Forum: F-16 Simulators

Why did they stop making flight sims? They had a great product line, with F-15, USN Fighters, USAF, IDF, and others, and then they stopped abruptly.

Still have my old disks back home. Does anyone know if they will work on a Vista based computer? Thanks!

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I loved USAF. Don't know how many hours I logged on that game, but it was a lot. I had F/A-18 but for the life of me could not figure out how to use LGBs or JDAMs so that took a lot of fun out of it since I couldn't pass half the missions.

Yeah I have those games collecting dust in my closet somewhere too. Janes had a bunch of great one's - U.S.A.F., Israel Air Force, USNF'97, etc. I played a lot of those back on my Windows 98 system. I understand Janes USAF can be patched to run on Windows XP, see http://www.majorgeeks.com/compatibility5159.html and
http://www.gulfknight.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2559 and http://www.simhq.com/_air8/air_278a.html
Can't speak for Vista (have yet to find the hard drive space to try and run it on my Windows XP system) - Good Luck!

Elite 1K Joined: May 26, 2005 - 08:39 PM Posts: 1496

The market for hardcore sims has died. Now it's more lucrative to go after Madden Year+1 or Shooter Clone XVII. And Jane's Combat Simulations was owned by EA. 'nuff said.

Sims have been a victim of the success of gaming as a whole. The unwashed masses want Ace Combat 15, not Falcon 5.0. Sad

These days game manuals are 6 pages long, and two pages are the license agreement and the legal-ese epilepsy warning. I still have the Falcon 4.0 binder on my bookshelf. Those were the days...

Man, I totally agree. I value realism in flight sims/games and when my friend showed me Ace Combat for his 360 I was quite disapointed. I ran out of my special 4 missile missiles far too soon. Laughing

USAF was a really great game, I remember being amazing with the graphics. I must admit, I don't know how realistic the A/C-130 mission is from Call od Duty 4, that one sure is fun!

I'd like to get me one of those jet engines used in Ace Combat.... They'll run all day at full-burner and don't run outta' gas... Doh

Keep 'em flyin' Thumb

TEG

haha,

I must have made a couple dozen custom game maps for USAF -although I only multiplayed online for a couple months back in 2001 due to insufficient bandwidth!@%

I recall one night-mission co-op map in particular which was a blast to multiplay on, which included a squad of GBU and CBU armed F-15E zapping a mountain based SA-10 battery close to the Iran-Iraq border, lol. Of course there were some Mig-23, a mirage and a couple Mig-29 for the co-op team to deal with on the way out!

You had to have loved free-for-all dogfighting in those warthogs though - crazy.

Don't know exactly what happened to that USAF disk over time, oh well.. sheesh, all the better.

[quote="geogen"]haha,

I must have made a couple dozen custom game maps for USAF -although I only multiplayed online for a couple months back in 2001 due to insufficient bandwidth!@%

I recall one night-mission co-op map in particular which was a blast to multiplay on, which included a squad of GBU and CBU armed F-15E zapping a mountain based SA-10 battery close to the Iran-Iraq border, lol. Of course there were some Mig-23, a mirage and a couple Mig-29 for the co-op team to deal with on the way out!

You had to have loved free-for-all dogfighting in those warthogs though - crazy.

Don't know exactly what happened to that USAF disk over time, oh well.. sheesh, all the better.

PITY! I suppose those dozen custom maps vanished into obscurity as well?! Sad

i STILL HAVE SOME OF THOSE GAMES MYSELF, IAF and USNF were my favorites, never had USAF, and F-15 never ran good enough for me, shame (I finally got a flight stick and the I had to get a new computer that it doesn't work well on) The only complaint I had about any of the games was the lack of visible stores on USNF and the fact that flying a mission at night was virtual suicide for me if I ran into any enemies. I had whole campaigns set up, even--put the prepacked missions to shame.

Bummer that you never had USAF since that's the only one (that I'm aware of) that can be made to run on Windows XP at least. I've even seen versions were someone included an F-14 Tomcat, Super Pro 9.2 / 9.4 was the name of the patch if my memory serves.

yeah--i've seen that on youtube I think, but all in all, I never really was happy with anything but the reference sections of the Jane's games, the campaigns lacked the realism I truly wanted back when I played. I've all but stopped playing after I got my new system a while back, but I was getting good, now a Gambian Air Force pilot could probably take me out Very Happy

lol, my favorite thing about Janes flight sims was always the intro movies, especially WWII. Actually, Janes WWII was one of my favorite flights sims ever after F4

Well, I think the next time I go home, I'll snag my USAF disk, and see if it works on Vista. I'm not that computer savvy, so, if it doesn't, I'll prolly wipe out an old CPU, and reboot it, and load the game again. Then, I'll have a SIM ONLY computer!

Might take up more space in my place, but it's been a long time since I've been in a good dogfight. Last time I played USAF, I was still on Vipers. D@mn, that's been over 6 years now!

Someday, I will be in a job where I can get back to a fighter unit...but I digress.

Quote:

Well, I think the next time I go home, I'll snag my USAF disk, and see if it works on Vista. I'm not that computer savvy, so, if it doesn't, I'll prolly wipe out an old CPU, and reboot it, and load the game again. Then, I'll have a SIM ONLY computer!

Might take up more space in my place, but it's been a long time since I've been in a good dogfight. Last time I played USAF, I was still on Vipers. D@mn, that's been over 6 years now!

Someday, I will be in a job where I can get back to a fighter unit...but I digress.

I'm not savvy either, but see if you can get your hands on a spare Windows 98 Hard Drive and have a computer nerd (I can use the term, I am one) install it in your tower. Then you should be able to run Vista and Win98 on the same machine.

If you can get your hands on Jane's IAF (seeing as it has the Viper) or F-15 (okay, no Viper but a good sim) I'd love to put my skills up against you in a dogfight, TC.

I run Janes F-15 on my XP home edition machine currently. It's out kids machine so we have never done any upgrades to it, and she runs like a champ. I think I bought that game in about 1999 and me and a pilot buddy of mine would play each other for hours over our dial-up connections. It was a little slow to get going, but once you did it was a blast. We both had seperate phone lines so we would just talk over the speakerphone to communicate. Of course being a Boom Operator myself, I loved hitting the tanker. Always makes me laugh about how picky the boom is on the game, If I told an F-15 driver to "stabilize" over the radio I would be laughed out of the unit.

Forum: F-16 Simulators

Jane's Sims - Why did they stop?