Like many others here I played this a lot when young on my dad’s PC. I remember finding it really hard to play at the time!
NikolaNovak 2 hours ago [-]
One of first games I ever played at my dad's work when I was probably 6 or 7 years old. I've always enjoyed flight Sims, understanding this dubiously qualifies :). I've enjoyed the strategic aspect of fuel and bomb management and while the ai is simple, it provided a challenge.
I now have kids of my own; over the winter I setup an old laptop with old games, and started introducing them chronologically to games like Sopwith, Paratrooper, Alley Cat etc.
My 6 year olds son comment on this game in his journal:
"I like: everything. I don't like: nothing."
Took me a second to not over interpret the seeming double negative :-)
Update : years later I played wings of fury on my cousin's amiga 500 ; far better game but not the same magic :)
danw1979 2 hours ago [-]
The first time I ever saw a PC it was running Sopwith. Must have been 1989. I loved the game, but it was this exotic new machine that really interested me. It had 5.25” floppies, probably a 286 and quite an old machine by then.
I had only used Z80/128k machines up to then. My dad had an Amstrad 6128, with those 3” “hard” floppies, sturdy, with a decent thick metal gate.
This PC was a very different beast. I remember being confused about the disks. They seemed weak and unprotected ! you could literally see that delicate magnetic surface through the opening. I had always been told never to touch it, but there it was, just asking to be touched…
Sharlin 1 hours ago [-]
The classic Sopwith clone from the golden days of the Finnish shareware game scene, Triplane Turmoil, turns thirty this year. It was open sourced in 2009 and community-ported to more modern platforms via SDL. Was a lot of fun back in the days of shared-keyboard multiplayer.
I remember playing this on my families Olivetti M24. It was very difficult. Maybe because the game was speed sensitive and the M24 was an 8086 running 8Mhz. Good times nonetheless.
jedberg 3 hours ago [-]
I played this on the original IBM PC. (Un)fortunately, my dad got the 8MHz upgrade, so the game was really hard, because it was built for a 4MHz clock.
Luckily someone eventually realeased a DOS utility that would fake a 4MHz clock by making everything take two cycles.
Good times. :)
hencq 2 hours ago [-]
I think ours had a turbo button that would double/half the clock speed. Good times indeed :)
jedberg 2 hours ago [-]
I seem to recall that the turbo button didn't come along until the 80286, but some of the PC clones had them before that.
My 486 definitely had a turbo button (that was the one I built after using the original PC for so many years).
hencq 9 minutes ago [-]
Hmm, maybe my memory is betraying me. I remember our first family computer was an XT and then later we had a 386. Maybe I'm misremembering and it was the 386 that had the turbo button or maybe the earlier one was a clone. My first own PC was a 486 as well that I built together with my dad. Good memories.
vasac 2 hours ago [-]
The Turbo button worked wonders for Tetris. You start it with turbo turned on, so Tetris adjusts to the computer’s speed - but it only does this once, at startup. As soon as the blocks start falling, you turn the turbo off, and now your Tetris runs at half speed. I even managed, a few times, to roll over a score of 32,768 (ah, those signed integers).
nikolay 1 hours ago [-]
I've spent endless hours playing Sopwith! What a legend!
stephenhuey 2 hours ago [-]
Discovered this on an old Apple 2 in the 90s. Loved the basic physics of things like flying inverted or flying down low and then releasing a bomb while pulling up into a steep climb so the bomb would fly more laterally to a target.
2 hours ago [-]
waltbosz 2 hours ago [-]
I was just thinking of this game last night. I was wondering if AI could take the ASM and convert it into a browser game. Playable w/o DOSBOX.
pavel_lishin 31 minutes ago [-]
I remember playing this game on my dad's computer, and being largely baffled at what I was supposed to do. Shoot, drop bombs, of course - but how do I land, refuel, how do the points work?
Still a core memory, though.
NooneAtAll3 3 hours ago [-]
I fondly remember what essentially is a more modern clone of Sopwith - "Pe-2 diving bomber"
It is fun. Shoot-bomb-rearm/refuel in missions, upgrade your plane in between
migueldeicaza 2 hours ago [-]
Did the site get slashdotted?
jesse_dot_id 3 hours ago [-]
This is the first computer game I remember playing on my brother's Commodore Colt. I was very bad at it.
justinhj 3 hours ago [-]
This game was so fun. I think there's a lot of unexplored game design in this style of 2d aviation.
The multiplayer game Altitude was a good modern example.
sheiyei 2 hours ago [-]
We had an awesome split screen dogfighting game on a Win98 PC where everyone had a Spitfire-like plane and tried to take the others down. You could land at your base and heal etc. Super fun. I think it was called Iron Birds? Don't think I've found it since.
jauntywundrkind 3 hours ago [-]
Lufteauser is a bigger space & higher motion, but has hit some good vibes for me, in this zone. Single player.
We were always begging the daycare to let us play this. Very solid.
As a small kid, I learned how to use the DOS command line to launch this game on my parents' PC. I also remember really enjoying Sopwith 2, which added cows, among other things.
contingencies 3 hours ago [-]
Superior successor was Wings of Fury. The DOS version.
Honorable mention: Choplifter. Gameboy.
AFF87 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 22:16:41 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I now have kids of my own; over the winter I setup an old laptop with old games, and started introducing them chronologically to games like Sopwith, Paratrooper, Alley Cat etc.
My 6 year olds son comment on this game in his journal:
"I like: everything. I don't like: nothing."
Took me a second to not over interpret the seeming double negative :-)
Update : years later I played wings of fury on my cousin's amiga 500 ; far better game but not the same magic :)
I had only used Z80/128k machines up to then. My dad had an Amstrad 6128, with those 3” “hard” floppies, sturdy, with a decent thick metal gate.
This PC was a very different beast. I remember being confused about the disks. They seemed weak and unprotected ! you could literally see that delicate magnetic surface through the opening. I had always been told never to touch it, but there it was, just asking to be touched…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplane_Turmoil
Luckily someone eventually realeased a DOS utility that would fake a 4MHz clock by making everything take two cycles.
Good times. :)
My 486 definitely had a turbo button (that was the one I built after using the original PC for so many years).
Still a core memory, though.
It is fun. Shoot-bomb-rearm/refuel in missions, upgrade your plane in between
The multiplayer game Altitude was a good modern example.
We were always begging the daycare to let us play this. Very solid.
Honorable mention: Choplifter. Gameboy.