I’ve installed Windows 98 on PCem, you basically have to do all the things you would do when setting up a new PC from way back. After setting up the PCem (you need roms for the emulatoed hardware- google is your friend) you need to make a disk partition (remember fdisk from DOS times?) with the use of bootdisk or bootable Windows 98 CD, format your partition, install Windows 95 or 98 on it, configure all the hardware (most should be recognized by Windows, if not apply drivers manually) and you’re done. Yes, it’s lot of work and if you didn’t do it yourself in the past it might be a challenge.
For this particular PCem config I used:
Machine: [Socket 7] Shuttle HOT-557
CPU: Intel Pentium MMX 200 MHz
128 MB RAM
GPU: S3 Virge + Voodoo graphics
Sound Blaster AWE32
HDD - your preference, I used 2GB (Sectors: 63, Heads: 16, Cylinder: 4096, Size: 2014MB)
Joystick: CH Flightsick Pro
S3 Virge, the one and only 3d decelerator ever made.
I think I flew LB2 with my Voodoo2. I know I upgraded from V1 to V2 for Jane’s F-15, went from like 15fps to at least 30. I just can’t recall if I got F-15 before or after LB2.
As for CPU, I had a P3-350MHz around this time, but my exact memory of what I had when is fuzzy. I recall clearly buying a P5-75MHz in Jan 1995, and buying an Athlon 1.2 GHz in Feb 2001, for various reasons. My CPUs in the interim were a 350 and a Celeron 550 but I don’t remember when I switched exactly.
Jane’s Longbow 2 works quite nicely on PCem, didn’t had a single crash so far (game crash that is, I plow into the ground once or twice though). Here’s 7th mission from Fallen Crescent dynamic campaing. Night CAS in a Longbow. Pretty cool stuff. Can’t wait to fly this beast when it comes out for DCS.
Old gem from Innerloop released back in 1997. It had its shortcomings but did many things right - it even had dynamic campaigns, not on par with Falcon 4 but still…
Yes, I remember it well. I didn’t put too much time into it due to the aforementioned shortcomings. I wanted to fly JSFs but I liked some of my other sims, particularly the Jane’s offerings of the time, better.
In Cold War you weren’t peanalized for taking out targets that detected you (radar or vis), you did get score reduction for being spotted though. For obvious reasons you weren’t supposed to attack any targets of oportunity, but there were sometimes missions that gave you something to destoy in Cold War scenario. Some were only in that setting like dropping or picking up some special cargo on some dirt strip. I preferred that gameplay type. Limited and Conventional war were less interesting to me, but did had their own challenges.
I hated the “take out this plane escorted by 2 MiGs without taking out the 2 MiGs” missions in Cold War.
That was just dumb ROE. As soon as the main plane died, they went after you, IF you managed to take it out without accidentally taking out of the MiGs in the first place, that is.
Thankfully the game was really flexible so you could choose between geopolitical situation as well as type of missions you wanted to fly (A/A or A/G), so you could easily fly the type of sorties you preferred.
loving those.
