So while clearing out the house I ran across this box. I'm really big on packing things away in boxes where stuff in them is in perfect condition and then is petty much lost forever! Well I come across one that's marked AW3, KAWSM, SAC, Films. Flight sim ostalgia gold mine! That was a month or so ago.
So yesterday I took a swing at getting that stuff to run on my much newer PC. Win10/64 wasn't a good fit for stuff made in the late 90s. I did get AWMV to run in Win98 compatibility mode! But without 3D hardware acceleration. That's a bummer, man! (tm The Dude). 800x600 is about it and looks even crappier than I remember. It's made for DX5 I think! It's pretty basic as I can't update it over the net. No airfield with the little bubbles or the O-club, non of that. Transferred art files off another AW3 game CD so all the planes work. Set up a profile on my stick and throttle. All my controls work. Took a few hops. Killed Yamamoto in a P-38 mission. Admired the sheep--from a distance!
SAC would install but not otherwise run as it says it needed the 3dini file. No 3D, no 3D shapes so I guess that's why. No extra skins or skies or seascapes! KAWSM wouldn't install at all as it's 16-bit program and that's no go on a 64-bit system. 32-bit would get there but no provision for it on a 64-bit OS. Even if it did I'd think it'd need those same 3D files for the sounds so I'm stuck with the basic sounds. All my other files, films, etc., are on 20 year old floppies. The TBs of storage I have today was unheard of back then, that's all ya had. Can't read them on this OS. Can see the files on them but can't do anything with them. No opening, can't even copy them. I kept getting an error they may be corrupted or need to be formatted. I didn't think they could ALL be affected the same way although all of these date to around 2000. I'm sure some are just straight up bad even tho they were perfectly preserved in boxes inside another box in stable temperature conditions. Googled the problem and apparently MS changed how discs were formatted after about Win98. Subsequent OS put in something called a descriptor bit to the format process that earlier versions did not. So trying to read them on a Win10 system isn't gonna happen. That explains it! Will find a way around it. I actually still have the machine I used to use for AW. It was my first PC "build" and I was very proud of it, that old P4 system with a last of the Mohicans 1GB AGP video card! It's all in boxes, perfectly preserved! Prolly could use a new button battery I'd think! I could format some floppies with my new machine and then make copies with the old machine using them and that would theoretically work as long as the old ones aren't just bad. Twenty years is scraping the end of life expectancy for them I'd think. Would love to watch those old CAM files. Kept a lot of old scenario stuff. Cartwheel, Korea51, etc.
Was fun taking a few hops around the old Fightertown anyway! Hard going back to fixed hat switch views tho. Kept trying to move my head to look around! Will try to make some vids when I get a chance.
Thought some of you guys would get a kick out of this.
