Mother of all PC flight sim videos

Bill Stealy, Gilman Louie, Damon Slye and other giants of PC flight sims are in this episode of Computer Chronicles from 1990 – the beginning of the golden age of PC simming. Well worth watching.

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Electronic Arts PC manual covers

Yet another round of classic PC simulations – this time from Electronic Arts (before they went all Evil), and more heavily slanted towards the 1990s. Unlike Dynamix, EA sims did both simulation of a single vehicle to an excruciating degree (such as 688(i) and F-15), as well as fun survey sims (such as Brent Iverson’s excellent US Navy Fighters and its sequels such as Jane’s Fighters Anthology), and some genre busting original titles such as SEAL Team. EA finished their sim adventure with a big bang, producing (via their partnership with Jane’s group) Longbow and F-15. Sadly, the powers that be decided that military sims did not produce enough money, and EA moved from making interesting games to lowest common denominator forgettables. This gallery represents 15 games from my collection produced between 1989 and 2000. The gallery is sorted from earliest games to latest. Click on each one for more sizes.

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Dynamix PC manual covers

More classic PC simulations – this time from Dynamix, featuring the once-mighty Damon Slye. Dynamix released their stuff under the Sierra label and carried a reputation as a great survey sim maker (i.e. sims that simulate several vehicles with less realism, as opposed to games such as Falcon 3.0 which focused on a single vehicle in detail). These games delivered a lot of fun, with quite good graphics and sound (and waaaay better music than Microprose could muster). This gallery represents 7 games from my collection produced between 1989 and 1997. The gallery is sorted from earliest games to latest. Click on each one for more sizes.

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Microprose PC manual covers

Another round of Microprose game manual covers – this time for the PC, the platform where they really produced their best stuff. These are all scans from my collection. For some games (like M1 Tank Platoon and Fleet Defender) I have more than one manual, because I bought some of these in South Africa, where we got the UK versions, and then I also got copies of the US versions after my arrival here. I really would love to know why they felt the need to change the cover art, given the text is the same across these versions. This gallery represents 25 games produced between 1987 and 2000 (heavily slanted towards military sims). The gallery is sorted from earliest games to latest. Click on each one for more sizes.

EDIT (4/14/2013): Added the Twilight: 2000 and Special Forces covers.

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Microprose C64 manual covers

(EDIT: forgot my Silent Service and F-15 Strike Eagle cover scans, now added).

Microprose was founded by “Wild Bill” Stealy and Sid Meier in the early 80s, and become the place where Meier established himself as a major innovator in gaming. Although the brand name still exists in game publishing, it’s not the game developer it once was; development stopped at the turn of the century. A lot of their early successes were on the Commodore 64, and they set the bar for PC simulations in the mid to late 90s. One of the things that set Microprose apart from its competitors was the amazing packing – large, full colour boxes packed with lengthy manuals that set atmosphere as well as giving information about the game and its world. Here are some cover scans from my collection (click each for more sizes):

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Ideal’s 1959 Fighter Jet console toy

Poking around YouTube one day, I accidentally stumbled on this amazing 1959 toy. The 1950s represented a time in American consciousness when jet aviation and the space race were mingled into an overall sense that the future was happening right then. It was the age of NORAD and the Century Series of interceptors, keeping watch for Soviet Bear bombers carrying nuclear loads over the pole.

During this period the early scale model industry gave children a way to imagine themselves in stratosphere, in the thick of the action, swooshing their (recently invented) injection molded airplane kits around their bedrooms.

But of course, home computers and video game consoles would not exist for another 20 years, so these kids were limited to imagining what it was like to fly these planes.

Enter the Fighter Jet from the Ideal Toy Company to change all that. Have a look at this amazing period TV commercial:

It is impressive to say the least. In a world before cheap consumer electronics, all of the effects were achieved with simple circuits and clever mechanical engineering. Here is a clear view of the console:

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And what flight sim would be complete without a good set of instructions:

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Here is a modern review of the toy, showing it in action. It is quite amazing how much careful thought and invention went into it. Not surprising, considering Ideal was the toy company that invented the Teddy bear and the Magic 8 Ball:

Must have made for an awesome Christmas morning unboxing this thing – looking at that old timey commercial makes me want one even now. Could this be the first flight sim entertainment product?

