Hey there, LeQuack, welcome to the forums!

If you'd like to buy a copy of the game, you can always pick one up on ebay.



Obviously, you can try your own country if you're not from the UK.

Alternatively, as MStrobel said, you can pick up a copy of the game over on but to be able to play it, you'll need to "mount" it as a virtual drive. There are instructions available in the forums to do this. To download the game, you'll have to sign up to the forums.

As you may have guesed, Armadafleetcommand is the parent site of these forums.

Technically, it is illegal to download the game if you haven't bought your own original copy.

However, as it is abandonware, (Since it's been 7 years and the company that created the game - Microprose - no longer exists) you're unlikely to ever encounter any problems. Most people ignore the legality of the situation, in fact. It's up to you what you decide to do.

If you decide to download the game, there are a number of things that you need to be made aware of. The game isn't 100% compatible with Windows XP, but there are a number of patches available through the link above to allow you to play the game.

I say that "there are a number of patches", because not every patch works for every computer. Some work for some, some work for others. We aren't sure why this is. Some unlucky XP computers are simply incompatible with BOTF. If you have this problem, get in contact with a guy called Joker on Armadafleetcommand.com. He created the patches, so he may be able to help you.

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As with what MStrobel said, Birth of the Federation 2: Supremacy, and Birth of the Federation 2: new Beginnings are totally independant games.

They are by the fans, for the fans, and so, they are being developed for free. When they are complete, they will be downloadable, from this site, although they may be put on disks and posted if people with dial-up connections etc. need help. The game certainly will not be available to buy through the shops though.

Making money from the game would bring the wrath of Paramount, Viacom, Atari, and every other company associated with Star Trek down on the community.

That's obviously a bad thing.

Again, welcome to the site.

Wow, thanks for the detailed answers.

The movies don't work because of our old friend, Windows XP.

This is a well-known problem; they don't work on my computer, nor countless other peoples. Nemitor seems to be the exception to the rule.

You CAN still watch them individually in Media Player etc. you just can't watch them in-game. If you want to watch them in Media Player, then you have to watch the .avi files. The .snd files are supposed to be sound files - that's why there are more of them than movie files. I have Media Player 11 Beta, and they work fine. I've used them before in Media Playr 10, and they also worked fine with that.

The non-playing movies is something to do with the "security access" of the game. Basically, the only way that we're gonna get the movies to play again is if Microsoft released a specific patch to sort it out.

This would mean messing up their "perfect" security settings, so I doubt such a patch will ever see the light of day.

open up iso copy. extract english folder to main botf folder. edit ini

Whilst I haven't got the .iso copy, I have got the .ini file and the movies ARE switched on. I've even copied the movie files into my BOTF folder, but they still aren't playing.

I thought there wasn't any point in downloading the iso unless your game broke?

Don't worry about beeing a newbie, everyone has to start somewhere.

The iso is a freely available copy of Birth of the Federation. You can download it from Armadafleetcommand - but as with all other downloads, you'll need to sign into the site first.

It's pretty hefty in size - so if you're using dial-up, i'd recommend you download it overnight.

To use it, you'll either have to burn it to a disk, or you can "mount it" onto your computer as a virtual drive using certain programs. eg. Daemontools.

This method apparently makes the game run much faster, because the computer doesn't need to access the disk to run the game. instead of having a 52x speed, (Depending on your CD/DVD-ROM Drive) you can apparently get up to something like 200x speed! 8O

Obviously the annoying memory leak doesn't get fixed by this method though.

I haven't got a clue how you set it up though. I haven't downloaded it because I can still use my disk. I haven't got Daemontools so I can't guide you through that either!

There's probably a guide to help you install it somewhere in the forums on armadafleetcommand.com.

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As for ranks, I suppose you mean the rank under your name here in the forums?

It's just a bit of fun, really. The ranks are based on the number of posts you've made - the more posts you make, the higher your rank will be. Generally, the system aims to help newbies like yourself identify those people who may be able to help you with problems - those people that have been around for a long time and have made many posts are more likely to know how to help you - so they have a higher rank.

Most forums employ a system like this, although the actual rankings and post limits for each rank are individual to the site.

I'm ranked as an Admiral coz I kinda spend too much time on the site...

wierd i have no problems with the avi's on xp. I bet you don't have the correct codecs. If you don't DivX or somehting you normally would have the correct codecs installed, without much problems... a whatever. You can switch them of as matress showed.

Yeah, i've got DivX.

I'm downloading the K-lite mega codec pack at the moment coz that's the biggest codec pack I know of. I know that the K-lite pack has DivX functionality so i'll let it overwite that.

I'll post if it worked.

*Edit - no change, there's still no movies. When I load up the game, it simply goes straight to the title screen.