Since THC stumbled into being, I’ve been itching to grant MicroProse’s 1998 chart-topper European Air War, Dusty But Trusty status. Only a nasty bug that delights in crashing careers in both the GOG and on-sale-at-the-moment Steam version has stopped me.
Linked to the movies that play at regular intervals during dynamic campaigns, said bug isn’t unsquashable. At least one of the modded forms of EAW offers trouble-free careers. However, anyone that wishes to fly sortie sequences using modern screen resolutions and the pretty forgiving late-Nineties flight models faces a problem.
Those ‘1.2’ FMs together with so-so bandit AI, fairly simplistic damage modelling, and almost non-existent engine management, mean vanilla EAW lacks the authority of the two great WW2 combat flight sims that followed it into the air. More positively, they also make Tsuyoshi Kawahito’s design ideal for anyone who finds the warbird diversions of today too demanding or complicated.
One evening this week I got the urge to spend a few hours strafing trains, ventilating Bf-109s, and ripping the wings off Flying Fortresses, and didn’t fancy commencing these aerial antics with a protracted spell of pdf perusal. EAW sprung to mind and ended up fulfilling my needs almost perfectly.
After a Schwalbe-swift install, and some minor joystick-related fiddling (I needed to remove dinput.dll from the install folder in order to get full stick functionality) I found myself in the presence of one of the genre’s very best single sortie generators.
The European map used to select ground targets, and fighter sweep or interception locations, is colossal compared to the pocket handkerchiefs we tend to get nowadays. (The above screenshot shows only a small portion of it).
Impressive too are the three hangars from which steeds are selected. They contain twenty different airframes in total. Want to fly a Mustang, P-47, or P-38 all the way from East Anglia to Schweinfurt, Munich, or Pilsen. Go ahead. Fancy dogfighting, without preamble, over the Normandy beachhead in a heavily outnumbered Bf 109 or Fw 190? No problem. Wish to hurtle into sizeable formations of Heinkels in a Battle of Britain-era Spit or Hurricane? EAW is happy to oblige.
While I can’t think of any air warfare sim that bedecks skies with bandits and bacon-savers quite as energetically as Rowan’s Battle of Britain, MicroProse’s effort does a pretty grand job of communicating the scale and chaos of WW2’s larger air battles.
EAW’s habit of populating the areas around designated ground targets with targets of opportunity is also endearing. Still have some rockets or bombs left after that attack on the radar station? Why not donate them to that factory down there, or rough-up that airfield you noticed during your ingress. In the campaigns, freelancing in this manner actually impacts the course of the conflict. Frontlines move earlier or later than they moved in reality depending on how well the war is going.
No EAW recommendation would be complete without a mention of the sim’s remarkable malleability. Insert a combi-mod like OAW into your install folder and the range of crates and careers available in this beloved classic, increases exponentially.
I never managed to get terribly deep into that game due to having a busy academic and (somewhat busy) social life when it came out. Too bad as I now know I missed a true classic.
I actually remember most the immersion in the menus, a lost art today (and previously covered in THC). I think it was the US career menu screen that I would just leave up, which was a barracks decorated with pin up art, a radio playing 40s era music, and sounds of your squad mates shuffling around and clearing their throat, and occasionally the great flyby sound of a Merlin engine. At least that’s how I remember it.
Gosh, if I liked the menu so much to remember it fondly 25+ years later, it really is a shame I didn’t get much flight time in.
As you say, EAW’s menu are pretty special. A couple of examples:
https://tallyhocorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/eaw51.jpg
^ The inter-mission Nissen hut in the BoB campaign. The flag is animated. Clicking the radio changes the channel from jaunty swing to sombre classical. Occasionally a passing aircraft or out-of-shot pilot can be heard.
https://tallyhocorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/eaw50.jpg
^ Pre-sortie screen in a US campaign. The fan is animated and there are sounds of erks at work in the background. The pictured aircraft reflects your current type, and clicking the patch of sky above the fuselage starts the mission.
Played the demo to death as a kid!
Today the only thing stopping me is the joystick bug, can’t make it recognize it not matter what.
I love when you cover old things like this! It is so good! MOAR!!!!!!!
Thanks. Assuming it gets on with Ada (my current PC), MiG Alley is likely to be the next combat flight sim inducted into the Dusty But Trusty hall of fame.
Good article Tim, brilliant! Also good luck with MiG Alley but I’m guessing it won’t run unless you use some sort of Virtual Machine or PC Emu? Please correct me if I’m wrong on this as I would also love to get it running, something I have been trying to do for years with no luck!
Btw I’ve been waiting to give my GB2 orders but I never saw any Combat Mission Olympiad Turn 10 article, are you ok? What happened? Or am I blind and have somehow missed it? Hope to hear from you soon!
