I've had good luck cobbling together a nice Jane's Longbow 2 experience on Windows 10 and thought I would share how I got there.

Longbow 2
Getting Longbow 2 Installed
To be thorough I'll include some steps you may not have to or want to take. The reason for these steps is that the installer does not work on anything past Windows XP as far as I know.
The software required to do this is: Windows XP, Jane's Longbow 2, the 2.09e patch, and the display driver update patch. EA's ftp server is no longer available, but fortunately there are archives like this one where you can obtain the software, ftp.ea.com archive.

• Installed a Windows XP VM.
• Installed Jane's Longbow 2.
• Installed the 2.09e patch.
• Install the Display Driver Update Patch.
• Copied the fresh install off to my Windows 10 Computer.

Getting Longbow 2 Installed the easy way
Assuming you don't want to do all of that you can start with Flyboy's V3 Longbow 2 Fix Flyboy's v3 Longbow 2 Fix

I placed the install in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Jane's Longbow 2". If you put it somewhere different you'll want to adjust accordingly.

Running without inserting CD's
The next basic issue I had is that I don't even have a CD-ROM drive in my desktop anymore. The three times a year I need one I drag my laptop out to use it, so inserting a CD to play would be tough. Fortunately there's an easy way around this.

Copy the CD's/ISO's to two subfolders, Disk1 and Disk2, or something similar.

Create the file CDEmu.ini in with the contents:


Configuring Graphics
Edit CA.ini and in the Init section ensure these are set:


Install nGlide. It's the only glide wrapper I've found that both runs the game successfully and allows for successfully exiting missions back to the menus.

Compatibility Fixes
There seems to be lots of misleading information about what to do for compatibility. Some people suggest right clicking on the executable and settings a compatibility mode, usually Windows XP SP2 or SP3, while others suggest installing a compatibility fix created with ACT.

From my experience I can say that you absolutely should NOT set a compatibility mode on the executable. The only thing that should be need to get the game to run stable is GlobalMemoryStatusLie. Setting a Windows XP mode will also enable GlobalMemoryStatus2GB, which from my experience appears to override GlobalMemoryStatusLie and leave you in no better shape than without it.

Furthermore the sdb file in Flyboy's v3 Fix doesn't allow the game to launch in Windows 10 for me. I eventually narrowed it down to the 'CorrectCreateSurface' fix. However, even after removing that I found that his collection of compatibility fixes were preventing successful exiting of missions. But not all is was bad here. Once I got running with his sdb file I noticed substantially better graphics than I had without it. Eventually I narrowed that down to the AdditiveRunAsHighest fix.

I created an sdbsdb with just the GlobalMemoryStatusLie and AdditiveRunAsHighest fixes. Change the extension from pdf to sdb and then install this with the ACT Toolkit or sdbinst.exe in Flyboy's v3 fix zip, by running .

Adding this to CA.ini will fix the "Read Janes" crashes and allow the Kiowa training mission to start. I cannot get the instructor to accept my popup for the MMS, but the mission otherwise works. (Edit: I think you just need to use the = key rather than Shift+= to pop up. I was trying to be to gentle for the mission trigger.)


Controls
In the age of HOTAS setups flying with just a stick is a real drag. Fortunately I found JoyToKey which lets me program my sticks so that when it's running axes and buttons can input keypresses. Once you unzip the application and place it where you want it you'll need to set the Compatibility mode to Windows XP and ensure it runs as administrator for it to work properly.

The configuration has a small learning curve, but it allows you to do some interesting things. For instance my peddles are configured such that greater or less than 0 (center) inputs the bracket keys at about 8 presses a second. This gives me rudder pedals working in the game seamlessly. I wasn't able to do anything magical to get the throttle axis to work, but the mic switch serves as a handy throttle control, pushing forward and back to increase and decrease. Here I went with 4 keypresses a second and a 300ms delay so I can have finer control with quick presses. The coolie switch left and right cycles my MFD's, China hat zooms my TADS, etc. Hat switches change views and slew my view in 3d mode.

Track IR Trackmapper looks interesting and I may give it a try to see if I can get it working, but I haven't gotten there yet.

At this point I'm excited to start completely some more training missions and remembering how to fly the Longbow.

Azer 2000 Campaign
You can extract azer2000.exe to 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Jane's Longbow 2' if you wish to play the tougher version of the campaign. The file can be obtained from the same link as the patches in the above instructions.

This is a 16-bit self-extracting zip so on Windows 10 you can just rename it to azer2000.zip to open it.

There are two .bat files you can run to enable and revert the tougher campaign. Instazer.bat and Remazer.bat.

Unfortunately Instazer.bat includes running a 16-bit Patch.exe executable that will not run on Windows 10 natively. You can however download and install DOSBox to get it working. Once installed run it, type



You can also create a DOSBox.conf with an autexec section that contains at least the first line, if not all the steps to reduce the typing.


4k Longbow 2
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven

Longbow 1
Longbow 1 can be run with 3DFX if you use the Anthology version and the tactics to do so are similar.

If you have the Longbow Gold 3 disk set it appears that it is somehow slightly different and the only way to get it to work is via DOSBox. It works well, with the only downside being the sky and ground textures being noticeably worse.

Getting Longbow Installed

• Install Longbow from the Jane's anthology disk. Click no when prompted to install goldfxa.
• Set Windows 98 compatibility mode on the goldfxa.exe patch on the first disk, run it, and install the patch.
• You can optionally copy off the install and uninstall the game it if you want to place it somewhere else or onto another computer.

I placed the install in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Jane's Longbow 1". If you put it somewhere different you'll want to adjust accordingly.

Running without inserting CD's
Longbow 1 is on the first two of the Anthology disks so copy the contents to sub directories Disk1 and Disk2 and create the file CDEmu.ini in with the contents.


Configuring Graphics
Install nGlide.

Compatibility Fixes
The fixes for Longbow 1 are the same as Longbow 2, except with the addition of IgnoreException. The fixes are included in the sdb above. Change the extension from pdf to sdb and then install this with the ACT Toolkit or sdbinst.exe in Flyboy's v3 fix zip, by running provided above in the Longbow 2 instructions.

Adding this to the Ca.ini will help with some issues:


Input Problems
Input is way too fast if the fps is allowed to run too high. This is especially evident on the menu screens when clicking with the mouse. In order to fix this I used nvidia profile inspector to limit the game to 30 fps.
To do this:

• Download the latest version from the releases link of the nvidia profile inspector page.
• Unzip and run the Application
• Click the yellow star icon to create a new Profile and give it a name like 'Jane's Longbow 1'
• Click 2 icons to the right of that to add an Application to the profile and find the lbwin.exe in your install directory (C:\Program Files (x86)\Jane's Longbow 1 if you followed along with my example).
• Under section "2 - Sync and Refresh" change the Frame Rate Limiter value to 30 fps
• Click Apply Changes in the upper right hand corner.

That's all it takes, you can close and if you like delete the nvidia profile inspector software. If you open the nvidia control panel you can see the profile created by going to Manage 3D Settings in the left menu and looking under Program Settings. You'll note the profile is there though the fps settings is inaccessible. This is why we used nvidia profile inspector to do the work.

My understanding is ATI exposes the fps limiter settings, so you should be able to do so without a 3rd party app, though I don't know anything beyond that.

Controls
JoyToKey works well with Longbow 1 as well and I'd suggest this approach if you can't get your controllers to work either as they are or with your profiling software.