Just as a reminder, I managed to fix this game (using the GoG distribution of it) more than a year ago.

I really don't understand why GoG's team has failed to take action on this... it's not like they have to do any "leg work" in making this fix.

The only possible argument would be that DGVoodoo isn't allowed to be distributed "commercially?" Meaning, GoG would need to come up with a similar solution on their own? THAT, I could understand.

In any case, for those reading this thread, it's TRIVIAL to fix the program to be able to run on Win7, Win8x, and though I haven't tested this yet, almost certainly also on Win10. See the below explanation, copied VERBATIM from a post I made a year and a half ago, right here in this forum.

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CLBrown
CLBrown
New User
Rep: 85
Registered: Oct 2013
From United States
Posted February 17, 2019
How to get F/A-18E Super Hornet Working (tested in Win7x64 and Win8.1x64)

Here's the deal with this program. It requires a different version of DirectX than is available in versions of Windows after Windows XP.

Yes, I know, Microsoft claims that other versions "can't be run" but what they REALLY mean is "Microsoft removed these intentionally."

Well, people have been figuring out means to get around that for a couple of years now, and there are two good solutions available.

Note, the game was released on March 1st, 2000. At that time, Windows 98 was still the biggest "gaming platform" available, with "Windows 2000" a minor footnote. So, my advice is to set "compatibility mode" to "Windows 98" mode. Realize, I have not gone through and tested out what "compatibility fixes" (as implemented with the Compatibility Toolkit)) are really necessary... but likely, some of the things bunched together into the "win98" mode harm performance a bit, so you may want to experiment with the Compatibility Toolkit to make a custom configuration. I'm not going to do that right now, and am merely sticking with "Win98" compatibility mode. I also, as I always do with older programs, set "run as admin" and "disable visual themes." These may not be necessary to the program, but it can't HURT to turn them off when running the program.

Now, on March 1st, 2000, DirectX 7.0 was the current newest release... with 7.0a coming out on the 8th. So, it's a safe bet to say that this program was written to use DirectX 7. And there is NO support for DirectX versions earlier than 9 on Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 10. (Some older games will still run, mind you, because they only use items which are still retained in the later versions, and because they don't "version check," but most won't!)

So... you need to get some means of running (in this case) DirectX7 on your modern machine. And you can't actually install it... this won't work (and wouldn't be a great idea anyway, with how MS hooks DirectX directly into the operating system.

In some cases, it's a simple matter of dropping the earlier DirectX (and usually DirectDraw) dll files into the game directory, but this is not always successful, and I don't generally recommend it (though I did just that for a long time).

Today, there are (at least) two very effective means of running DirectX versions earlier than DX9. One is a program called Dxwnd (for "DirectX in a Window") and the other is called dgVoodoo.

Now, Dxwnd was created as a wrapper to allow you to...as the name suggests... run full-screen-defaulting Direct3D programs in a window. It has since grown to include full emulation capabilities, and works pretty well... but it's a "tweaker's tool" with a TON of things you have to configure, and is not my first choice.

The second option is dgVoodoo (v2.54). Now, as the name suggest, this was initially created to emulate 3DFX GLide (and it still does that very nicely!). However, recent versions have added very effective Direct3D and DirectDraw emulation as well... and this is my "tool of choice" for running almost all of my older programs which require Windows and DirectX. It has fairly simple and straightforward settings... and I simply drop it into the directory with the game executable, run dgVoodoo's confi application to set things up as I like, and then run the game.

I was concerned that F/A-18E Super Hornet would have a 16-bit executable... it isn't a DOS title, so DOSBox wasn't an option (well, not really, though some people have actually created DOSBox installs which actually include Windows inside of them... but that's a huge deal I'm not prepared to address here!). For those who are not familiar, DOSBox is an emulator... a program which behaves as if it's a "virtual DOS computer." There are many versions of DOSBox, and GoG actually bundles DOSBox with many of its older DOS-based programs.

But for 16-bit Windows titles... they can't be run, period, on 64-bit machines, except in a full virtual environment. So it was good to discover that the EXE for this program was not 16-bit. (DOS programs are normally 8-bit by the way.)

