No need to miss out on anything. Map what's on the F-16 HOTAS to your HOTAS or to easily-accessible keyboard commands and you. Are. Done.

Fly the campaign and use a TAXI or RUNWAY start and you don't have to mess with the startup sequence. Fly and fight with what's on your HOTAS. Anything else you need, you don't need to map to the keyboard or know the key commands for (except for maybe a select few). Why? Clickable cockpit. If you know where that knob/switch/dial/button is, grab your mouse and click it. Done, get back to flying.

Printed manuals have gone away due to cost considerations. You can always just print out the online manual if you really want one.

I'm sorry you found our game lacking. Being that we had to start the game from scratch we had to limit the amount of stuff we put in the game so co-op and a dynamic campaign had to be put on the back burner. I've already written about this decision before (and another write up about factors that caused us to drop multiplayer from Fleet Defender when it was in F-15 SE III which would have still been valid issues later on) so I won't bore you with the details but can provide links if you want. For JF/A-18 I was able to get co-op in and achieved my goal of the designers not having to limit anything in a mission for it to be multiplayer but I gather you never checked it out. A lot of the rest of my time during that game was dealing with issues of switching from an AF to Navy focused game so it still wasn't time to consider a DC. If we had done another game after that I believe that plan was for me to see what I could do about adding the option for a dynamic campaign but at that point EA was getting out of the combat simulation market so it was not to be.

Elf

Man JF15 and JF18 were truly two of the best flight sims of all time. Dynamic campaign or not. Their world never felt empty to me either.

If anything, they just did not age well with new Windows versions and hardware.

Thanks. It's really frustrating knowing that people would still like to be playing the games we did but they can't because of something completely outside of our control.

Elf

This is why, later in the year when I take my desktop out of retirement, I'm sticking with DOS (DOSBox under WinXP). For retro gaming, it's been a lot more reliable to me than old Windows games, and I have so many DOS titles that I've never dug deep enough into. At the top of my list is Subwar 2050 and Fleet Defender, but I have so many more really cool games, probably a lifetime's worth.

Perhaps some day I will give it a shot with Falcon Alternative Launcher