Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Old Games/Sims Woes

A new entry for the "Maneuver Warfare: a Wargamer's Notebook" is in the works. I wanted it to include some combat flight simulator experience of F-86 Sabres and Mig-15s dogfighting over Korea. So I went and dusted off my copy of Mig Alley and tried to install it on my Win7 computer. It never ran ... At a certain point even other games stopped working (the installer must have overwritten some DirectX files) ... Big pain.

Installing Mig Alley in my oldest XP computer made the trick. "Setup.exe" must be ran in Win98 compatibility mode and that's it. That will probably do the trick in the Win7, but I'm not going to take any more chances.

This is me flying a Mig-15.

Yours truly practicing the flying gaits in some remote area of South Korea.

Well, it looks ugly. It's a 11 years old simulator. You may wonder why I chose Mig Alley and not any of the other add-on/mods for IL2-1946 or Strike Fighters. I read that Korean War dogfighting is nowhere more authentic in terms of flight models than in Mig Alley, but I have no proof of anything. What's your experience with the before mentioned mods?

And speaking of flight models. I messed up with trimming, climbing and descending in the F-86 until 2 a.m. last night. The F-86 Sabre, with the trim in neutral, flights a beautiful straight and level 430-450 KIAS with the engine at 83%.

I better get into some serious dogfighting now. I've lost no less than 5 hours troubleshooting this thing.

Cheers,

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

So are you up to doing some OODA-loops over Korea now or what? ;)

/Pergite

Shelldrake said...

I bought Mig Alley when it first came out for the campaign which was strongly recommended by flight sim buffs but I never found the time to get into it. It is still sitting on my shelf making me feel guilty! For an 11 year old sim those screenshots still look pretty good. Too bad there was never a Mig Alley 2. :(

smith said...

Mig Alley was a fantastic sim and Rowan was a terrible loss, they made some great stuff. I played the MA campaign many times over for the Sabre, the Mustang and other ground-pounders.

The sim had/has such character - I recall being amazed at spotting Migs high and a long way away, and knowing they were going to sweep down on us as I saw the sparkle of their falling drop tanks.

JC said...

Thanks for your comments!

@ Pergite: spot on! :) Exactly.

@ Shelldrake and smith: it is a great sim. It is such a pity that it didn't get a facelift like Battle of Britain did. Even when the visuals of the engine are quite limited, the sim manages to compensate for all the troubles with different aids and special views.

Cheers,