So... here's how I recommend running this program.

1) Find and download dgVoodoo v2.54. Extract it to a directory on your desktop.

2) Find the installation directory for F/A-18E Super Hornet. In my case, that's "F:\GoG\GalaxyClient\Games\FA-18E Super Hornet." Your path will almost certainly be different, but will probably be at least a LITTLE similar.

3) Set the compatibility mode for the file titled "F18.exe" to "Windows 98." Windows 95 will also work. You can set compatibility for "Config.exe" and "F18Start.exe" as well, if you wish... but I don't think it's required.

Drop the dgVoodoo files into the same directory where you find those. Note, you do not want to drop "directories" into that location, only the files themselves. Since this game does not use 3DFX, you can ignore the 3dfx files, but if you do drop them in (I usually do anyway) use the 32-bit ones, not the 64-bit ones. Drop ALL the Microsoft DirectX files into that location as well, and everything from the "root" folder (which is mainly reference readme files, but may be nice to look at if you get confused as to how to set things up later on).

In my case, I dropped in the following files:
D3D8.dll
D3DImm.dll
d3drm.dll
DDraw.dll
dgVoodoo.conf
dgVoodooCpl.exe
QuickGuide.html
Readme.html
ReadmeDirectX.html.

I left all the 3DFX/Glide stuff out, as this game can't use those.

Do the above... and the game will run smoothly and flawlessly. At least it does for me.

If you prefer, you can use Dxwnd, but you'll have to get help with that, which I can't provide.

Thanks for the fix CLBrown. I actually bought a copy of the gold edition on Ebay and got it working with this. I'm not sure it is completely stable as it has crashed after playing for an hour or so on the post briefing screens. It could be that I have Afterburner running, so I'm going to have to test it some more. I tried other versions of DGVoodoo but 2.54 does seem to be the best so far.

Yeah I think it is stable now. I removed the D3D9.dll and added the d3drm.dll and played for a few hours. Afterburner is fine with it set up like this.

Hi, and happy holidays to all of you !

I really appreciate the efforts and tweaks provided in this thread.

I just wanted to add my two cents as I managed to run this sim almost flawlessly under Win 10.
I used dgVoodoo 1.54 as instructed and got pretty bad frame-rates with Win 98 or Win 95 compatibility settings, but everything went amazingly well when I selected the XP SP3 compatibility mode. Smooth as silk !

So if you've got bad performance, I suggest you give it a try.

Fly safe,

Cheers,

Andro

Given that I resolved it on my own machine, using nothing but dgVoodoo 2 several years back, I'm a bit surprised that you guys still haven't gotten this fixed.

REMINDER!!!

I see that GoG has released its own "DirectX emulator" and is incorporating it into a number of titles now.

dgVoodoo works PERFECTLY with this game, emulating the older version of DirectX which the game requires. I have to assume GoG's new DirectX emulator works similarly, right?

SOOO... is anyone there even THINKING about releasing that emulator/wrapper and making this game "formally functional" again?

The main reason I keep checking this is that F/A-18 Super Hornet remains the ONE TITLE from GOG which can be seen, but can NOT be launched or even installed, from within GOG Galaxy.

In fact, I've even tried to link my "fixed" installation of Super Hornet to the program launcher element on Galaxy, and it reports a "game not found" error. Meaning, I can't even run it like I would a 3rd-party program (which would be fine with me, frankly, at this point, after YEARS of "it won't work here" from you guys!

If I can launch "Klingon Academy," which exists entirely independently of GOG (at present) through GOG Galaxy... why can't I launch Super Hornet, which I bought from GOG?

FYI I got the retail version of the game working on Windows 10 without the use of 3rd party programs like dgVoodoo or DxWnd. This should also work for GOG release.

Basically all you have to do is to set the compatibility for BOTH F18.exe and CONFIG.EXE to Windows 98/ME, run CONFIG.EXE, disable the movie playback (select: none) and run the F18.exe.

