If anyone interested I'm recording complete playthrough of Ukraine Campaign from U.S. Navy Fighters, still not finished but I'm getting there. The gameplay is captured in 1080p @60FPS with improved music (custom MIDI soundfont) for ultimate viewing pleasure . Unfortunately the game engine works rather weird with joystick and high cycle count on DOSBox (more cycles -> more drifting and fluctuations of joystick axes), so I had two options: playing with joystick with choppy FPS or playing with keyboard with smooth FPS. I choose the latter as keyboard support for this game is well done.

Here's the playlist:

U.S. Navy Fighters HD

Looks awesome
Love the music and constant radio chatter. I forgot how good it was.

Thanks for posting that, it really takes me back. USNF was my first fixed-wing sim I believe. Played it on a Packard Bell Pentium 100 with a 4 MB Cirrus Logic video card! I ended up with all of the Jane's sims, ATF, Marine Fighters, the works. Loved that stuff.

Seeing the game again -- the pre-mission video briefings, the GUI weapons screen and all brings back such great memories of playing this. Great job on that mission too, especially with the keyboard.

"Get this guy"

So, overcome with this wave of nostalgia, I checked out some of your other vids, and I had to watch the opening one, Eviction Notice. Hello folks, welcome to the Black Sea. Hard to believe this was 20 years ago. Thanks again for posting this.

ATF was one of my first sims and Fighters Anthology was my favorite.

This entire series had poor graphics and an arcadish feel even for the early to late 1990s, but EA made sure they turned up the immersion and did their historical and technical research.

God I miss Jane's sims, now everything is a Call of Duty Modern Warfare or Madden clone.

Thanks for the kind words.

About the graphics however - when U.S. Navy Fighters came out (1994) it was one of the best looking flight sims on the market. There weren't any other that supported 1024x768 resolution (although without cockpit). But it wasn't very practical as even 640x480 was very taxing even on fastest CPU's available at the time (Pentiums). When the last installment came out - Fighters Anthology in 1997, it had still the same graphics engine (although with updated 3D models) while competition already was diving into 3dfx which was huge leap in graphics fidelity. But as many older simmers remember, the immersion and fun factor were its strong points.

Technical research was there even before Jane's involvement. USNF wasn't Jane's title but it already sported immersive and well thought out campaign, ATF was first title supported by Jane's, with added lots of technical specifications and videos about the aircrafts.

For me the naval campaigns (Ukraine, Kurile and Vietnam) along with Fatman's mood building music were the main things that were burned into my memory two decades ago. Fighters Anthology took some parts from ATF Gold and some from US Navy Fightes '97, and doing so it lost that awesome "naval" music that I loved so much. Thus my fovorite from the bunch was U.S. Navy Fighters '97, but sadly it's Windows exclusive (no DOSBox emulation possible) and lacks Fighters Anthology 1.02 frame rate limiter, which makes the game unplayable on modern systems. Also the USNF'97 had cool ask AWACS/GCI for bogeys feature, which was changed for Fighters Anthology to data-link feature taken from ATF, which made sense as most campaings were based in modern times, but I still would like to get verbal commands from AWACS/GCI operators in Vietnam campaign.

The first sim I bought for myself was US Navy Fighters Gold. It was this or similar box with a gold border.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/US-Navy-Fighters-PC-Games-1997-Big-Box-/401102119493?hash=item5d638ca245:m:m5er8Bopa460Z2Kc_WbO7sA

Compared to most game packaging it was fairly slim and kind of a hard box. I wish I still had it. I had actually first bought a game called Black Knight but my sister wasn't able to help me to get it to run on her system which was the only real home pc that we had at the time. So my grandmother took me back to the store and I came home with this one after probably and hour of contemplating whether to spend my meager funds on. I'm glad I did. I had to run the dos version if I recall. It was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen or played. It was a visual and audio experience that blew me away.

Who ever wrote the music for the game should win an award. Its the very definition of the golden age of pc simming as well as the definition of nostalgia and masterfully executed, immersion specific musical scoring for a military flight sim.

Hey Coot, you mean this Black Knight?



It was fun game, although it couldn't compare to USNF.

My older brother was in to Fleet Defender at the time I was in to USNF. We used to argue about which was better and of course it was USNF Actually they were both good.

I remember when I got USNF '97, if that's the one that had the Vietnam jets, it didn't run so well for me. ATF was the game mentioned here that I played the most. Remember the 'Aurora'? I also played the hell out of Marine Fighters, loved the VSTOL stuff and flying around the Kurils. The 90s were a great time to be in to this stuff.

Fleet Defender was alongside USNF my favorite flight sim of mid '90. It's approach was bit different, focusing more on one plane (more of a study sim) with most advanced avionics implementation to date. Or maybe I liked all games where you can fly an F-14? ... actually I think I did (and still do), as I also loved Top Gun: Fire at Will and Jet Fighter 3




Oh and the Aurora - I first saw it in Fighters Anthology (I didn't owned ATF before FA), I remember you could fly it above the cirrus clouds, which were impenetrable before, and you could outfly anything in the game.

And what about Atomic Moth? And that Pterodactyl thingy which threw rocks instead of bombs

That's the one damson I believe but I never played it and had to take it back. My sister and I with our limited pc skills couldn't get it to work.

