It all started when Falcon 3 was a superb simulator, and other company's came with more detailed an sophisticated simulators.
After a demo of Falcon 4 in 1997 it seemed that this would become THE simulator of all times, for all Falcon fans. But after the demo, reading prerelease notes, reading web forums it took quite some time before Falcon 4 was released.
Falcon 4 is released as a General Dynamics F-16 'Fighting Falcon' by
Microprose in December 1998. This was the first version of Falcon 4.
Starting to read the manual you could read that : "Falcon 4.0 carries on a
proud tradition of presenting the most accurate, realistic and engaging F-16
flight simulator available anywhere.", and Falcon 4 sure did. The only
thing that became clear was that the release was made to early and there were a
lot of bugs and errors reported. It was a shame but all the great words of
multi-player Falcon 4 flying didn't come out.
The first network meetings of the 102 TFS (Cyber) even resulted in playing other multi-player simulators and games, only due to the fact that we, if we tried hard and long enough, could take off with a two ship in the network.
So almost right after the official release Microprose announced that there would come an update.
As soon as the first update of Falcon 4 was announced everybody started looking out for this patch. When this patch came out as Falcon 4 1.04 there was a huge interest for this patch so that the download site of Microprose was stress tested to the limit ! But the release of this update corrected, as hoped, a lot of bugs and errors that were experienced by Falcon 4 users all over the world.
After the first patch 1.04 there were a couple of other patches (1.06 and 1.07) before Microprose (with support from IBeta) came with their last patch Falcon 4 1.08. The release of this patch, about a year after the release of Falcon 4. It became clear that Microprose's Falcon 4 team was working very hard to solve bugs and make progress to Falcon 4. This 1.08 patch became a pretty reliable version of Falcon 4.
After the release of 1.08 the tide turned, Microprose stopped the Falcon 4.0
team, could this mean the end of progress ?
No certainly not !! After this the IBeta team continued to progress Falcon 4 and
came with their final Falcon 4 108i2 patch. This patch had a lot of new
additions and corrections of bugs.
During the above years loads of Falcon enthusiasts were flying Falcon 4 and
wishing for upgrades on graphics, flight models, and theater. This came in reach
when (for a unknown reason) the Falcon 4.0 source code came available on the
internet.
Patches, tools, updates, fixes, cockpits, sounds and so on were produced by
Falcon 4 flyers and its almost unbelievable what you can find on the
internet.
Falcon 4.0 nowadays is a flight simulator with the possibilities to start your F-16 according to startup procedures. If you managed to take off you can meet a Mig 29 as a opponent of your F16 in multi-player mode.
The standard Korean theater of Falcon 4 is also replaceable with other's like Balkans or Europe.
That's all for now, start reading about the 102TFS or read the installation notes, see some download sites, or read about the add-ons !
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