COE Installation
Rocky

Thanks to the kindness of an Aggression regular in the USA (cheers Brad) I now have the first copy of Covert Operations Essentials in Europe (unless you know different). Here is a summary of the installation procedure for the R6 trainspotters out there.

First off all congratulations to The United States Postal Service for getting the box to me all the way from USA to Scotland undamaged and in a remarkable 3 days - nice job lads. And what a smart box it is too; the front is a hinged cover, and is by the far the best R6 design yet. I will be interested to see if it is the same high quality package that Europe eventually gets. (update - Euro box sucks)

First off - Check the Specs. Lets look at the "Recommended configuration"

• Pentium III Processor CHECK
• 128MB RAM CHECK
• Win 98 Oh Ho, Win 95 OSR2 shall have to suffice
• Voodoo3/5 CHECK V3 3000
• SB Live Sound CHECK
• 1 GB free HD Space SAY WHAT? 1 Gigabyte? Okay time for a spot of housekeeping.

So the Recommended Spec is actually quite high, and although the "Minimum spec" listed on the box is very reasonable, we know that these "Minimum" specs just do not do the business these days.

So onto the housekeeping. A Quick check on C drive properties reveals that 1.34 GB are still free on the 10GB HD. Its enough, but best to clean up a little first. Over an hour later and the free space is 1.9GB - plenty! Its amazing how much space can be cleared up with a little time and effort. I did not remove any major applications. All that went in the Bin were some movie trailers from Screendragon, and some (ahem) other movies. Convert all those Rogue Spear images saves from Bitmap to JPG and before you know it - 3/4 of a Gigabyte free! The exact free space in bytes is now set at 2,098,704,384 bytes (ever see Rain Man?)

Next step - check how the HD has held up under all that file moving stress; a quick dfrag attempt reveals that a pityfull 1% is fragmented, no problem there then - onto the install. Shut down all applications running in the background and away we go.

Training disk first. Insert Disk, click Install and in under 5 minutes (5xDVD drive) the process is complete. A quick check reveals free memory is now at 1,755,078,656 bytes - a total install of 343,625,728 bytes. Quick test shows the new intro and starts the Training Manual without a hitch.

Next up the game disk. Again the install took just under 5 minutes on my (now rather dated at only 14 months new) 5xDVD drive, plus a couple of minutes updating DirectX7.0 to 7.0a. This installation required a reboot - probably due to the DirectX upgrade (and yes I know 8.0 is out now). This led to the first increase in heart rate. As the windows splash screen came up some ferocious disk thrashing started, to a rhythm that either indicated some sort of hardware failure, or some peculiar likeness to the beat of a samba. After a minute of this I was sure my HD had given up the ghost, however after a moment to recover it sprang back into life and the boot continued as normal.

Memory now stands at 1,633,173,504 giving the game install a 121,905,152 byte requirement. The total install across both disk stands at 465,530,880 - nowhere near the 1GB the box inferred.

Also on the mission are two RedStorm Demo's. Shadow Watch is a turn based RPG. The installation of the demo takes a little more concentration than the main feature. The installation exe is zipped in a self extractor, so make sure you have a folder ready for it - or make a temp folder prior to running the zip file. Unzip the installer and execute the file. This creates another new folder within your RedStorm folder to hold all the demo files.

The second demo is Bang Gunship Elite, a mission based space epic. No zip file this time, simply run the installer found in the COE folder and the demo installs itself into a new RSE sub-folder. A cool but short intro, and some very familiar music preceed a very nice looking space-battle game.

Rocky Sept. 2000