Jane's Fighters Anthology: Going wide in Windows

1 day ago
2 min read

Jane's Fighters Anthology (JFA) has received a couple of new widescreen patches recently. These patches allow the cockpit to be shown in a widescreen resolution. These are file replacement patches replacing the original fa.exe file.

There are three patches:

FA_Widescreen_zip: Created by ohyeah2389.
FA_Widescreen_1920x1080.zip: Created by ohyeah2389.
FA_Widescren_nocd.zip: The widescreen patch modified by kuoyichen so the CD is no longer needed, this does not support 1920x1080.

Patch release notes

The widescreen patch has been created by ohyeah2389 and was released on the 24 June 2026.

The following notes have been edited from those provided by ohyeah2389.

So here's FA.EXE with the following changes:

16bit scanline counter
800x600 now runs at 1024x600 (with HUD support)
1024x768 now runs at 1280x768 (without HUD support)
640x480 was not changed to a widescreen variant as it's the mode the menus use, and it would corrupt their drawing.

This WILL NOT WORK if your display driver does not support 1024x600/1280x768, which my system does not.

You can work around this by using a DDraw wrapper that supplies this display mode, such as cnc-ddraw. Otherwise, FA will try to set the video mode a few times, and then fail with an error "Could not set video mode X".

Note: The 1920x1080 resolution should be supported by a majority of display drivers, it replaces the original 1024x768 (without HUD support).

Further notes

Issues remain when trying to access the Jane's reference material in-game, this has been a long-standing issue with JFA. A previous article provided a workaround by using an alternative wrapper (not compatible with this patch).

A suggestion is to take a copy of an existing JFA installation folder and apply the patch and cnc-ddraw wrapper to this new installation and use it for running missions. The existing JFA installation can be used to access the reference material.

Obtaining

Both patches can be obtained from the Internet Archive at the Jane's Fighters Anthology widescreen patch archive. They are also available at the Combat Flight Sim Tavern, janes-fa channel.

Installation

Installation is simple, the steps are as follows:

Extract one of zip archives to the JFA installation folder.

Optional: backup the existing fa.exe file.

Rename the patch executable to fa.exe.

cnc-ddraw

As discussed in the release notes the patch requires a display driver support 1024x600/1280x768. The DirectX wrapper cnc-ddraw can provide this support if needed.

cnc-ddraw can be obtained from the cnc-ddraw GitHub repository Releases.

The cnc-draw zip archive should be extracted into the JFA installation folder.

Screenshots

There is no example video as recording with cnc-ddraw active, resulted in a video recorded in the original 4:3 aspect ratio. However, the following screenshots should provide examples of the patch.

Finally...

Huge credit and thanks for all the hard work, goes to:

ohyeah2389, for creating the widescreen patch.
kuoyichen, for creating the no CD version of the patch.
FunkyFr3sh, for cnc-ddraw.

Good hunting!