Okay, has anyone else tried experimenting with any of the classic Jane’s flight sims like Longbow 2, F-15, F-18, and USAF lately?
I know there are a myriad of Glide-wrappers, patches, and drivers that you can use to get some of those games up and running in XP. I’m most interested in F-15. I’ve already downloaded the last patch which included the D3D patch (as some of you remember, most of the early Janes games were all Glide-only, a remnant of that horrible alliance EA made with 3dfx), but I’ve got to find my copy of the game (somewhere in the garage). Wanted to know if it was worth the effort, though. Does it look like shit? Or does it actually look halfway decent?
I’ve heard that it looked pretty good with the earlier GeForce boards and early drivers, but with more modern boards and drivers, the video quality supposedly went down.
Hopefully someone else on this forum is like me… I have all the boxed copies of all the original Janes sims, but they’re just gathering dust right now. But until LOMAC ships, there ain’t anything else to fly, and I’m all Falcon 4.0-ed out.
D3D doesn’t work quite right. It looks graphically correct, but frame rates are hellaciously bad. And a game published in 1998 should absolutely scream on an AthlonXP 2100 with a GeForce4 board.
Turning off D3D and going to software mode fixes the frame rate issue. It’s butta’ smooth. But it’s software mode in a fixed 640x480 resolution on a 21-inch monitor. Talk about pixelalted city. But I’m okay with that for now, because it’s giving me flashbacks to playing that awesome MicroProse title, F-15 Strike Eagle III. It looks just like that.
I’ve already tried a Glide Wrapper (evoodooxp), but that didn’t do much except to create problems loading the game. Still the same frame rate issues, it seems. Anyone else know of a good Glide Wrapper?
If you are interested in the Janes F-15 Iraq campaign then have a look at this website. It contains a utility that allows you to fly the F15 Iraq campaign in Janes F/A-18.
The advantage here is that Janes F/A-18 is more compatible with the latest video cards and operating systems. The patch also adds extra hires modes for Janes F/A-18.
As for older sims like Longbow 2 etc. there isn’t much you can do to get them working well on recent computers. For my helo sim fix I mostly fly Enemy Engaged now which works well under Windows XP.
The team that made F-15 and F/A-18 once said the D3D patch for F-15 was mostly an experiment, meant to give them some idea of what it’d be like to work with Microsoft’s API. At the time, they were only familiar with Glide, but the emergence of the TNT and nVidia was too great to ignore. Anyway, by their own admission, they’ve always said the D3D patch wasn’t much of an option. What about the Glidos patch everyone is using for Red Baron 3D? They don’t mention F-15 on their website, but it can’t hurt to try. http://www.glidos.net/index.html
Might also try hunting through the forums over at www.simhq.com for ideas.
So I stumbled upon a used copy of Jane’s F-15 at the local Half Price Books tonight. $10, but it’s the original 1998 box with everything in it. You remember those glorious Jane’s boxes, right? Talk about nostalgia city. Was almost tempted to pick it up, but I held off for now. I may go back there tomorrow, though.
In days not so long past, games – especially flight sims – came with impressive, informative and fun to read manuals. This one, of course, was the pinnacle:
But you also had amazing manuals like:
And others that I can’t find pictures to, like all of the Jane’s games, EF2000, F-22 ADF, Total Air War, all the Microprose games…sigh. Ah, memories.
I bought that Falcon manual on eBay for 10 or 15 bucks. I hope it’s useful in my quest to replay old classics that I missed while growing up with little disposable income. But I have a couple of years before I plan to get to it.
After a crappy week at work, this thread bump both made my day and made me sad for the old days. I wouldn’t trade my time at EA Baltimore for anything…
And yeah, that Falcon 4 manual was freakin spectacular. I still have mine. Still have an unopened F-15 Officers Edition too. :)
