Oh I know. Some of the old ones were great. I was a Janes WW2 Fighters fan. Fanatic, really. One of my favorites of all time. But, that was then. I remember spending a lot of tme on these old games trying to get them to look better. Terrain mods, skins...etc.
Was up to the wee hours of the night playing Warbirds, too. Was hooked, badly.
But they look too dated, now. Graphics aren't everything, but it is part of the experience. I couldn't look at those old games anymore and get as immersed as I used to.

"By the way, does anyone know how to run Flying Corps Gold on Windows XP....."

Ursus' FCG help site is still up. Should get your FCG up and running on a WinXp machine.

http://web.comhem.se/carlberg/fcg/help/help.htm

Can you all please report back on how FCG is running for you because following re-installing my WinXp sometime ago, my FCG will play just fine for about 15ish minutes then freeze. I can get back to my desktop with alt-tab and close FCG manually, but because of the way wow exec is designed I have to reboot my PC to be able to run FCG again. Before my OS reinstall FCG was running fine with no problems. I completely re-installed FCG; but it will still do the "freeze". A work-around is to close after a bit of flying then restart it; but that's no good for the great campaigns and long patrol missions. I suspect its due to poor memory handling; just not sure.

jimb

Thanks, I've already tried that, no dice however.

I'm surprised you got it to work at all, with me it wouldn't even start.
The only thing I can think of that might work is to use some kind of virtualization, like VirtualPC or VMware.
Probably can't use 3D acceleration then, if it will even work at all.

FCG`ll probably work with VirtualBox, basically it`s like dosbox and d-fend in that you set up a profile with the kind of hardware, i.e you give it a 12mb graphics card, 2gb harddrive etc. Then you actually install Windows 98, or MS-DOS 6.22 or Win 3.1 or whatever you want on it. You start the program, then you start a virtual computer inside the program then install whatever O/S or GUI you want, then drivers and directx and what not, then you got your own virtual computer!
I had a bunch of games not working in D-Fend that I got working in VirtualBox minus a weird problem with the mouse cursor flickering in-game.


My thought is that a lot of us are suffering from the old school syndrome now and then, I mean.. You would have to be pretty stoneage (In terms of computer and game/sim technology development) not to know of RoF and OFF and still be a SimHQ member, this thread is about DP and thats what we`re discussing with nostalgia in mind, in spite of playing RoF and OFF

For what it's worth, I've "flown" FCG in XP_32, XP_64 and W7_64; never had ME or Vista. Try here:

http://www.wingsofhonour.com/flyingcorps/tipsandtricks/html_woh_flyingcorps_tipsandtricks.en.html

The sequence was:
1) Full install, do not run;
2) Update with proper patch;
3) Get the updated Smacker.dll file
4) Then set compatibility mode.

I've pretty much stopped "flying" anything that doesn't support TIR or at least have "mouse look" for TIR 2dof.

plug_nickel

I've had success with installing FCG on XP using this method:

Set FLY/WINSTSTB.EXE to 95 Compatibility mode
Apply all checkmarks except the last on the compatibility tab
Double-clcik the file to install
Apply update
Apply smacker32 from Mig Alley, or from a download from the net

I played all of them, Knights of the Sky and SWOTL were my favorites. SWOTL was the only sim where the Axis could actually win the War (based on your mission success rate).
Makes me want to get an old 486 PC and play them again. I still have RB1, not sure about SWOTL, but how would you get old titles like these again?

You don't need an old PC, just DOSBox! I've got it running just fine on my Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit machine.

DosBox is fab!
Gives the opportunity to play all these old
flightsims now and then!
From Ace to Birds of Prey and Strike Eagle!