Oh my....what have I done. Now I'm going to have to go up in the loft and fish out my manuals so I can re-learn this awesome sim I havent played in over a decade. She still looks pretty good for being a senior citizen! Of course I figure it out at 2 am...too tired to really dive in so I just threw a bunch of planes in the builder to see what I have graphics wise. I doubt any sites still have user made missions or campaigns.

Nice, Now I'll have to dig my old disks out. lol

did you follow an install check list?

if we could only increase the viewable distance "bubble" i would still play the hell out of that game. i loved jane's f-15

it'll forever be etched in my memory as the last game i played freely all summer vacation before i was sent out into the world of adulthood, work and living in my own apartment..!

Indeed.. Still a great sim with fantastic immersion...

Congrats Force10! Janes was one of the great flight sim publishers of all time, and Janes F-15 one of the first great study sims along with the original Falcon from Spectrum Holobyte.

I remember hours of multiplayer with Janes F-15, and I'm not a MP type of guy. It was that good. Makes me cry just thinking about it and the overreaching and failures we see today (COD anyone?). DCS does outstanding stuff but the Janes titles were the height of what the Russian made sims, despite their technical brilliance, seem to lack: IMMERSION.

Great sim!. Im glad to see people are still using it. Unfortunatly, I think I lost my copy years ago.

Rob

is it me or do the planes look squished?

Your absolutley right. When setting up nglide I automatically set it up for 1920X1080 which stretches the image. Here a fixed screenshot.

Oh man. That was such a great sim. I was on the VMF-257 ladder for a long time. Only was at the top once. There were some great sticks out there. I wonder what happened to BEAR VMF257..

Oh wow. How did you get around the menus screwing up problem? If I fixed that I'd spend just as many hours in F-15 as I do in F-18.

Loved that sim. Was a big Janes fan. WW2 Fighters is still one of the best games I ever played. Longbow, too. I remember that they were planning a setup, similar to what DCS is doing now, with its combined arms. Couldn't wait. Then, they went kaput! I thought that the explosions were pretty impressive for that time. What was that, about 1995, or '96?

Did spend a lot of time on this one too... release was 1998.

That's what I want to know.

I bought my copy shortly after 9/11. I played it a bit, but it's been basically cooling it's heels since.

perhaps a Install/How to get working Step by Step guide is in order?

Sorry guys...been working on refinishing my kitchen cabinets. I'm at work right now but when I get home I will take screenies and show my install. I will say that I do have to to the CTRL-ALT-DEL deal for the menus to work. This had never worked for me before so I was stoked that it finally did, I guess perfect wasn't the right word. I did also use a utility called "Direct Draw Compatibility Tool 1.1" or something and that might have made the difference on getting the menus to function.

This x2. In fact, this x1000!

Apologies for taking awhile to document my install. So here goes...

To start, you can see my system specs in my sig, the only other thing I would note is I am running the 12.6 ATI drivers for my 6970. I also have UAC turned off, but I usually run everything as admin anyway. We all know these old games can be finicky with different hardware, so your mileage may vary.

1. Pop in the F-15 CD and do a full install.
2. Apply the official f15d3d17 patch
3. Google and download the "DirectDraw_Compatibility_Tool"

Here is the official description of what it does: " DirectDraw Compatibility Tool is designed to fix color palette corruption in the old games. Both Windows Vista and Windows 7 have built-in compatibility tools for such games. But to invoke compatibility mode there should be information about specific exe-file in the corresponding part of the registry. DirectDraw Compatibility Tool allows to completely automate process of compatibility rules creation"

Now I'm not 100% sure this is what fixed the menus for me or not, all I know is the CTRL-ALT-DEL trick never worked for me before, but now it does. I don't know much about programming, but I don't think the menu uses glide to display and possibly uses Direct Draw for the menu. Again, don't quote me on this, not sure.



Follow the instructions for the tool (self explanatory)

4. Download Nglide 0.99 and install: Make sure you get the latest version "0.99" as it has a Janes F-15 specific fix listed in the notes for the glide portion of the game.


