Stars.ini

The stars.ini is located in the c:\windows directory or wherever else you installed windows to (c:\win95 etc) and contains the non game-specific settings for Stars!, and a hashed record of your game's serial number and machine configuration. If stars.ini is missing or the serial number/machine config do not match you will see the enter serial code dialog when you run stars.exe. For Stars! to remember these settings the user needs to have write access to the c:\windows directory(admin rights or access specifically granted by an admin), however stars will run quite happily without the stars.ini file ever existing - it will just ask you for your serial code every time and won't remember any of your settings.

The following settings are stored in stars.ini:

• window layout
• all zip orders(custom transport tasks)
• all stored queues, including the default queue
• all map settings and filters

Manually modifying

There are a few modifcations you can make to the stars.ini file.

newreports

Adding newreports=1 to the [misc] section will give increased information in your text dumps and change the name of the dump files from gamename.pla to gamename.p## (## being the player number)

• generally recommended and required by some utilities

backups

Adding backups=XX to the [misc] section where XX is a number (eg backups=50) will create sub-directorys called backup1,backup2 etc until backupXX when the game is generated - this only applies to the host player or when playing alone vs AI.

fonts

Adding (or editing) a [fonts] section can cure some font problems. Here are the default settings for the various languages, though others can be substituted.

English:

[fonts]

Arial=Arial

ArialBold=Arial Bold

ArialItalic=Arial Italic

ArialBoldItalic=Arial Bold Italic

German:

[fonts]

Arial=Arial

ArialBold=Arial Fett

ArialItalic=Arial Kursiv

ArialBoldItalic=Arial Fett Kursiv

Danish:

[fonts]

Arial=Arial

ArialBold=Arial fed

ArialItalic=Arial kursiv

ArialBoldItalic=Arial fed kursiv

Finnish:

[fonts]

Arial=Arial

ArialBold=Arial Lihavoitu

ArialItalic=Arial Kursivoitu

ArialBoldItalic=Arial Lihavoitu Kursivoitu

Swedish:

[fonts]

Arial=Arial

ArialBold=Arial Fet

ArialItalic=Arial Kursiv

ArialBoldItalic=Arial Fet Kursiv

Russian:

[fonts]

Arial=Arial Cyr

ArialBold=Arial Cyr

ArialItalic=Arial Cyr

ArialBoldItalic=Arial Cyr

Default Location

3.11/95/98/ME/2000/XP: C:\Windows

Vista: [drive]:\users\[user]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Windows