Any combat flight sim gamers on here?

[mrsimperless]

As I mentioned before I'm currently spending about a year or so in Bangkok, Thailand on a project for my company. My schedule has me in Bangkokg for about 3-4 weeks then back home for a week, repeat, etc. It gets pretty boring over there and I'm constantly looking for games to play and things to do. I get to missing home pretty bad after a while.

Something else I get to missing after a while are the history and discovery channels. On this most recent trip home I watched quite a bit of both and got myself hyped up to start playing flight simulators again. I used to really love these games and have quite a collection:

Jane's WWII Fighters
Fighter Squadron
Falcon 4.0
Jane's Israeli AF
Jane's USAF
and a few others...

So anyway, I decided this would add some fun to my stay. I have a pretty nice high-end laptop that I take with me, so I went out and bought a new USB 3D joystick to take with me and play some sims as my old Sidewinder 3d Pro required a gameport which my laptop does not have.

Anyway, I get home last night and installed the joystick just fine. Then I went to install WWII Fighters. It says loading installshield up to 100%, but nothing ever comes up! The CD will access for about 5 seconds, then turn off. Access for 5 seconds, turn off. Etc. I tried to research the problem and it looks like the game doesn't run on XP.

So I try the next game Fighter Squadron... same result. Can't even install it. I do some more research and it seems that most of these older sims aren't compatible with XP. However, some of my research shows that people are running them on XP with varied results. Some using ACT, etc. But I can't even get the install program to run!

Just wondered if anyone else out there was still playing some of the older flight sims and if they had any luck running them on XP. (I'm running on XP Pro) It seems pretty odd to me that I can't even get the installation program to run and install the files. Anyway, thanks for any help you can give!

[gstelmack]

Go grab Falcon 4: Allied Force. Fairly inexpensive, and it has been updated to run with the modern stuff.

For WWII, IL2: Sturmovik and its brethren should run fairly well on modern boxes.

[Dutch]

IL-2/Forgotten Battles/Pacific Fighters is a great simulation of WWII combat on the Eastern Front and in the Pacific, but for all the efforts put into the realism, the fun factor seems somewhat sterile. But maybe that's just me.