>Hmm, does SWOTL run OK and find the joystick in DOSbox or some other VM?

DOSBOX does a bang-up job of running SWOTL with sound and music, and it lets me use my old CH flight yoke and stick with a 15-pin to USB adapter (every USB game controller works, no configuration necessary).

For the record, I never cheated in SWOTL, I didn't even back up my pilot files...so losing a pilot who'd been promoted to Oberst was a heart-stopping event.

SWOTL was top shelf, the last and best 2.5D flight simulator by Totally Games/Lucasfilm Games. The manual alone was worth the price of the box.

It's true, you only had 60 rounds of 30mm ammo, but with the Mk.103 cannon and careful aim you could easily knock every opponent out of the sky before running out. The P-51s usually only took two or three rounds to destroy utterly. Always fun to fly a tour of duty in the 229, although to tell the truth, the Do.335 from an expansion pack was my most favourite. It was a little slower and less maneuverable, but still faster than any Allied fighter (well, except the P-80, another expansion pack fighter) and probably the most durable plane in the entire game.

You're breaking my heart here, and although I'm sure you mean well and it's nice that you are a fan of music from earlier periods, you're way off-base.

I've performed many of the works of Bach, Mozart, and their contemporaries and successors and hardly anything tops Bach in any of those categories. High harmonic tempo, rhythmic complexity in and between parts (Classical-era music is largely homophonic), extended chords via appoggiatura and other passing tones, four, five, and eight-part fugues with multiple subjects and counter-subjects.

Off the top of my head, here are a few Bach works that I think best exemplify his genius:

Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor (BWV 582)
Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied (BWV 225)
Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue (BWV 903)

Mozart, however, is elegant but very straightforward, even simple. Perhaps it's a personal experience bias as I've mostly only performed his liturgical works (Masses etc.) and arias from his operas, but there is hardly a comparison to be made between the two.

With old enough drives, their head actuators being powered by stepper motors, there are actually gaps between the tracks that the bits "leak" onto, making recovery of overwritten data feasible. So, don't store sensitive data on 20-year-old drives.

You can get data recovered from surprisingly borked disk drives, including overwritten data

This is not actually true. It may have been true for certain early stepper-motor drives, but certainly not any modern hard disk drive.

That whole "reading between the tracks" thing hasn't been true since hard drive head actuators were powered by stepper motors (over 20 years ago). Voice coil head actuators are precise enough to eliminate this concern entirely.

>I just accidentally my friend with the whiskey.

Accidentally what?