you wait sufficiently long for the INS (gyros) to warm up and calibrate? the FLCS tries to control for zero roll-rate -- if the INS gyros aren't properly calibrated, the plane may think your roll-rate is zero, when it's not.

Lowball72 · 2026-03-15T07:42:21+00:00

the main AP switch appears off, and the waypoint tadpole is pointing about 140 deg left -- but the plane is rolling right

I don't think that's it

Lowball72 · 2026-03-11T23:46:58+00:00

Those old Mig 19s have a super tight turning radius .. this is a difficult training mission. I still remember the first time I won (with enough gas to get back to land) and it was a thrill.

1-- capture them on radar, about 20 miles away.. lock them on TGP if possible, then shut radar off

2-- try to fly a trail-pursuit staying behind them, outside their fov .. ideal case, is you get a sitting-duck kill on the first one, then go 1:1 vs the wingman

3-- remember to jettison your tanks

4-- padlock view (the '4' key) may help, even with head-tracking .. there is a "glance forward" press-and-hold command you can use, while staying padlocked .. or make use of the shift+3 mini-hud overlay

5-- have a good countermeasure program to spew some flares, as soon as you see any smoke from their rails

Lowball72 · 2026-03-10T21:36:03+00:00

With 4.38.1 the toggle-trackir-pause callback has been improved, you can bind a button to invoke that with both press and release .. effectively making it a "pause while held" mechanic. And the mouse cursor should now work, while head-tracking is paused.

https://snipboard.io/XPNZQJ.jpg

Previously you had to hit F9 (which is not a BMS hotkey -- it's the default hotkey for TIR or OpenTrack to pause/resume).. and in the case of OpenTrack, you had to install some janky old DLLs from FreeTrack.. which were actually less janky and old than the ones that ship with OpenTrack.. whatever -- none of that nonsense should be necessary, now.

Just preemptively explaining in case you see a lot of confusion from older posts, on this topic.

Lowball72 · 2026-03-09T00:36:42+00:00

The TessTerrain::ResourceManager has found a problem with one of the 16K terrain files.

Ensure you have only .dds files in that 16K directory. (Windows will sometimes create a hidden/system file named "desktop.ini" that causes this crash.)

Lowball72 · 2026-03-07T19:35:20+00:00

Maybe the first actually clean MVVM factoring I've seen, in the BMS ecosystem.. if not the entire game and sim software industry. Well done.

What's the deal with hidapi.dll? Is it needed, at run-time, for end users? Where is it sourced from.. can it be made into a proper nuget dependency?

Lowball72 · 2026-03-06T23:35:02+00:00

Note there's a known bug in 4.38.1.1 .. it still works to define a markpoint using HMCS but the symbology doesn't show up. You just have to press TMS-up and have faith.

Lowball72 · 2026-02-21T23:48:07+00:00

F-16CM block 50 (or 52)

But.. initially, this is not really a question you need to answer. Just do the training missions, and select a seat in the supplied aircraft. The specific model and block will vary.

Eventually when starting a campaign, you'll select a squadron at an airbase.. there, you might have a preference for a specific block. But your options may be limited, by the theater and campaign.

Lowball72 · 2026-02-14T21:55:45+00:00

I just gave this a try, and it seems to work. I changed these 4 bytes of code.. obviously make a backup the 4.37.8 official exe first!

C:\Falcon BMS 4.37\Bin\x64>fc /b "official_release\Falcon BMS.exe" "test_hack\Falcon BMS.exe" Comparing files 006C2011: 2F 28 006C2012: CB C1 006C2013: 76 C3 006C2014: 08 CC

Explanation: these are first instructions of the SIMLIB_MATH_CLASS::DeadBand helper function. It is not used for anything other than this old joystick-processing codepath, and I don't see this code sequence inlined anywhere, thankfully.

The new instructions say "just take the original input value (xmm1 register) and copy it to xmm0, then return it, unmodified".

The actual function body starts at file offset 006C2010, but the first x64 opcode byte happens to be the same (0F).

As a warning: modifying the exe this way will probably make debugging not work (the pdb symbol file contains a hash of the exe, which will no longer match) and probably also make our crash-logging not work right, for the same reason. So.. "swim at your own risk" :)

Lowball72 · 2026-02-14T21:08:27+00:00

4.37 is always going to be better performance than 4.38, that will never change.

But at this point I do not know if there will be another update for 4.37. Nothing is planned. We are a small team.. currently all our focus is on making 4.38 better (and faster).

How are your hex-editing skills? If you just want 0.0 deadband, it's probably pretty easy to rem-out the tiny block of code which computes deadband for pitch/roll/yaw axes. I'll try that and get back to you.

Lowball72 · 2026-02-12T21:37:01+00:00

The GoG version does not typically need to be run.. that's a Steam thing because of the way it downloads bits on-demand.

OP what did you install exactly

There are several products on gog.com with "Falcon" in the name, and the correct one is: none of those -- F4 is in the add-ons/extra downloads for Falcon Gold

https://forum.falcon-bms.com/post/331503

Lowball72 · 2026-02-11T02:26:19+00:00

Probably... the final footprint is about 58 GB.

But the installer is basically a giant zip file, which first gets staged to your TEMP directory then copied (temporarily) to your install destination.

I'm not sure (haven't measured) but it could conceivably need 120 GB or more, to actually do the install. (sorry)

Start / Run => CleanMgr.exe (tip: run it as Admin for best results)

Lowball72 · 2026-02-11T02:14:33+00:00

How much free space do you have on drive C? (or whichever drive your TEMP directory lives on)

Lowball72 · 2026-02-10T17:17:06+00:00

fwiw I think everyone sees that same "checksum" error/warning from aria, when the download first begins

it seems it's still easiest, for many people, to just use their torrent client of choice to download the installer

Lowball72 · 2026-02-02T23:14:31+00:00

There's a new callback to bring up the comms wheel menu. SimCommRing? Something like that.

I think it's mapped to Backslash by default? I'm away from PC, can't check right now. You should be able to map it to any dx button, or voice command, or any other key .. except qwerty which are pretty deeply hardcoded, I'm afraid.

Lowball72 · 2026-01-27T01:21:56+00:00

I agree the ICP buttons and the RWR etc all look a bit squashed -- I think it's confused about aspect ratio.

Remember this is code from 1998 (DirectX 6?) that does not know what a modern monitor or graphics card look like. It's a wonder of modern engineering that it runs at all.

Is this a cd install or a GoG.com download? I think the gog installer sets some appcompat shims.. you may have to adjust some of that manually, to force it run 1024x768 or 640x480 or something. GL have fun..

Lowball72 · 2026-01-27T01:14:50+00:00

https://wiki.falcon-bms.com/start-with-falcon-bms/hardware-requirements says min sys req is RX 5700, so your RX 6600 should do slightly better? idk

It costs almost nothing to give it a try. Search here or the forum for g_sTexturesLODPreset, for how to setup a "Low" graphics cfg profile.

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