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All Third Wire titles 30% off

Third Wire, makers of the Strike Fighters/Wings over and Strike Fighters 2 series, are having a 30% sale on everything in their inventory – that means a complete, modern combat flight sim for $20. DRM free, direct download from their site. Remember: TK and his tiny band of brothers are indie developers who need sales to buy their dinners! Support them!

Go there right now!

Need some motivation? Head over to CombatAce and see the sheer volume of free add-ons you can get – including Operation Desert Storm for Wings over Europe

Need more? Here is a nice movie of Strike Fighters 2: Isreal

And some screenshots from various of their titles (click for full size):

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Airbrush for Fighters Anthology – a blast from the past

Reading some random forum, I came across this post:

Isn’t the 707 or KC-135 shape color-able in Airbrush? Color the entire shape in Airbrush and then it will be the correct color on the nose, and from far distances. And you can change the green KC-135 texture to gray in one fell swoop.

Then I thought, “hang on, are they referring to that ancient tool I wrote to recolor the Fighters Anthology shapes?” and after digging a little more, yes that was it. But the amazing thing is the post was made in 2007, eight years after I published the tool. And apparently people are still messing with it.

Startup screen - notice the credits say '1999'.

The tool came about as a result of my wanting to edit the FA models. I had sent an email to Brent Iverson who was a dev with EA on that project asking for information on the models (which were of course all binaries, called .SH files). Turns out the way the binaries were done was by creating an ASM file (yes, x86 assembler source code), and then assembling them into the actual shapes; so the shapes held data (the vertices, polygons and stuff), and some code too, for things like animation, visibility nodes, and so on. This meant that creating new shapes from scratch was a bit of a no-go, but modifying existing shapes was possible – so Airbrush was born; all it let you do was change the colours of the textures (which were saved in some ungodly RAW format), and change the colours of the polygons. I believe future plans included moving vertices around too (I recall I turned the Oscar sub model in the game into a Typhoon sub by moving the sail back).

Editing polygon colours - .SH loaded and displayed in glorious interactive 3D!

Although being able to read the binary .SH files and display them was quite hard (I had to decode the file structure with a hex editor, and I believe I was the first to do it), Airbrush’s best feature was the ‘smart remapping’ of colours. You said, ‘make all the greens into blues’ and Airbrush did that for polygon colours and textures. It was made easy by the fact that this was all using an 8 bit paletted graphics mode, but still, it’s a nice feature. Oh, and both version had pretty nice docs too.

Texture editing mode - you sould select a region, and say 'change all yellows into greens' for quick re-camouflaging

Wow, you never really know how much life a piece of code is going to have. Airbrush came out in September 1999 (says the readme file), and it was compiled for DOS 6 using the 16 bit GCC compiler (running CWSDPMI for memory), and a very, very old version of the Allegro library. I had to install DosBox just to be able to look at it again (Win 7 64 does not run 16 bit apps). Turns out I had two versions too – 0.1A which was very primitive, and then an improved 0.8B. Apparently 0.1A is able to open more shapes than 0.8B. I’ll take their word for it, it has been 11 years. Fun fact: FSDSxTweak still uses the Allegro library (a more modern version) for some internal stuff.

If you are bored, give them a try – the 08B version has some shapes and textures to play with (which will work under 01A also). I have put them in my Skydrive for posterity

• Airbrush v0.1A
• Airbrush v0.8B

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Best Games You Never Played: Operation Desert Storm mod for Wings Over Europe

UPDATE1: You can now download the mod from a mirror as a single large file (no login required).

