October 21^st, 2003 (12:00am) - Malfador Machinations has just released their first patch for their star-spanning action RPG, Space Empires: Starfury. It is available through Shrapnel Games at http://www.shrapnelgames.com/malfador/Starfury/6.htm. The patch, which brings Starfury up to version 1.07, mainly addresses the CD checker glitch detailed below, along with a few other minor issues. It also adds a new feature.

The main focus of version 1.07 is correcting the release version’s CD checker routine. With the release version the checker would only verify CD and DVD drives up to the letter J. Higher mapped drives would not be checked, and so the program would not find the Starfury CD and therefore not allow the game to run. The patch corrects this issue and now the checker will look for the CD in all possible mapped drive locations.

A new feature requested by users has also been added: slower time compression. Now you can slow the game down to one-half, one-quarter, and even one-eighth of normal gameplay time, allowing for more strategic planning during a pitched battle.

Additionally, the patch corrects a number of small issues that some users have reported, such as disappearing text and radar map anomalies. An infrequent sound card problem has also been corrected. Apparently not all SoundBlaster drivers are truly DirectX compatible, and in certain situations-and with certain drivers-the creation of a 3D sound buffer would crash the game. This is now no longer an issue. For a complete listing of tweaks and additions please refer to the history.txt file located in the Starfury directory after applying the patch.