That is awesome! I have had difficulty trying to run it on a higher resolution using emulated DLLs to try and update its Directx. Wish somebody who knows programming could upgrade this gem. But sadly even the newer one Battle of Britain II is having problems running on newer systems. There is a long post on A2A forum where they were trying to get it running reliably(with the latest patch)
Came here to say that I just tested Mig Alley in win11 and it works .
There is an excellent updated setup made by BEEN_Nath_58 on MyAbandonware site, all you need to is to install it, then put https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/releases in the main game folder, set compatibility options to reduced color mode 16 bit , and voila, you are flying within a minute. I haven’t tested it more yet, just started a quick mission and it works well, no performance issues. As for higher res, I would give it a go and look into it, maybe something like dgVoodoo it would be doable.
How’s the resolution in there? Any change?
Sadly no. So it is 4:3 and 1024×768 resolution for me:) Although I think the game is capable of having a bit higher resolution natively(1280×960), but it is locked to 4:3.
But at least it works. And korean war was long time ago, they had lower resolution back then:)
Thanks for the info! Well, I think I’ll wait for Tim’s confirmation on this (hopefully in the next Dusty but Trusty report) as I’ve already been waiting years to get it running again, a few more days won’t hurt.
Btw funny story, when I met Buzz Aldrin a few years ago all I was talking to him about was his combat missions in Korea, I never mentioned “the Moon thing” once and I’ll never forget how happy and beaming smiling he was to talk about that, he was impressed that I knew about it anyway. I’ll also never forget his crushing handshake, almost destroyed my hand haha!
I remember I hacked the .EXE with simple resolution Hex code and it ran with higher resolution years ago(1920×1080). But for some reason it does not work now. :/
I had the GoG 1.2 running a while ago as I wanted to experience the original flight models with the original hitboxes where you can shoot the whole plane. The newer mods shrunk the hitboxes to just the engine which is absurd in order to increase the difficulty but EAW was never meant to be ultra realistic or difficult…
I was very determined to get 1.2 running correctly even if it was a pain to do so. I had to get a used Logitech 3D Pro joystick as EAW 1.2 refused to work with any of my modern joysticks. Not even my trusty T16000m was recognised by it even after doing all the common workarounds. Funnily enough it worked fine with the modded version but I had no interest in using that. The logitech was the only one that worked consistently with the original.
I even had the 1.2 version working with mouse tracking in trackir although it was a bit temperamental but I’m too used to headtracking in my flight sims to go back to using keyboard views. It worked alright just had to make good work of the centre view key often.
CombatAce also has an empty/small video replacement file to get around the game crashing during the campaign in the 1.2 version. I never got too far in my campaign to really see if this worked but I didn’t have any crashes when I last played EAW. I had to reconfigure the controls everytime I started the game up but that was about it. Might worth be trying in any case if you run the 1.2 version.
That was basically my rather painful and slightly insane effort to get 1.2 running as properly as I could on my pc but it can done if you don’t want to use the easier to run modded versions.
Tim, I’m willing to bet you a pint (of what, I’ll leave up to you, hopefully not molten gold or liquid platinum though matey) that you won’t get MiG Alley to install without a Virtual Machine hassle hoop hop. So, what do we play instead to dull this injustice? Klingon Academy, that’s what. You want to play it now, don’t you? Well, at least we can play THAT classic now (albeit not an entirely hassle free hoop hop) but at least it runs on 64-bit PC’s. More info here: https://www.jiri-dvorak.cz/ka/index.html
Apologies, goodman. I had not installed Klingon Academy for a couple of years so was not aware of more recent hassle removers. It’s a doddle now! Just pop the first disc in and install away. Then, get the “combined patch” from moddb and install it: https://www.moddb.com/games/star-trek-klingon-academy/downloads/combined-patch-102r7-english
Now, copy the “Movies” folders from the other five discs to your install location, and edit the options.cfg file there to your specifics. Mine says “moviepath = D:\GAMES\Klingon Academy\” (no quotes).
That’s it! Depending on your screen setup, you might want to drop the resolution down a bit to be able to actually read the UI/HUD. Since I am on the couch some distance away from my TV, I had to drop it down to 1280×720, but if I were to move forward (or setup the projector in the castle dungeon) to place my nose right up against a huge screen, I might then choose 1920×1080.
Btw, it plays great with an old Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback II stick.
But it gets better. After Klingon Academy, you know what the next Dusty but Trusty award ceremony should rightfully be, don’t you? Yes, TiE Fighter. Specifically, Angel’s amazing “TiE Fighter Total Conversion” godsend. May the Force be with you sir and Happy Christmas.
Essential viewing before you do any of the above:
Klingon Academy: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLoSoj5qWroNHXFzmJptOiFpV1vUBwxGz
TiE Fighter Total Conversion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEVrdwZ9bEk