Most likely CONFIG.EXE saves its settings in the Windows registry in different places depending on compatibility mode set to it.

So if you disable movies when running CONFIG.EXE without any compatibility options and then run F18.exe with Windows 98 compatibilty (which is needed for the game to run at all) it will look for settings in wrong part of the registry and the game will not run. That's why it's essential to first run CONFIG.EXE with Windows 98 compatibility settings and disable the in-game movie playback first so the settings will be stored in a place where F18.exe running with Windows 98 compatibility mode will find them.

Update: Here's how it runs on Windows 10 for me, note that the intro video was edited in.
https://youtu.be/MlSnIdNIPoc

Surprisingly improbable, given that this game uses a version of Direct3D which is deprecated in Windows 10. Unless you somehow got an old version of DirectX, which is not supposed to be allowed to be installed by Win10, to install... that shouldn't be able to happen.

There are too many calls in this game which require the earlier API, and simply don't work under "current" DirectX implementation, for that to happen without some sort of translation layer or interpreter in between.

I'd be fascinated to hear if anyone else is able to get his solution to work. That absolutely did NOT work for me.

I suspect that our friend here has some sort of compatibility layer installed and has simply forgotten about it, or perhaps isn't even aware of its existence.

Trust me... the GOG guys are excellent insofar as "creating compatibility fixes." They didn't do what he's suggesting... or rather, they almost certainly TRIED doing just that, and found that it didn't work. They would not have removed a software package from the store unless they'd found themselves knocking their collective heads against the wall with "how to fix it?"

dgVoodoo/DXWin work well, because they translate those old DirectX calls into forms compatible with current release DirectX inputs. And GOG's own in-house DirectX interpretation layer, now being implemented in many of their older game installs, works very much the same.

"Compatibility" settings don't do the same things. They do a small subset of these, but don't do a full and complete "call by call" translation layer.

So, while I'll be happy for him if what he's stated is actually true, I am dubious of this claim, being that what he suggested was literally the VERY FIRS THING I TRIED, and it absolutely did not work for me.

This is great, but I'm curious to know why this title specifically was removed to be fixed while so many other broken and not up to standards games have been left up for sale this entire time. Theme Park just being one example of many.

Thank You!!!!
But sadly the joystick/controller not works, its on game controllers as default, and if i open directly the config.exe it is checkmarked, but in flight it do nothing.

That's great news. Unfortunately, the game isn't shown in my games library anymore. How can my original purchase be restored?

Me to, but it seems that it's not really popular game. Also note that I'm using retail CD version with the Albanian Campaign expansion. I don't know whiich version is featured on GOG.

The only "compatibility layer" I have installed globally is nGlide, which as you said is not used by this game (no glide support). I've been using dgVoodoo2 for few titles but only locally (I put dlls inside the game folder next to game executable).

Well, seeing their work on some of their DOSBox based releases I wouldn't agree. I prefer to use my own retail versions with custom conf files prepared by myself. Though I still buy their games, just to support the initiative to release those old classics digitally (with many goodies). Though, again some titles are still missing their manuals (Harrier Jump Jet, Falcon 3 add-ons - Hornet and MIG-29). For early Windows games they do allright.

Why would I lie? PC hardware and software is so numerous there are millions of possible configurations. Even GPU brand can have an impact, hell, even graphics driver version can. So there are many factors that can influence your outcome. I just shared my insights so maybe GOG guys bring this title back to the store.

It was sad to see this one off the store for so long, but I'm very happy to see it's been back again - and now with the expansion added no less. Thanks for sorting this one out everyone!

Hi damson,

did you get your hotas to fully work with the game? If so, how?

Personally, i can't get the throttle to work, nor the rudders.

Try this (works for me) :

- Go into the game directory folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\F18).
- Locate the dinput.dll file and rename it to dinput.dll.old or dinput.dll.backup (you could also delete it, but I prefer to backup files whenever I can).
- Recheck your Joystick or Hotas in Config.exe
- Launch the game.
You should be just fine. Keep me posted if you still have issues.

Hope that helps!
Fly safe,

Andro