Development
Initially targeted for a December 1995 release (thus giving the game an aggressive 12-month development schedule), the game was ultimately released on February 12th, 1996 for MS-DOS PCs. WCIV was produced on the then-unheard-of-for-a-video-game budget of $12 million USD. The majority of this budget went into the production of the game's full motion video scenes, which were shot on actual sets instead of a greenscreen and using 35mm film instead of digital capture. The original MS-DOS edition shipped on 6 CD-ROMs.
Origin later released a native-client for Windows 95. The Windows client added a deinterlace-option to improve the appearance of the cutscenes, but was identical to the original MS-DOS game in all other respects. In 1997, a special DVD-ROM edition of the game was released. In this edition, the cutscene video was upgraded to full DVD quality (made possible due to the fact that the scenes were originally shot on film). As most PCs of the time were insufficiently powerful to play the MPEG2 DVD video, the game client relied on Windows 95's multimedia player to stream the video from DVD to a hardware decoder. This dependency on external hardware rendered the game unplayable outside Windows PCs equipped with the correct decoder board. Hence, the game was strategically bundled with DVD-ROM kits that included the necessary decoder hardware. Later, the gaming community developed fan-made patches to allow this version to play on more modern hardware where no hardware-based MPEG2 decoding was available (or necessary). There was also a separate DVD release which lacked the enhanced video, and was hence playable on all PCs capable of playing the original CD-ROM release.
On April 3, 2012, the DVD quality version of the game was made available as a download at Good Old Games. Also in April 2012 the source code was handed to the fan-community by a former developer for the purpose of long-time preservation.
Read more about this topic: Wing Commander IV: The Price Of Freedom
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