The only compatibility settings I have on the shortcut for F-15 is "Disable viual themes" and "Run as administrator"


Launch F-15


When the screen opens, the menu pie slices might not be entirely visable and hovering the mouse over the slices doesn't hilite them, and the options may not show when hovering the mouse over the ball in the middle. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and then just hit cancel. Now you hopefully notice the ball in the middle is moving and hovering the mouse hiltes the slices and options in the middle. Ocaasionaly, after hitting cancel on the CTRL-ALT_DEL, some of the menu still shows the task manager, just move the mouse around and it will "paint" back in the menu and things will hilite as they should. This only happens to me about 10% of the time.

Depending on the selection, it may be neccesary after clicking a selection to do the CTRL-ALT DEL- again to refresh the window if things aren't showing properly. An example: You click on the arming screen, but the large window still shows the mission summary instead ofshowing the pilots for arming. Just do the above again, and all will be fine.

I know this is a pain but it only takes a second. Just make sure you hit "Cancel" after CTRL-ALT-DEL. If you hilite the Janes F-15.exe and select "Switch to" it doesn't work.

Here are some screens.







The cockpit does look a little soft, but I can read everything and all the gauges appear to be working



The 3D world however, has never looked better!



I hope this helps somebody....Good Luck!

This doesn't work for me - menu screen is still static and after C-A-D I get a black screen

Hi Force10,

I got JF15 working with nglide and the CAD trick. I have a couple of issues though, hoping you can help:

1. I have a widescreen laptop, so all the visuals within JF15 get stretched laterally. Is there a way to reduce the aspect ratio to 4:3? I've heard about an nglide configurator or control panel, but for the life of my I can't figure out where or how to access it?

2. Even with nglide, I'm still getting less than perfect lines and jagged surfaces (see screenshot). Any way to improve this? I have a GeForce G210M 256 MB graphics card, which I'm thinking should be more than enough for a 14 year old sim.

Would greatly appreciate any help!

ya i got it and Janes Longbow 2 working... on a retro system, lol... love both games/sim... now i need to find out how to capture screens and video on a retro system that has no internet connection.

Hi Condor!

1. The nglide control panel is really hidden isn't it? You should find it here: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\nglide_config.exe

2. The only way to smooth the jaggies in a game this old is to force Anti-Aliasing in your graphics card control panel. I'm an ATI guy so I'm not sure how it looks with your Nvidia card. I'm not even sure how well it will work with a mobile nvidia card. Maybe someone else can chime in?

My screens are stretched wide but after testing I set the nglide config to 4:3 so it looks correct when I play now.
Hope this helps and let us know how you make out.

Force10, you, sir, are a facking genius!! I have no idea why the developers of nglide would want to hide that nifty little control panel, or how you or anyone else managed to find it buried in that windows folder. But of more importance, it works. Setting the aspect ratio to 4:3 itself brought a noticeable improvement in graphics quality, but setting anti-aliasing to 2x on my Nvidia control panel really got rid of those jagged lines. Textures are now smooooth as silk . Thanks you, thank you!!!

I got another little conundrum for you. Normally in JF15, Shift+F8 gives you chase plane view, where the camera will rotate same as the plane (as opposed to only F8, where the camera orientation stays fixed). But when I hit Shift+F8, the view only works as long as I hold the Shift key down. As soon as I let go of Shift, the view automatically toggles back to in-cockpit. But F8 without shift works fine. Any ideas how to remedy this?

Thank you guys for recommending nGlide!
The graphics quality is much better, indeed.

P.S. nGlide configuration tool isn't hidden. All necessary shortcuts are in the Start menu

ima have to dig out my old Janes F-15 CD...

Been looking for "DirectDraw_Compatibility_Tool but all the sites are through a downloader that dosen't work or file dosn't exist.

Makes me wish DCS would hurry up and shoot out a multi-role fighter already.

thx for your explanation Force10.
I got everything ok... except the menu loll

If I ctrl+alt+del and cancel, I got a full blackscreen, except I see the bottom windows bar.

I was able to ''guess'' each menu and put the settings I like, but I cant change the keys/joystick buttons.

Wow, that's great! I keep my F-15 and F-18 discs and manuals around because I'm convinced that sometime later in life I'm going to make the time to get these running and give them the focus they deserve, which I was never able to give them at the time due to so many great competing sims of the day (LB2, EAW, EF2K, TAW, F4, etc). When I think back to those days, I still can't believe how many great sims we were flooded with over a period of just a few months.

Enjoy!!!

Anybody got a direct link for downloading DirectDraw_Compatibility_Tool ??
Because all I get is when I Google it, a link with a link in with a link to a link pointing to a link, linking it to a link that links me to the download, that is only a link to the link...


