And also I browsed the two Fallout threads I found here, the one Certis made after he admitted he had never played the games and the one announcing the restoration Fallout 2 patch, and I didn't find any mention of ways to make the first game better.

* Increase movement and combat speed to up to 10x normal.
* Play fallout in a window or in 16 bit colour mode
* Use d3d9 in place of the usual ddraw
* Use the mouse scroll wheel in the inventory, barter, conversation and save/load menus.
* Assign a use to the middle mouse button, and adjust mouse sensitivity beyond fallouts normal range
* Adjust or remove the 13 year time limit
* Fixes the broken pathfinder and sharpshooter perks
* Adds some additional script functions for modders to use

The downloads are specific to a single version of the fallout exe, so make sure you download the right one. Most of the features aren't applicable to fallout 1, and dx9 graphics modes and upscaling filters don't work in the windows 9x versions. There is no version available for the DOS version of fallout1.

wanderingtaoist wrote:

The only patch I remember is the 1.1 version, which corrects saving when you have a car, makes loading and saving faster and generally prevents crashes. Patch it up before starting a game, as the patched version doesn't work with old saves.

Fallout 1 has no car.

Most's link has the official patch. I've never tried any of the other fan patches/restorations.

NT users can get around the installer by manually installing the game themselves. Note however that you must have at least NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3 in order to play the game. Also, Fallout should work fine but was not tested very much under NT.

For the instructions below, I will assume that you have created a folder called FALLOUT on your C: drive and that the drive the Fallout CD is in is your D: drive. Insert your actual drive letters where appropriate.

1. Copy d:\program\win\falloutw.___ to c:\fallout\falloutw.exe.

2. Create a text file in c:\fallout called fallout.cfg and add the following line to it:
[system]

3. You now have 4 options corresponding to the 4 install sizes:
3a. Do not copy anything else. This is the same as the smallest install, but is also the slowest way to play the game. If you do this, make sure you follow the steps in 3b, 3c & 3d below for editing the config file.

3b. Copy d:\master.dat to c:\fallout\master.dat. This file is 318 MB.
If you do _not_ do this step, add the following on the next line in c:\fallout\fallout.cfg:
master_dat=d:\master.dat

3c. Copy d:\critter.dat to c:\fallout\critter.dat. This file is 150 MB.
If you do _not_ do this step, add the following on the next line in c:\fallout\fallout.cfg:
critter_dat=d:\critter.dat

3d. Copy the entire d:\data folder to c:\fallout\data. This is 73 MB.
If you do _not_ do this step, add the following two lines to c:\fallout\fallout.cfg:
[sound]
music_path2=d:\data\sound\music

4. Add the following line to your [system] block:
free_space=0

5. Make sure you close and save your changes to the c:\fallout\fallout.cfg file.

For example, if you chose to not copy any of the data files over, you should have a fallout.cfg file that looks like this:

[system]
master_dat=d:\master.dat
critter_dat=d:\critter.dat
free_space=0
[sound]
music_path2=d:\data\sound\music

That should be it! Just run c:\fallout\falloutw.exe to play the game.

If you have problems installing Fallout from CD, just create a shortcut to the setup executable, put it on desktop and set it to Windows 95 compatibility mode, then run it.

Also, Fallout 1's main executable should always be ran in Windows 95 compat. mode.