GOG Wing Commander 1 Character Transfer Made Easy

Sylvester

Vice Admiral
Fellow Wingnuts! I've decided to give a small slice back to the CIC Tech Support world after benefiting from it so much over the last 12 (12!?) years. I've noticed people having some difficulty in transferring their WC1 characters between SM1 and or SM2. To that end, I have modified the autoexec file that GoG provided to easily switch between the games.

When you launch the Wing Commander shortcut after installing it from GoG, you'll see a DOSBOX window open and will be prompted with 3 choices:

1) Wing Commander with Secret Missions
2) The Secret Missions 2: Crusade
==============================
3) Exit


The original game's TRANSFER.EXE and TRANS2.EXE are included in the download, but running them would normally require that you mount the location of your installation manually in dosbox and run them individually. What I have done is change the autoexec file provided so that when you launch Wing Commander, you'll get these options instead:

1) Wing Commander with Secret Missions
2) The Secret Missions 2: Crusade
3) SM1 Transfer Utility
4) SM2 Transfer Utility
==============================
5) Exit


The CIC forum won't let me upload a .CONF file so copy the following text to your dosboxWC_single .CONF file to make the change:

[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.

@Echo OFF
mount C ".."
c:
cls

ECHO [1;33m[42mÉÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ»
ECHO º ------------------------------------------- º
ECHO º Wing Commander º
ECHO º ------------------------------------------- º
ECHO º 1) Wing Commander with Secret Missions º
ECHO º 2) The Secret Missions 2 - Crusade º
ECHO º 3) SM1 Transfer Utility º
ECHO º 4) SM2 Transfer Utility º
ECHO º ------------------------------------------- º
ECHO º 5) exit program º
ECHO º ------------------------------------------- º
ECHO ÈÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍͼ[0m

choice /c12345 /s Which game do you want to run? [1-5]: /n
if errorlevel 5 goto exit
if errorlevel 4 goto trans2
if errorlevel 3 goto transfer
if errorlevel 2 goto sm2
if errorlevel 1 goto sm

:sm
cls
loadfix -1 wc
exit

:sm2
cls
loadfix -1 sm2
exit

:transfer
cls
transfer
exit

:trans2
cls
trans2
exit

:exit
exit


Hopefully this will make it even easier for wingnuts to ensure that your 200+ kills and 12 Bronze Stars transfer properly from game to game. Happy flying!
 
Last edited:
Apologies for necromancy, I've been pottering through WC1 and wish to transfer my pilot into SM1 and 2. I've used the text above but I get dumped back to windows if I attempt to run the Transfer programs, no error messages at all. I'm running the GoG versions of the game in Win10. I have put a copy of SAVEGAME.WLD in the parent directory as well as in GAMEDAT to no effect. I'm not running the game from the C: drive as that is tiny and holds just my OS data, but I'm not sure if that will cause a problem since C: is virtualised within DOSBox any how. Hopefully one of the clever people here can help. Merry Christmas to one and all

EDIT: Just tried running any option, i.e the game too, via the now edited .conf file and none of the options will work. Launching the game via GOG Galaxy works fine and saves etc still present, just can't access the transfer files grrr! :mad:
 
Last edited:
Hey, you may need to reinstall the game to get everything functioning again, but do make sure you save your .wld savegame file(s) first and then copy them back after reinstall.

Although the instructions above are great for simplifying the process, to go in and troubleshoot I'd recommend using actual plain dosbox. https://www.wcnews.com/techsupport.shtml#wc1 is our tutorial on how to do that
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Back
Top