Thanks in advance.
My best regards, Kodiak.

Try THIS.

Thanks damson, that worked properly.

My best regards, Kodiak.

Hi, Force10, i read you post and did everything to the letter, except I installed version 1.01. But as you probably know it did not work. i still get the start menu screen that dose not function right. I have not been able to play the game. I don't know what I did wrong.

I would definitely reccomend patching it up and then giving it a shot.

Fileplanet

I apologize for bumping such an ancient topic, but this thread seems to be one of the best sources of information on getting F-15 up and running that I can find on Google, and I have a few tidbits to share.

Firstly, I installed everything according to Force10's post earlier in the thread, specifically outside of Program Files so as not to have UAC troubles. This machine is Win7SP1 with a GeForce 9300M GS running driver version 334.89. I found this resulted in a technically functional game, but the menus were still completely frozen. The Ctrl-Alt-Del trick would only result in a black screen, and I've read other people having this same issue.

Through experimentation (and so much futzing with the Windows Compatibility options that I can't remember where they ended up), placing the DDWrapper version modified for Diablo found here (direct link) in F-15's folder with ColorFix=1 and NoVideoMemory=2 results in perfectly animating menus. (Note that using the "vanilla" DDWrapper causes the game to crash when you exit flight back to the menus. Also, the site for nGlide states that F-15 should run fine with the DDWrapper ForceDirectDrawEmulation option only, however this causes the game to crash on launch for me.) There's only one large problem left: all popup menus, dropdown boxes, and menu text disappears. Through playing with the fake vsync options to lower the frame rate it appears all these things show up initially but end up being hidden; perhaps a sorting error causing them to be placed behind the background image.

I wish I were a DirectDraw programmer so I could iron out that last issue myself, but unfortunately I'm not. I got really close though, so I hope someone can make that last step eventually.

When trying the version of DDWrapper you provided, I still get crashes upon flight exit. Perhaps some of those compatibility options have something to do with it?

great shots!! thanks!!

Oh, as I mentioned in another thread, the crashes I got were the result of, somehow, running two glide wrappers at the same time, though I think zeckensack's wrapper was taking priority. Uninstalling it, I've been using the latest version of nGlide and it's super stable, but 2D cockpit still lags like hell.

I like seeing this thread bumped. !Jane's forever!

OK...a little bit of a necro bump here.

I recently changed my motherboard/cpu and changed from an AMD card to Nvidia...when I tried to follow my own instructions here it was a no go. I was pretty sure I would be joining the ranks of those that cannot get Jane's F-15 to run on their machine.

I was doing some searching and found this wiki page of all things.

Jane's F-15 Windows 7

I followed the instructions exactly and Wala! It has been working perfect! One of the mistakes I was making in the past was this:



Every game I install I always place a shortcut or pin it to the taskbar...this is a no-no for F-15. I am starting it from the .exe in the game folder with no compatibility options and it's been working great. Make sure you do everything in the Wiki and I would bet that most that could not run it before can now. The ddwrapper I'm sure is a big part of it as well.

I hope there is someone that see's this and gives it another try that couldn't get it working before. I think Windows 8 is off the table since there is no native Direct Draw support? Not sure about that.

Good Luck!

Been trying forever to get this to run. This works perfectly on W7 - 64 bit. Thanks for posting!

Yes, a while ago Andromedius noticed that when he launched the game from steam it would work (unlike when he started it from the shortcut created by the installer). In the end it appears that the shortcut is broken because it doesn't contain game's path in its "start in" field (more info here). So basically you can fill that in or just create a new shortcut and it will work fine. There should be one additional step added to the list - replacing the original exe with the one modified by x-ray (it is buried somewhere in the forums, but the search option could help). It fixes some random crashes during the missions.

Unfortunately I tried to complete the Desert Storm campaign and 2/3rd into the campaign I started to get a crash every time I started a particular mission. I installed the game on my older system (XP SP3) and was able to complete the whole campaign without a crash. One thing I didn't tried on my Win7 64bit machine was to revert back to original exe (from the x-ray's one) although I also used it on XP machine as I was getting crashes without it.

Sweet...I was hoping this would help at least 1 person!

Good deal!

Always really liked Janes WWII Fighters. That 109 sound! I think it's actually the sound for the Hyperlobby startup. Beautiful screens