I've always wanted Fleet Defender. I used to drool over it when I saw it on the shelves. I know Steam has it but I'm hoping it will come to GOG so that I can finally get it.

I loved flying the Aurora too at max altitude and full throttle and watching it in the flyby view. I liked flying the X-31 off the deck with the thrust vectoring forward and my nose pointed down at the ground and then watching it in flyby view lol. Really weird looking but awesome at the same time. I always enjoyed doing complete flights and full returns though it seems like they took ages to complete. I just enjoyed knowing and seeing in my map and 3D world that I had flown my B-2 bombers from the UK, all the way across the English Channel and then attack some imaginary enemy airbase. I loved, loved, loved all the naval-based aspects of the game.

Top Gun was great fun too. I wish I still had all my boxes. I can still feel the raised packaging art of the pilot with his head turned on the ATF box under my finger tips and see the little bits of Jane's information packed into the box's opening cover.

I always had a love-hate relationship with Jetfighter. Like you damson I loved the opportunity to fly the F-14 wherever I could. I remember the great modeling including the cockpit. But for some reason the game's interface and user interface was awkward for me as well as its presentation. I can't remember exactly what it was about it that was tedious to me but I did enjoy it for the most part. I do remember that I could not stand the warning sound in the cockpit. I still have the free t-shirt that came with one of the Jetfighter versions I had gotten. Its well worn and has a hole in it but it has an image of an F-22 on it and it says "Peace through deadly force".

And remember all the great info and videos about the different aircraft and other platforms as well included in the games? Awesome stuff. It was like having Weekday Wings combined with a combat flight simulator. It didn't have videos for every aircraft but it had pretty much written info on everything.

Oh I also remember playing the heck out of the AC-130 Spectre and its 105mm Howitzer and blowing the crap out of ground targets and watching it all happen from the external enemy to player view, seeing me circling above and around the targeted enemy.

damson and Dbond, I hope for all our sakes that with this upcoming Combat Air Patrol 2, we'll all have an honest to goodness return experience to what was for each and everyone one of us pc simulator enthusiasts, the golden age of flight simming. I'm hoping that when that comes out and I load it up, that I'll feel like that 15 year old boy who took his first flight in an F-14 off the deck of a carrier, being catapulted over a vast ocean and enjoying the details of the masts of all the surrounding fleet's ships, enjoying the chatter and atmosphere of this new experience. I'm hoping that at the very least that this will be our next USNF or Strike Fighters series with a successful future of continued content, including new aircraft and theatres.

Ha ha, I did the same thing.



Hey Coot, I couldn't put it better myself. I have high hopes for CAP2.

I played a lot of USNF 97 in middle school...this brings back memories thanks!

Well Kestrel, then you will be happy to hear that another Campaign is underway. This time it's Vietnam played in Fighters Anthology. I wish USNF'97 played well on modern PC's, but without frame rate limiter (introduced in FA v1.02 patch) it's to fast to be playable, and the MIDI music doesn't work either.



and here is the playlist, 5 missions completed at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIku_oD9y-RCTA9Vb_4TMAvdKTJy5rkrg

Oh, and this time I can play with joystick as there are no issues in Windows as there were in DOSBox with USNF.

Interesting! Is possible to play Fighters Anthology on Win7??

Sure, I have Fighters Anthology running on my laptop with Win 7 64-bit, the only thing you have to fix is the corrupted color palette. There are few fixes for that, like killing the explorer.exe application before running the game exe, some more info here:

http://SimHQ.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3816030/Re:_No_One's_Making_Jane's_Fig#Post3816030

To that I might add that there is a fix available for Ukraine Campaign video crash

http://jkpeterson.net/fa/index.php

4th post from top, it basically disables the videos so the crash doesn't occur.

and the game runs out of the box on my Win 10 64-bit rig! But remember to install the official 1.02 patch, which adds the frame rate limiter, so the game runs properly even on newest systems.

I have all my old janes games still
(F-18, F-15, IAF, USAF, Fighters Anthology, etc etc)

I gave away my DoS Versions (USNF/MF/ATF etc) to a friend's son about 10 years ago.


That being Said, my Fighters Anthology Disk had become unreadable for one reason or another.
(I think there's a chip on the outter edge of the disk).

I Still have Top Gun FAW as awell as Jetfighter 1-4, Fleet Defender and FD Gold, and at least 4 copies of Falcon 3.0 (Disk, CD, DVD, Digital), and 2 copies of Falcon 4.0

I have enough spare parts and old PC's laying around, was gonna build a DoS/Windows 98 Legacy Machine w/ 3Dfxx and SB AWE32, and my Old Gameport Controllers.

But Seeing as Most of these titles run on Windows 7 now I didnt bother.

The only Ones I cant install are Top Gun FAW and Fighters Anthology,
As Stated FA's Blue Disk has a chip outta the bottom edge, and FAW Never Liked Working on anything other than Windows 98.

I run Top Gun Fire at Will without problems on DOSBox. As seen here



At some point I plan to do a complete playthrough of this game in the same vein I did my U.S.Navy Fighters HD series.

Most games that cause problems on newer systems are early Windows titles (mid 90 - early 2000). Most DOS games can be easilly run using DOSBox.

TG FAW Gives the option to install for windows or for dos, I was choosing to install for windows that way I could use USB Joystick.

will prolly try to give a shot in DoSBOX, which has come alooooong way since I last tried it.