Tips for Combat:

Use your afterburners to get by your enemy when he is going straight on you. There is no need to take unnecesary damage in head on collision.
It is good to have weapons of both long and short range on your ship, if you can afford it. For me the best combination is 4 Mk2 stream lasers on the outside of the ship and a Mass Ion Cannon in the middle.
Every shuttle has a weak point. Manouver your ship to that point and than destroy the shuttle. Try to be quick becouse the shuttles do rotate.
Buy only good missiles like Pythons or Proximity missiles. They are quick and very powerfull.
I found out that the torpedos are slow and have small range so be carrefull how you use them.
Decoys Mk2 are a lot better then ordinary decoys.
Use a quality joystick. Prefferably some with programable buttons. This is not a must but deffinitly helps a lot to not have to move your hands to much during combat. My sidewinder took quite a lot of time setting up and programing but when I got it right the joy of playing the game increased even more.
Use mines. They are quite handy in combat against a lot of enemies. When he is following just drop a few and your tail is clean.

General Tips:
The question most people ask me is: How to save? Well here is the answer. While on a planet or base, hit P to access your PAD. There are four buttons: a computer, a ship, a sheet of paper, and a box with the letters "UF" on it. Click on the computer, then click on the green sphere next to Save Game. Type you name in one of the blanks and hit save at the bottom to save. Save often!
Finding and flying to planets: Once you are in space, hit Alt-N to access your nav map. You can search the map for your destination by hitting the F key. To select a destination, click on the point with your mouse. To rotate the 3D map, hold the right mouse button and move your mouse.
Here is the procedure for landing in Privateer 2. Fly close enough to the planet so that when you hit 'C' in your ship to bring up the Coms window, you have the choice to talk to the planet. Hit the corresponding number to talk to them, and ask them for permission to land.
Best cargo ship is Monolith so use him vhen you are carrying valuable cargo. They make very good wingman.
Be carefull when you pick wingman ... some of them are pretty useless. Best wingman is Orpheus.
Use sistem jumps.
Don't take missions that offer a big reward if you don't have a very, very well equiped ship because they tend to be very hard to finish.
Autoexec.bat and Config.sys problems:

Here is how those MS-DOS startup files should look like to play Privateer 2. This is only the template. You have to include drivers for your sound card if needed and for your CDROM:

Config.sys
device=c:\windows\himem.sys
devicehigh=c:\windows\emm386.exe i=E000-EFFF i=B000-B7FF ram
dos=high,umb
devicehigh=YOUR_CDROM_DRIVER.SYS /D:MSCD001 /M:10 /L:G

Autoexec.bat
lh mscdex /D:MSCD001 /L:D
lh c:\YOUR_PATH\MOUSE_DRIVER.exe

I should warn you to use this only as a template. You may need to adjust it to suit your system. Also, you may need to load MS-DOS driver for your sound card.

Digital joystick calibration workaround:

This tip was sent to me by Dustin Wind (dduke555@yahoo.com) so any questions or comment should be directed to him.
I just purchased a 'logitech wingman extreme digital 3d ' joystick. This stick is without any analog capability, therefore while it works with DOS games ina box, it will not work in true DOS mode, OR any windows game that does not use joystick input directly from the windows OS (privateer 2) as there are no trim pots.
This really ticked me off but after wasting a bunch of time looking for drivers and such, i decided to snoop around the priv2 directory.
In 'DARK.CFG' you will find many lines including these of relevance:
--------------
Joy 1
Joy Dead 0.100000
Joy cx 334
Joy cy 370
Joy lx 0
Joy ly 0
Joy rx 655
Joy ry 655

(this is the fixed version for my particular stick)
--------------
After trying to calibrate a digital stick in priv2, those numbers will be wrong.
To fix:
change lx and ly to 0
change rx and ry to 655

Play the game and if the ship direction is not still, adjust cx and cy accordingly.
DO NOT try to recalibrate X and Y axis in priv2 anymore as it will reset the parameters to garbage again.
The throttle should calibrate perfectly in priv2, so no need to change settings under 'Joy 2.'
When you are all set up, you can adjust the dead zone if desired.

P.S. If you are looking for a new joystick the previously mentioned model was a great deal. It is extremely durable for a low end joystick, it has many buttons, and a twistable stick (i use it for roll in
priv2). You can use one button as 'shift' to almost double the total amount of useable actions. It comes with very nice remapping software so you can use the buttons as keyboard keys or combos in any game. I very rarely even need to use the keyboard in priv2
anymore. and, of course, the stick is digital so you will always have great accuracy and never get scratchy pots.


Thanks for the tip Dustin Wind.
Useful instalation tip:

This tip was sent to me by Huw Read (Huw.Read@NTL.com) so any questions or comment should be directed to him.

I have had some problems running the game, so I thought for future
reference you could have it if anyone else has troubles too....

Anyway, I am running an athlon 800, 13 gig hdd with windows XP and Ive had some problems. The installer does run but always reports insufficient memory space (even when I have about 3 gig free). I managed to get around this by installing it on my old laptop (a 266 pentium 1) and, basically copying the folder over onto my winXP machine. In the folder, there is a file called dark.cfg, I edited this and changed the first line (something like "d:") to where my cdrom was that i was using (I have two in my computer) and the second line (C:\dark) to point to the game folder in relation of the win XP machine (e.g. C:\GAMES\DARK).

That seemed to do the trick, it runs now, but now I have the "Its too
fast!"

Thanks for the tip Huw Read.

Useful instalation tip for Windows XP:

This tip was sent to me by Bart Hunt (bhunt4@cox.net) so any questions or comment should be directed to him.

If you try to install on Windows XP and have a large hard disk you get the "not enough disk space available" error message. If you manually make a directory of "c:\dark" first on the hard drive the game will install with out any problems. I have tried this on both fat32 and ntfs partitioned drives, works every time. By the way it can be any drive partition that is available not just C:

Thanks for the tip Bart Hunt.
Tips for missions:
I have received a lot of e-mail about a mission in which you have to save senators doughter. In this mission you have to chase some lunatic acrros half the universe by solving his riddles. I will not pu the sollution here but you can download this .txt file whith the solution.