Take it with a grain of salt ... I might not know those flight sims very well, but when he mentioned "Heavy Gear 2", I just laughed it off as a hoax.

captain_koloth wrote on 2020-12-16, 00:28:

cambeiu wrote on 2020-12-05, 09:08:

I have not tried Pentium. I am using my Ryzen 3600 to emulate the K6-2 300 and a Voodoo 3 card. All flights sims and games that I have thrown at it (F-22 ADF, Jane's F-15, Mig Alley, European Air War, Heavy Gear 2) have worked flawlessly at full speed with everything maxed out.

What do you consider to be "100% speed"? I'm getting terrible framerates with an i7-10700 and RTX 3080.

What do you consider "terrible framerates"? It is fully playable to me, to the point that I cannot distinguish it from when I played those in original hardware back in the day.

Hey everyone,
thanks to all involved in making this possible!
I've waited for a decade to play Mig Alley and now it is possible without a hitch, though the process is long.
I have created a more or less standalone build that can be used as portable on Win 10, requiring only changing the directory path in the roots.dir to the one where you put the game. You can find it shared on Myabandonware in the comments.

The instruction to install everything yourself for Windows 10 is as follows:
The following steps need to be done under PCEM + Win 98 SE or any other virtual machine that is Win 95/98.
This is important because much of the installer parts and patches don't work under anything more modern.
- Install the game
- To get rid of the need to have a cd in the drive, copy over the "smacker" directory from the cd to the game directory and change two lines in roots.dir to indicate that this folder is now in game folder, not on cd
- Install 1.23 patch
- Install 0.85f patch

Now you need to extract the installed game from the Virtual Machine. PCEM is pretty good here, you can just mount the drives you used in Win 10 and copy over what you need. The next steps can be followed in Win 10.
- Download https://yadi.sk/d/gIIxbgifRFVxQw
- Download https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/releas … ag/experimental
- extract and put those Dlls into your Mig Alley install. These should be: ddraw.dll , libwine.dll, wined3d.dll.

This is it. Now you can enjoy the awesome MA, with everything turned up to 11, with trackir, modern joysticks etc.

Now, I would not recommend to play under PCEM v17 yet, because despite fairly powerful hardware emulated in it - and a p2 233 + voodoo banshee should be more than enough, it runs pretty badly when close to the ground on a pretty powerful pc. And you will spend half of the time in this game doing CAS and ground attacks! Not to mention the lack of modern hardware support. Still, it is very useful for installation.

thanks for this info, also i can add that i have managed to install Mig Alley on Windows 10 directly and have it running fine using Ddraw compat and Dxwnd. One thing i couldnt do though is apply that OBG patch that came later, i can run it with the official patch though

I followed gills instructions to the letter,

I ran Mig alley and it runs fine on Win 1o but the problem is always this....no matter if i use the 1.23 or the 0.85 patch...the game shows my joystick in game but when flying it doesn't work at all. I wish someone would fix this issue as its harder to solve then getting the game to run.

I would recommend setting up the OBG patch - the version called 085f not the 085f2, because apart from Trackir and additional options it fixes quite a few bugs. It's unfortunate but Rowan released the game with a lot of issues, not Falcon 4 level, but still.

If you have issues with a joystick after doing all the usual motions (calibrate, reassign all axis', check drivers) then you should try using Joy To Key for assigning buttons and the rest. Or Vjoy + PPjoy to create a new virtual device and assign your existing one to it. And of course if you want to use a Hotas this will be necessary anyway.

gill wrote on 2021-02-10, 17:07:

Hey everyone,
thanks to all involved in making this possible!...

This is great - wine seems to have done the trick. I copied over the dbg v085f install and dropped in the 3 files you linked to. The old girl fires up nicely and without the graphic tears in the cockpit I had before. Excellent!

I tried the "experimental" ddraw.ll in the second files link (dll dated 1-31 2021, more recent than the one in the first link) but it re-introduced graphic tearing so I'm sticking with the older ddraw in the first link.

The only issue is there is no 1600x1200 resolution. Is there a tweak needed to enable that?

gill wrote on 2021-02-12, 15:47:

I would recommend setting up the OBG patch - the version called 085f not the 085f2, because apart from Trackir and additional options it fixes quite a few bugs. It's unfortunate but Rowan released the game with a lot of issues, not Falcon 4 level, but still.

