Table of Contents

Starter Guide to OMF2097

/home/omf2097/

…Was so tempted to stuck “Ultimate” into the title, always feels thematic for OMF.

This is supposed to be a guide to get a completely new player to install and get the game running, and guide them through beating 1Player mode on easy, and get them started on Tournament mode.

  1. Install and setup DosBox
  2. Starting the actual game
  3. Basic menus
  4. Basic GUI
  5. Basic controls
  6. Basic Jaguar
  7. Basic 1Player
  8. Basic Tournament Mode

DosBox

All praise our lord and saviour DosBox, the bringer of most wonderful oldschool game to any and all modern hardware!

The DosBox web page already has a bunch of good guides for this, so I'll just refer to them:

You don't need to edit the config, it generally works without. But it can be useful to set a few settings:

Installing and Starting the Game

Now you need to have an install of OMF2097, either an installed copy or the installer. You can get either from here:

Next either copy the game files or the installer to a folder that you want to run it from, example:

c:\dos\omf

Now we can start Dosbox. And the first thing you want to do is to “mount”, which is to tell DosBox what folder to use. Example using the folder in the previous example, type into dosbox command prompt:

mount c:\dos\omf c

This will make the folder “c:\dos\omf” into a drive letter C:\ for Dosbox. So now you just have to type that in to change to the new drive:

c:

And you change the command prompts position to the C:\ drive. (Tip: for the future, you can put these commands into the [autoexec] part of the config file, to have it do this for you automatically each time you start DosBox!)

If you copied in the OMF installer, you can now type INSTALL and follow the installer to complete the game.

If you already installed or copied in a pre installed, then you can type in SETUP to change the soundcard to make sound work. Select “Sound Blaster Pro” and just select the default settings, they work with DosBox.

Once done with those, you can type in OMF to start up. You'll get a menu where you can click the first option “Regular Game”, and you'll go into the game and watch the intro.

Basic Menus

Once you've watched the very nice intro, and got into the main menu, with the cool looking robot on the left side basking in the spotlight. We have a few options here I'll sum them up, and then go through the useful ones for now:

One Player Mode

The main story mode, we'll be playing this in a little bit.

Two Player Mode

We can ignore this for this guide. If you got friends that want to play, you can come back here after done with the guide.

Tournament Mode

This is an alternative mode where you have to fight to earn cash and use on buying bots and upgrades. We'll come back to this at the end of the guide.

Configuration

Various options, but the most important one for now is:

So you can change the keybinds if you don't like them. Default is Arrow keys and Enter=Punch and Shift=Kick. You can also adjust volume if you like.

Gameplay

Various options that affects gameplay. There's a couple important ones, you can ignore the rest for now.

SPEED: Set it down a few notches, as the game can run so fast on new computers that you can't see what goes on. Set it to half for starters, see how it feels, you can adjust it later to where it feels nice.

CPU: is the game difficulty for One Player mode. Set it all the way to the left for the easiest for now: “Punching Bag”.

BEST OF: Default is “BEST 2 OF 3”, but you can change it anything you like, most prefer either “ONE ROUND” or “BEST 2 OF 3”.

Ordering Info

Can ignore this, unless you want to watch the sales pitch.

Help

In-game help and tutorial for the game, can read for some more tips.

Demo

Makes the AI select two pilots/bots and play against each others. Can be fun to watch to see how it plays and what moves do etc. But largely you can ignore this.

Scoreboard

Highscore table, you can ignore this for now.

Quit

Exits the game, very useful when you need to. You can also press “F10” button on your keyboard to instantly exit the game from anywhere, called the “Boss Key”.

Basic UI

I'll explain the User Interface in the actual matches before we start one, to avoid surprises.

  1. Health - Red bar upper left, goes purple as you take damage, lose when all purple.
  2. Stun - Grey bar under the health bar. Goes purple as you get hit, when all purple you get stunned.
  3. Name - right under the stun bar is your pilot's name.
  4. Bot - right under name again is the name of the robot you're using.
  5. Points - right under the Bot again, points increase by hitting the enemy with attacks.
  6. Round counter/wins - To the right of your health bar, shows who has won a match in best 2 out of 3 etc, round Red or Grey markers, red is wins.
  7. The opposite side is identical for the opponent.

You can hit the ESCAPE button to pause the game and bring up a menu while in a match, these options works similar to the ones I mentioned in the previous section:

Basic controls

Controls

Default:

Unlike many other fighting games, OMF2097 only uses two buttons for attacks unlike the more common 4-6 among other fighting games. A lot of old Street Fighter fans for example finds this really crazy the first time they try OMF2097.

Movement

Regarding blocking, some attacks require specific Block stance. If your opponent uses a jumping attack you need to BLOCK HIGH to stop the attack, if you BLOCK LOW you'll get hit. The same the other way around, if the Opponent uses a Sweep kick you have to BLOCK LOW, and get hit if BLOCK HIGH.

Attacks

Each Bot has a lot of different attacks. The way this works is that you press down the attack button and a direction to get specific attacks. This sounds complicated and weird, but with a little practise it becomes second nature.

I'll be using Jaguar as example:

Note: I'll be using these terms for the Starter Guide, but the rest of the website uses numbers instead of directions, as that's what most OMF fans are used to and it reads easier when used to it. (Example Backward + Punch = 4P per the direction on the numerical pad on the keyboard).

To begin with don't think too much about all these attacks, find a couple you like the feel off, and use those. I'll give some suggestions for the Jaguar later on in the guide. You can spend a little time testing out different moves in 2 player mode if you want to.

