v1.9.3: Play Campaign takes you all the way in, and all the way back

Play Campaign now takes you all the way in, and all the way back.

Straight back into your war. Until now only a new pilot's first campaign opened by itself. From the second time on you landed on the game's main menu and had to load your save by hand. Now Play Campaign opens your pilot's own save and loads it for you, every time.

Back to the Squadron Room when you're done. Leave the campaign and the game closes itself and the Squadron Room comes back up with your sortie in the log book. No more stopping at the game's main menu.

Which save is his. The first time you come back, the Room asks which save is this pilot's campaign. It shows on his card as Campaign Save, with a link to change it, and Play Campaign uses it from then on.

Your name in the game. The game now gets your initial, surname and unit, so its own Log Book shows "P. Millin, 610 Sqn". The Room shows your full name everywhere.

Fixes.

• A new pilot's first sortie could show as none in his log book. The Room was counting an older save against him. Every sortie in his new campaign is now his.
• Opening the Squadron Room twice no longer leaves extra windows behind.
• If your game is installed somewhere Windows protects, such as Program Files, the Play button could stay grey after the Setup Wizard. It no longer does. Reported on the forum.

Updating from 1.9.2. Delete your old BOB2-Win11-Fix folder, extract the new one beside Bob.exe, start the launcher and click the upgrade line at the bottom. Your pilots are kept separately and are not touched.

Guide with pictures: https://malawicob.github.io/bob2-modern-fix/

v1.9.2: straight into your campaign, and the Luftwaffe side

The biggest update since the Squadron Room arrived. Open "Modern Fix Handbook.html" in the package for a picture guide to everything below, and to installing and flying a career.

Straight into your campaign. Create your pilot in the Squadron Room and press PLAY CAMPAIGN. The game opens on the campaign map with your side, your squadron or Gruppe, the phase of the war and your name already set. No more working through the campaign screens and preferences by hand.

Fly for the Luftwaffe. The German side of the Squadron Room: the Gruppen on a map of the Channel front, the Bf 109 E and the Bf 110 (with your Bordfunker beside you, with his own record), the Flugbuch, the Staffel roster and the Morgenmeldung. Every Bf 109 and Bf 110 side view is now painted from the game's own skin textures, 137 of them, so the camouflage matches what you see in the air.

The right letter. The Room now follows the game: after a sortie your aircraft shows the code letter, or the number and its colour, that the game actually gave you. A new British pilot has his aircraft on the board from the day he is posted. Reported by 33lima.

A personal record. Every pilot has a first name and a surname, and clicking his photograph opens his record: when and where he was born, and how he came to fly by a real 1940 training route for his rank and aircraft. Change any of it, or write your own.

The morning papers carry the real 1940 day. The Morning Bulletin and the Morgenmeldung now include the day before as it really happened: the raids, the weather, the figures claimed that night beside the losses counted after the war, and the other news. All 114 days from 10 July to 31 October, researched with sources.

No more false alarm. The launcher no longer says the graphics settings file looks damaged. The game adds the name of your last save to the end of that file, so its size changes, and the old check took that for damage. If the file ever really is broken, PLAY quietly puts a good copy back. Reported by 33lima.

A cleaner picture. The grid lines across the terrain came from forced antialiasing, so the package now leaves antialiasing to the game (off) and recommends the full terrain texture size for sharp distant ground. This replaces the 4x antialiasing advice in 1.8.4.

Joysticks set themselves up. Plug in a different stick or HOTAS and the launcher notices and offers to set it up.

Updating from 1.8. Delete your old BOB2-Win11-Fix folder, extract the new one beside Bob.exe, start the launcher and click the upgrade line at the bottom. Your pilots live in the SquadronRoom folder beside Bob.exe and are not touched.

The download is larger than before (65 MB) because of the new side view pictures.

v1.8.4 - the repair window could bring back the giant cockpit

If you took 1.8.3 and pressed Fix on the graphics translator row, update.

On a display set above 100% scaling, that button rewrote dgVoodoo.conf with the panel size instead of the size the game is actually handed, and the enormous cockpit came back. Windows reports the display scaling differently depending on whether the program asking understands scaling. Install and repair is a window, so it read 100% on a screen set to 150%. Both readings now agree, whoever is asking.

The DPI manifest step can now finish. It writes one setting in the machine part of the registry, was refused for lack of permission, and reported the failure only in the Details pane. Pressing Fix did nothing, every time. It now asks Windows properly: press Fix, then Yes. That row is called "Menu text fix" now, because "DPI manifest" told nobody anything. Reported by 33lima.

Antialiasing has its own controls, in Settings, Graphics, separate from ReShade, with 4x marked as the one to use. And the page says when the two overlap: four of the five ReShade presets do their own antialiasing, so running both pays twice. Subtle is the one that pairs with 4x.