During the 80s and 90s, Bill Gunston wrote a bunch of really cool books on military hardware. These were gung-ho, geek friendly books that focused on the numbers (number of missiles, rate of climb, etc), and completely left out all the bad stuff about war. Together with some really good art, they presented a Tom Clancy view of war, long before Tom Clancy started writing. And of course, being British, Gunston gave everything a nicely off-center view – British was always best, and non-American subjects often got center stage in his books.

One of Bill Gunston’s classic books. No accident that an RAF Tornado is on the cover; for Bill, British was always best (click for more sizes)

Combat flight sims have always had the opposite slant – most major developers were American, and with a few notable exceptions (DI’s Tornado and Spectrum Holobyte’s MiG 29) the same list of flyable planes came by over and over again – F14s. F15s, F16s, etc, etc, etc. No chance to fly Hunters, Jaguars, Su-9s, MiG23s or any of the other major players in the Cold War. What a lot of us wanted was the “Bill Gunston flight sim”. The closest we came was Fighters Anthology (a re-release of the excellent U.S. Navy Fighters, published under the Jane’s label), which was a really good game with a good range of planes to fly, but was sadly a little outdated by the time it hit the streets.

Even the Operation Desert Storm menu is a tribute to U.S. Navy Fighters. This mod knows its pedigree.

Enter TK – Tsuyoshi Kawahito. A 1990’s Flight Sim superstar developer behind some of the best titles of the last great wave of flight simulation – European Air War , Jane’s F-15, Longbow and Longbow 2. After Microprose went bust and Jane’s lost interest in PC gaming, TK disappeared for a couple of years. In 2002, he suddenly emerged with the PC game development equivalent of a garage band, Thirdwire Productions. His first release, Strike Fighters: Project 1, made it obviously apparent that TK had not lost his knack. But unlike the old days where content was dictated by the publisher, this time TK was making a flightsim geek’s game – set in the late 60’s and featuring all those great underdog aircraft such as  the A-4 and F-100. TK released new games based on improvements on the engines, all with niche settings (Vietnam, the Arab-Israeli wars).

When’s the last time a flight sim let you fly a MiG-25? ODS lets you indulge in all you most secret aviation fantasies

The greatest of all was Wings over Europe (WoE), set in the late 70’s / early 80’s in central Europe. If the phrase “Fulda Gap” means anything to you, then this was a game you need to play. The aircraft featured were some of the canon (A-10, F-15), but also some for the connoisseur – The Hunter F.Mk 6, Harrier Gr. Mk 1, F-105, Luftwaffe F-4Fs, and others (if you have heard rumors that Wings over Europe doesn’t run on Vista/Windows 7, I don’t think they’re true – I have been running it under both for years).

F-15E lays down – WoE has a solid, fast graphics engine packed with nifty tricks like self-shadowing aircraft and Hollywood style special effects

Now what really makes Wings over Europe a flight sim geek’s game is the open architecture. Everything is configurable in this game. You can add aircraft, tanks, weapons, terrains, modify the UI, you name it. All the tools and docs are released by TK, and there is a huge fan community creating really good stuff – head over to Combat Ace for the best centralized forums/file library. Hiding in that huge library is a true gem – Operation Desert Storm, a total conversion mod. Wings over Europe with the Operation Desert Storm mod is the finest combat flight sim experience you can have on a PC. It is Bill Gunston, the flight sim.

RAF Tornado – ODS lets you pick skins for various famous nose art variations, such as “MiG Eater”

The ODS team take over a whole install of WoE. You have access to a huge number of flyable planes from all the nations that took part in the war (including Canada, Italy, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia), era appropriate weapons, and a detailed map of Iraq and neighboring countries (including aircraft carriers in the Gulf). You can also fly a huge number of campaigns for all the major combatants on the coalition side (including RAF Jaguar squadrons, Italian Air Force Tornado squadrons, US Navy A-6E squadrons, and even the USAF F-117A squadron).

All kinds of flying are available – from stealthy to brute force

The replay value on this mod is very high. You have about 20 variations on the campaign if you include all the different aircraft and nationalities. For instance, if you choose an attack squadron from the US Navy, you will mostly get carrier based missions. Choose an RAF Jaguar squadron and you get a lot of CAS and SEAD missions; but with an RAF Tornado squadron, you probably fly from a different base and get mostly strike and interdiction missions.