Some other notables

Standing close to an opponent and pressing forward and punch will throw the opponent. The main advantage is that Throws can't be blocked, and is the main way to break through a opponent pretending to be a turtle in the corner.

The three low kicks (Down+Back+Kick, Down+Kick, Down+Forward+Kick) are considered low attacks, and must be Blocked Low.

Jumping attacks (jumping and then using either Punch or Kick) are good ways to attack the opponent. And they must be Blocked High.

That should be enough for basic controls. Better to use it to learn more.

Basic Jaguar

The jaguar is often called the beginner bot of the game, for being easy to learn and master, but it's also the most popular bot by far and there are more players maining Jaguar than any other bot in the game. I'll be using it as example for a couple of reasons:

To start with lets pick a couple of useful attacks to start with, with some simple explanations of why they're good. Start practising using these to get a feel for the bot:

Each bot also has some special moves, these use special input commands to activate, similar to many other fighting games but thankfully the input commands are generally very forgiving. Special attacks can be very useful, but they're not a replacement for normal attacks. Here are Jaguars special attacks:

Combos

A combo is any two or more moves that hit the enemy fast enough that they don't have time to recover control between. Combos generally do more damage and gives more points. It can seem quite weird to start with, so I'll keep it simple and just give a couple of useful basic combos for Jaguar:

The easy kick 3 hit combo:

You can also replace the last attack with a Jaguar leap if you want to be fancy.

Special attack 3 hit combo:

You need to hit with the Jump Kick a little away from the opponent, if you hit too close then the concussion cannon will actually miss. So try to just clip the opponent with the toe on the jump kick. Looks really fancy, and since it uses lots of special attacks gives lots of points.

Strategy

First of all, the Jaguar has a couple of moves that the AI struggles to block, which makes it much easier to deal with it:

So you'll almost always want to start attacking the opponent with a Jump+Kick, they'll rarely if ever block it, letting you setup some easy combos. After hitting with Jump+Kick you can combo into any move.

The Back+Kick makes the AI do some weird things, if you use it at max range, the opponent will often just walk into it, you can often win games on just setting up this and let the AI walk into your heavy kicks. It's also useful to spam if the opponent got you cornered, it will often get you out of a stick spot!

The AI also struggles to figure out how to block the Over-Head Throw, so if you're in a pinch you can just try to use it against them over and over, it will usually work.

Basic 1Player

Also known as Story Mode. You pick a Pilot, and a Bot, and fight against all the other pilots in other bots.

Each Pilot has different stats, they're mostly self explanatory so not going to go into detail here, generally you want to match up certain stats to certain bots but it also depends on playstyle. For now let's start with picking Angel, she has a very versatile stat set to learn any new bot with.

And obviously we'll pick Jaguar for robot. Again it's pretty versatile in regards to stats, and can work with most combinations of stats, just avoid characters with very low stats anywhere.

If you follow the strategies in the Basic Jaguar section, you should be able to tear through the AI at “Punching Bag” difficulty with little difficulty. And then meet the last boss who will say that he won't fight you until you raise the Difficulty Setting first.

Congratulations, you've beaten 1Player mode on lowest difficulty! You should now understand enough about the game that you can try other difficulties, and try out different bots, and start figuring things out for yourself. Good luck and have fun!

At this point I'd recommend playing around with testing different pilots and bot, and see which ones you like. 1Player is very good for testing out bots to try them and learn them.

Basic Tournament Mode

Tournament mode is the other single player mode, and the most popular one. You create your own custom pilot, enter tournaments, fight to earn money/points, and then use those money to buy upgrades to your bot or buy other bots. to eventually become the World Champion with a fully upgraded bot that will destroy almost anything it touches.

First off, you navigate the menus here by moving the hand with the pointy finger around to the different buttons. Some will be greyed out and can't be clicked. Take a few seconds to just move the pointer around and get used to it, it's a bit awkward the first time.

Now let's get started:

You start with creating a new Pilot, use the arrow keys to navigate the hand/finger pointer to the “NEW” button to create a new Pilot.

Now you've created your first pilot, and you should have a screen like this, so let's go through and explain them:

Besides the buttons, you'll have a bunch of green numbers and dots on the screen above. Most are pretty self explanatory, like Rank, Wins and Loses are just statistics. Money is naturally how much you have to upgrade for. On the right side there's a list of which special moves your Bot have. And the bottom section with all the dots is a list of how much upgrades you have, which is going to look very empty right now.

Let's start with looking at “Training Courses”:

Pretty simple, you can pay money to train to gain more stats, each time you buy one the next one of the same stat gets more expensive. To start with buy a few of each until you run out of money, balanced stats are generally pretty good in tournament mode. Exit by clicking DONE when you're out of money.

Next let's go to the “Buy” menu:

Bit more options here, but you can't afford any of them yet. But I'll explain them quickly for later on:

Now let's go back to the main Menu. Click on “Arena” to fight your first opponent (probably Cossette), and beat her up real good.

After the match you'll get the News reporter telling you how great you are or how lousy you are depending on how well you did.

And then you get to the Repair screen, where you get a bunch of numbers, like how much you won, bonuses, how much it cost to repair you etc. Also statistics for how many attacks hit etc. None of them are very important, you'll get your money back in the main screen anyway. And at the bottom is your mechanic telling you how much you rock or suck.

Back at the main menu again, you'll have more money to play with. Go to “Buy” and pick an upgrade you like, and spend the rest on more training.

If you lose a match you get no winnings, and have to pay for repairs. So you don't want to lose too many times, or you might start having to sell parts to afford repair bills. But usually the lowest ranked opponents are bad enough you should be able to bully them for more lunch money if needed.

Now you're set to try the rest of tournament mode for yourself!