If you have issues with a joystick after doing all the usual motions (calibrate, reassign all axis', check drivers) then you should try using Joy To Key for assigning buttons and the rest. Or Vjoy + PPjoy to create a new virtual device and assign your existing one to it. And of course if you want to use a Hotas this will be necessary anyway.

something i have found is that Empire Interactive in general seemed to always release games that were often pretty awesome concepts (usually always games with dynamic campaigns too) but were always either buggy or seemed unfinished in parts- Rowans Flying Corps Gold, Rowan's Battle of Britain, Navy Strike, Wargamer Napoleon 1813, Civil War Master PLayers Edition, Campaign 1 and2 and many others i am sure

that aside - is the reason you want the install to happen on PCEM because you did not find you could install Mig Alley directly into windows 10, or is it because other files or patches dont install correctly if done in windows 10? i am just curious as i could not get the OBG patch to work in windows 10 (maybe i had the wrong one though - 0.85f2 instead of 0.85f though)

I am still getting the screen tearing on either DDraw version now. I tried the full preinstalled version that was shared on oldgames and i also tried a version i installed using win98 on a VM machine. Its weird because it was running fine without tearing but now its not. Game runs but once I jump in the cockpit, its running but hidden behind the black screen.

Re black screen: alt tab and move stuff around. At least in my case the windows can be moved with a mouse.

It's true with Empire Interactive and Rowan being a bit lax with testing..but let us not forget how different that era was.
Especially when it comes to simulations, many are buggy or have some surprising shortcuts. I find Longbow 1 and 2 to be relatively well done - yet they also may crash unexpectedly. Probably the Digital Integrations games are the most polished (Tornado, Hind, Apache, F16, F18 not so much).

Anyway, the reason I installed in PCEM is because some of the files that Installers (both cd and patches) trigger do not run properly or at all on Win 10. So, for instance the patch does something to texture files, but it will only finish doing it (for me) under Win 98. Basically the best way to get a clean and finished install is to use Win 98. The same goes for the 0.85f patch.

thanks for that explanation -F/a-18 Super Hornet from DI is not bad, and perhaps next to Janes F/a18 (which i just cnanot get to work properly in win10 at all nor in any VM i have tried ) its the next best option - or perhaps a tie a with F/a-18 Korea/Precision Strike Fighter - imagics F/a-18 is good but also hard to get working right in win10, though have had more success with it than with Janes Fa18

Have you tried this https://vedmysh.livejournal.com/15502.html (google translate) - there is some topic on vogons as well with the author of this build. I've not had time to run F/a18 but F-15 works well.

Re: Jane's F/A-18, I have v101f running under W10 using the "dxwnd" utility and setting the shortcut to W7 compatibility. nVidia GTX video card. Currently menus run in a box but flight is normal. I think there was a setting for fullscreen menus but I don't have it handy.

thanks - yes i have more success now getting f-18 running with Dxwnd - from that mydxwnd in the link given before, i got the dxw file and put it into my current build of dxwnd i use and and ialso have the TSH mod installled also - the game runs fine though has to run in a window but the windows is scalable for me so that works. if i try and do full screen, the menus get all screwed up.

Cool. I never advanced far enough so I'm sticking with vanilla F18 for now - without the TSH realism mods. As it turns out I actually prefer the stock graphics to the hi-res TSH upgrades, and this suits my more casual involvement just fine. This, WW2 Fighters and Longbow 2 are really pretty awesome...

i woudl be happy with the stock stuff too, just that i have installe the tsh stuff now and dont want the hassle redoing it all - i installed it a while ago because back then it was the only way i could get f18 to work well enough for me .

ww2 fighters has been an utter breeze to install and run in windows 10, and longbow 2 i installed so long ago i completely forget what i did, but it seems to work and run in nglide mode okay without need for dxwnd the last time i checked.

the only thing with f18 is that i hope joystick still works, i havnt tried a joyatick yet, i have just been testing its stability in dxwnd without it so far, - going in and out of missions to see that it transitions without ctd (which i used to do for me)

How do you install the 1.23 patch on win 10?

I managed to get the game installed (by installing MS Word) but I keep getting the TT2 error

anyone?

what is a TT2 error?

sorry its been a while, - are you using the patch from here? https://www.patches-scrolls.de/patch/2693/7/46855/download

i had no issues installing the patch for mig alley in windows 10 64bit myself - the patch is not a 16bit installer, at least not the version in the link above

Agathosdaimon wrote on 2021-04-09, 10:11:

what is a TT2 error?

sorry its been a while, - are you using the patch from here? https://www.patches-scrolls.de/patch/2693/7/46855/download

i had no issues installing the patch for mig alley in windows 10 64bit myself - the patch is not a 16bit installer, at least not the version in the link above

Its not the patch itself thats having issues, there is a file in the install folder called tt2.exe, this patch needs to run it but I get an error.