undaunted_aviator

Granted Jane's F/A-18 can not compete with modern sims in the "realistic to the switch" department nor in graphics. But its AI while not perfect is quite good. Dogfighting and BVR against AI is fun and challenging. Things like terrain masking and SAM blinking are modeled. But its real strongpoint is the campaign which is immersive and a lot of fun. It is not dynamic like in Falcon 4.0, but a well scripted branched campaign. When playing the campaign again not all will be the same, as the campaign will either dice roll or take into account the outcome of previous missions to determine which mission to spawn. For example you are tasked to mine the enemy harbor and fail, you will have to deal with an enemy task force which managed to escape the next mission. With TSH I actually have some issues: MDI SA Page data link is broken in some missions. Happens in campaign too, not in all missions. This issues was never fixed. I went through all the posts in the simhq forums to find that one out. This not working is a huge downside for me, as the data link is quite useful in more complex missions, even if it only shows enemy aircraft in stock. While it offers widescreen resolutions at least on my machine I am getting rendering issues with those and I am stuck with 1024x768 like in the stock game. Some rendering issues with some bomb craters. A hole square of tile is either black or flickering. As stock just runs fine on my machine I settled for various high-res mods to make it look better. For example the "Terra North Cape" terrain mod by blitz looks even better, at least for me, than the TSH landpals. However one thing I use from TSH mod, that is the high-res cockpit. Which is really nice and a real improvement of the experience. As for the aircraft and weapons skins, most of these are available for stock too. Funny you mention that name. Not only was Matt Wagner on the team, he even created the Valhalla campaign, the first campaign other than stock for JF18. His campaign is IMHO even better than the stock one. The TSH and a whole lot of different mods can be found here: https://www.jf18-resource.com/ As for missions and campaigns the owner of the site mentioned above has it uploaded on his google drive as mentioned in this reddit post: (don't want to post a direct link to it as it is not mine.) https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/184q3o5/comment/kazqhfh/

Thanks for the very nice terrain. Really Love the heavy flak and SAM sites shooting at me. However I have some strange rendering glitch when coming from the sea. Like half rendered very distant mountains which IMHO should not be visible.

Some may still remember it, others like me found out about it more recently. Made by the people who where behind the classic MicroProse Fleet Defender. Those who went on with Electronic Arts Jane's franchise to create the groundbreaking Jane's F-15. Only to surpass themselves with the king of naval aviation flight sims: Jane's F/A-18. How to run Jane's F/A-18 today Well that is the biggest problem of all. If you want to feel like Don Quixote you could try to run it with wrappers on an modern system with Windows 11. Since I think this is an exercise in futility as Microsoft breaks something every update a different approach is needed. If you have a 13th generation Intel or above you may consider 86Box. I did not try it as my system is not that new and Jane's F/A-18 is quite CPU hungry. However in the future with more and more powerful CPUs emulation is certainly the way to go. So how do I run it? Well since a true windows 98 retro machine is quite expensive nowadays with questionable reliability and the downside of not being able to use a modern HOTAS I settled with a more modern machine and windows as my "retro" machine. Through testing I found out that an Intel Ivy Bridge machine running Windows 7SP1 32bit is ideal with the advantage that the hardware is quite cheap and available. An dedicated GPU is not needed nor desirable as the Intel HD Graphics integrated with the CPU is perfect for our purpose. A few tweaks for your "retro" machine For installing Jane's F/A-18 the same rules apply like for all legacy software in a modernish Windows. Do not install it in the program files directory. Run the setup and update as an administrator. As Jane's F/A-18 was released when processors with multiple cores weren't a thing it need a little workaround that will also prevent problems with sound and music in game. At the Jane's F/A-18 shortcut properties edit the target path: %ComSpec% /c start /affinity 0x4 C:\path\to\program.exe This will start Jane's F/A-18 using only a single core. You can assign it to different cores. Here is the hex bit mask: 0x1 = Core0 0x2 = Core1 0x4 = Core2 0x8 = Core3 As even an Ivy Bridge is too fast there is another workaround needed too. Go to he BIOS and disable C-States control, leaving Intel SpeedStep and Intel TurboBoost enabled. In Windows go to Control Panel -> Power Options -> Create new Power Plan -> Change Advanced Power Settings -> Processor power management. Set minimum and maximum processor state to 60%. Confirm with CPU-Z that your CPU is running slower. Mine is running at 2Ghz. Now start Jane's F/A-18 and start the automatic carrier landing training mission. If your plane bolters or behaves erratic with the the autopilot on your CPU is still too fast and the processor state needs to be set to a lower setting. HOTAS Jane's F/A-18 only supports one joystick with 16 buttons. You spend a lot of $$$ on your HOTAS? Don't worry. All you need are 2 programs. vJoy and Joystick Gremlin. After installing vJoy set it up with 4 axis (X,Y,Z,Rz) and 16 buttons. With Joystick Gremlin you map the 4 axis and 16 Buttons from your HOTAS to vJoy device. Extra buttons are mapped to keyboard to functions you want to have. vJoy2.1.8 and Joystick Gremlin 13.3 are available on their respective GitHub pages: https://github.com/shauleiz/vJoy/releases https://github.com/WhiteMagic/JoystickGremlin/releases The secret keys. There are key commands which are not documented in the manual. Alt+S = Screenshot. Will save it as DUMPXXX.BMP file in the game root directory. To enter the campaign editor go from the main menu to "Tools" and hit F1.