Smaller things. The launcher shows your display size, the Windows scaling, and the size the game is handed when those differ. The version line offers the upgrade instead of just announcing it. The launcher no longer stops a launch with a dialog to report a problem it has already fixed.

Squadron Room. The dispersal says when there is a morning bulletin you have not read, and takes you there. The Log Book no longer reports an aircraft name from the campaign save: the game defaults it to "Silver Eagle", and RAF fighters in 1940 were known by their squadron code and letter and their serial, not by a name.

Extract into your Battle of Britain II folder so that BOB2-Win11-Fix sits beside Bob.exe, then run BOB2.bat.

v1.8.3 - the menus draw right, and the Squadron Room

The menus draw correctly, the cockpit stays the right size, and the Squadron Room arrives.

The menu and cockpit fix

Bob.exe carries an 86-byte manifest that declares no DPI awareness at all, so Windows decides for it, and the Program Compatibility Assistant decides HIGHDPIAWARE — writing that flag as the process starts, every launch. The 2D dialogs were then laid out at the display's real DPI while the game drew its text at 96, and the briefing tab row printed on top of the description.

Stripping the flag beforehand can never work: it is re-applied at process creation. The fix is to leave nothing to guess at. An external Bob.exe.manifest declares the game DPI-unaware outright, and PreferExternalManifest tells Windows to read it instead of the empty stub.

The other half: dgVoodoo now renders the virtual desktop, not the panel. A DPI-unaware process is handed a smaller desktop — 1707x1067 on a 2560x1600 panel at 150% — and Windows magnifies its output back up. Given the panel it is scaled again on top, which is what made the cockpit come up half again too big. The setup computes this from the display scaling.

Proved together, including across a flight — flying is what defeated every earlier attempt, because Windows re-applied the flag mid-session.

The Squadron Room

• The sector map redrawn: one plaque per airfield rather than forty-one circles, fields that sit on top of each other sharing a plaque, and the crowded ones docked to rails down the North Sea and along the Channel.
• Point at a squadron for its card: the aeroplane, the station and sector, what the order of battle made of it, and the three highest scorers on its strength that morning.
• Come to the squadron as a sergeant pilot or with a commission — it decides which cross you are decorated with, as the RAF actually did.
• The Victoria Cross, a Bar to the DSO, and an allied government's own decorations: the Virtuti Militari and Cross of Valour on 302 and 303, the Czechoslovak War Cross on 310 and 312.
• The squadron code, your letter and the serial can be dragged about the aeroplane and sized with the wheel, remembered per mark of aircraft.
• A new career opens empty instead of showing the previous pilot's war.
• Polish and Czech names come out right — 45 roster names repaired.

Also

• Visual enhancements in the setup, one key: 4x antialiasing, 16x anisotropic filtering and ReShade. Off by default.
• ReShade can be switched off again rather than only removed, so you keep your presets.
• The compatibility-flag message that appeared on every launch was removing nothing — the Assistant hides a NUL and a binary blob inside the layer string, so the filter never matched while the word was still found.
• MENU SIZE no longer undoes its own work, and switching graphics translator no longer restores a stale dgVoodoo.conf.

Extract into your Battle of Britain II folder so BOB2-Win11-Fix sits beside Bob.exe, then run _CLICK HERE TO START.bat.

v1.7.8 - black bars in flight, settled

Black bars top and bottom in flight are fixed. Before it enters the 3D view the game switches the Windows desktop to 1024x768 for its briefing screens, and dgVoodoo sized its fullscreen output from that desktop, so the full-resolution picture was letterboxed into a 4:3 output that the panel then stretched. Whether it showed depended only on which screen came last before flight, which is why it looked like a driver, refresh-rate or DPI problem. dgVoodoo.conf now carries DesktopResolution set to your panel's native size, dgVoodoo's own documented remedy for programs that pre-set the desktop, and an explicit Resolution to match. The setup writes both from the display mode Windows returns to, never the current one.

Exclusive fullscreen is granted again. Windows had put the DWM8And16BitMitigation compatibility shim on Bob.exe by itself, at machine level. With it on, the game's mode switch is virtualised and the driver refuses every fullscreen request. It is removed at both registry levels ("Windows 11 flags" on Install and repair; one administrator prompt for the machine-level entry) and the Play button strips it if Windows puts it back. WINXPSP3 and RUNASADMIN are dropped as well; the game needs neither.

Updating an existing install: delete your old BOB2-Win11-Fix folder, then extract this one into your Battle of Britain II folder so it sits beside Bob.exe. Deleting first is safe and is the better way: your joystick reference, your control backups and your saves all live in the game folder, not inside the fix folder, and extracting over the top of an old folder leaves stale files behind. Then open the launcher and run Install and repair. The Graphics translator and Windows 11 flags rows will be red; press Fix on each.

