Tech refresh 2025: MiG Alley

This is a tech refresh article describing additional testing since the original MiG Alley articles were published.

The latest release of DDrawCompat v0.5.4 can be used when running under Windows 10.

Testing

The latest release of dgVoodoo2 v2.84 was also tested but continues to suffer from the same issues as earlier versions when initialising the flight window.

The latest release of DxWrapper v1.2.7400.25 was tested but could not initialise the flight window and crashed to the desktop.

DXGL v0.5.23 was also tested but could not run the game.

Conclusion

The advice remains unchanged for MiG Alley with the DDrawCompat wrapper remaining the wrapper of choice. The advice given in the following articles remains valid:

If there are problems running MiG Alley natively in Windows 10 then the advice to use the PCem emulator remains appropriate:

MiG Alley: Running in PCem

Update: DDrawCompat v0.6.0

Following the latest release of DDrawCompat v0.6.0 from Narzoul, this version was installed and tested with MiG Alley. Like the previous version, it seems to work particularly well.

The latest version can be found on the GitHub project releases page.

Configuring DDrawCompat

The original configuration (DDrawCompat.ini) has been changed to take advantage of this new version and is shown below:

SupportedResolutions=800x600,1024x768,1600x1200,2048x1536
ConfigHotkey=shift+f11
Antialiasing=msaa8x(0)
DpiAwareness=unaware
DisplayRefreshRate=60

The support resolutions remain unchanged but the resolutions are suitable for my monitor and you may wish/need to change for your own setup.

The DDrawCompat overlay has been re-enabled and can be accessed by using the config hotkey combination.

Anti-aliasing has been increased to 8x.

DPI awareness has been disabled as this results in appropriately sized menu pages in the game.

Display refresh rate has been set at 60Hz. Again this is suitable for my monitor and you may wish/need to change for your own setup.

So a big thank you to Narzoul for the continuing work in enhancing DDrawCompat.

Update: Further lessons learned

Installation

When installing the game if the installer freezes at around 74% then opening Task Manager and using Analyze wait chains will indicate the process the installer is waiting for. In my case it was an Explorer.exe process. This process can be killed off which will cause the installation to complete normally.

Loading a mission crash

When loading a mission the game may crash with an error message: 'Unable to read data format of analogue device <x>'. This indicates the device either is not calibrated or has lost calibration. In my case the rudder pedals lost calibration and needed to be re-calibrated using the vendor calibration tool.

The remaining advice in earlier articles remains valid.