Direct download: https://github.com/malawicob/bob2-modern-fix/releases/download/v1.7.8/BOB2-2.13-Modern-Fix-v1.7.8.zip

Do not copy a dgVoodoo.conf between machines: DesktopResolution is per panel.

v1.7.7 - unmissable entry point

One addition on top of v1.7.6: the fix folder now contains "_CLICK HERE TO START.bat", which sorts to the very top of the folder in Windows Explorer and does exactly what BOB2.bat does (opens the launcher, where you press PLAY). The folder holds over thirty files, eleven of them .bat, and the right one was too easy to miss. Nothing else moved, so BOB2.bat and every documented path still work exactly as before.

Getting started is now: extract the zip, put the BOB2-Win11-Fix folder beside Bob.exe, open it, double-click the first file, press PLAY. The v1.7.6 automatic black-border repair runs at Play if your settings file is damaged.

v1.7.6 - the black-border repair runs itself

One change on top of v1.7.5: the Play-time repair no longer asks a question. A settings.cfg that fails the plausibility check is by definition unusable (the game applies its stored bytes as a display mode with no validation), and the old file is always backed up as settings.cfg.before-knowngood, so there is nothing to decide.

If you have the black border: update to this version and press Play. The launcher finds the damaged file, repairs it with your own display's resolution, shows one note saying what it did, and the game launches. Nothing to find, nothing to answer.

v1.7.5 - black-border repair, now automatic at Play

Makes the v1.7.4 black-border repair foolproof. Nothing to find, nothing to type.

The launcher now checks SAVEGAME\settings.cfg when you press Play. If the stored display mode is implausible (the proven cause of the low-resolution 3D picture inside a black border), it offers the one-click repair right there: your old file is backed up as settings.cfg.before-knowngood, a known-good file goes in with the resolution set to your own display, and you fly. Declining never blocks the launch.

Also hardened: the repair reads your real display mode from the video controller rather than Windows Forms, whose values are DPI-scaled (1920x1080 at 125 percent scaling reads as 1536x864, and writing that would have recreated the exact invalid-mode bug being repaired). The SAVEGAME folder is created if missing, and every failure reports a message instead of stopping. Settings Tweaker option 14 uses the same hardened code.

If you have the border: update to this version and press Play. The launcher does the rest.

v1.7.4 - known-good settings.cfg repair for the black border

Clean hotfix on top of v1.7.3.

A full audit of the one install with verified full-resolution 3D proved the black-border failure end to end. The game sets its display mode in ChangeMode from four values stored in SAVEGAME\settings.cfg (width at offset 1416, height 1480, refresh 1544, depth 1608) and applies them with no validation at all. A damaged or differently laid out settings.cfg (one tester's file reads 67,110,784 at the width offset, which is not a resolution) makes the mode change fail, and the game then runs its 1024x768 default inside the desktop. That is the black border with the low-resolution 3D picture. No wrapper setting can fix it, because the damage is upstream of the wrapper. The audit also confirmed the launcher batch files, dgVoodoo configuration and DLLs are identical between working and broken machines.

NEW: Settings Tweaker option 14, "Reset graphics settings to the known-good file". It installs the settings.cfg captured from the audited working install, patches the resolution to your own desktop mode first, and backs your old file up as settings.cfg.before-knowngood. Run it with the game closed (the game rewrites this file on exit), then start the game and fly.

If you have the border: update to this version, open the setup tool's Settings Tweaker, choose option 14, then Play.

v1.7.3 - launcher validates dgVoodoo.conf contents

Clean hotfix on top of v1.7.2. Does not include the unreleased 1.8.0 work on main.

FIXED: the launcher's own Wrapper status row read green whenever dgVoodoo.conf merely existed, without checking its contents. v1.7.1 taught the Install and repair screen and the setup step to validate the conf, but the main launcher window was missed and still passed a reset conf as fine.

If the dgVoodoo control panel is ever pointed at the game folder and Apply is pressed, it rewrites the conf with plain defaults. That strips the forced resolution and the 4096 VRAM, giving low-resolution 3D inside a black border with the watermark back on, while the launcher still showed a green Wrapper row and no prompt to repair.

The launcher now checks the same load-bearing lines the installer does (ScalingMode, Resolution, VRAM, OutputAPI, EnumerateRefreshRates). A reset conf now turns the Wrapper row red with "config reset to defaults, run Install and repair", so hitting Play without repairing no longer hides the problem.

Note for anyone whose borders survived every other fix: update to this build, and if the Wrapper row is red, run Install and repair once, then Play.