This mod gives you land based and carrier based missions

The aircraft themselves fly quite differently, so there is a lot of variation. Although the basic controls of the aircraft are the same, the virtual cockpits are fairly different, so if you turn the overlay off, you need a bit of familiarization time with each one before you can stay in the air for longer than 15 minutes. The flight models are also quite different. So flying missions in the F-117 you need to think ahead for threats, whereas if you are in an F-15E, you have a lot more acceleration and maneuverability to get you out of trouble.

The virtual cockpits of most aircraft are detailed enough to present a nice challenge. Nice detail of the WoE engine – the rear view mirrors work.

Choosing the aircraft or squadron also dictates to some extent the types of missions you get (as is the norm in this sort of game). ODS gives you the full gamut. CAP, SEAD, CAS, strike, interdiction, fighter sweep, war at sea, and even reconnaissance (which is almost never included in this sort of game). There are also some nice set-piece missions. For instance, the battle of Khafji is nicely done, with columns of tanks firing against each other, SAMs hiding among the resort town buildings, and a veritable wall of AAA over the area. And because so many units were involved in that battle, you have the opportunity to fly that battle in a variety of aircraft (USMC Harriers, USAF A-10s, etc).

Air defenses are heavy in ODS – many of your flights will end with you swinging in the silk

In terms of difficulty, the game is quite well balanced. Air combat is not too hard, provided you can get off the first shot (heaven help you if you are in an F-14 versus a MiG-29 and you don’t manage to get the first shot off…). There is a good variety in skills of the enemy pilots, but getting caught in a one-0versus-many fight is always a bad idea. The air defenses are hard – due to their sheer numbers (especially AAA) getting in to some targets can be an interesting problem.

Modern air defenses versus old technology means often ditching your weapons and turning tail

The missile speeds are modeled accurately, so the amount of time between someone calling a SAM launch, you seeing the missile, realize that it is guiding on you, and then hopefully pulling an effective evasive maneuver  is just a few seconds. And of course, getting your weapons on target is always a challenege. Some of the more modern aircraft (Tornado, F-15E, Jaguar) have advanced ground attack avionics on the HUD, but the older ones (like the A-4 and F-111) require old fashioned dive bombing with the correct bomb sight mil setting.

KARI, Iraq’s integrated air defense network, presents a challenge on almost every mission

If you download ODS and just stick to flying the usual suspects (F/A-18, F-15, F-16, etc), then you are missing most of what makes this mod magical. Take a shot at flying with the Free Kuwaiti air force, and see what it’s like to take on the best 1980s Soviet air defenses with essentially a 1960’s aircraft. Try a single mission with an S-3 Viking, bombing Iraqui patrol boats with almost no bombing equipment. Go up with an Iraqi Mirage F.1 strike package and try to punch through the impenetrable CAP screens put up by the coalition. There are many, many different things to do in this mod.

This mod gives you a chance to try the unusual. Campaigns are more limited, but single missions have tons of variety.

Do I have anything bad to say about this mod? Let’s see – it’s free, it collects some of the best mods for WoE into a single pack, it’s set in a truly interesting period in air combat history, and it gives us the Bill Gunston sim we’ve all been waiting for for years. So no, nothing bad to say. Just go get it:

• Wings over Europe October 2008 Patch (pre-requisite for install)
• One large file containing all the parts below (no login required)
• Separate parts (login to Combatace required)
• Operation Desert Storm, part 1 of 3
• Operation Desert Storm part 2 of 3
• Operation Desert Storm part 3 of 3
• Operation Desert Storm Patch 1

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Way ahead of its time: SEAL Team

Another great oldie I picked up over Christmas this year was SEAL Team.It was not too hard to find on eBay, but it was a little expensive (around $20). It comes in a great big box with a packed manual. Previously I only had the budget, all-on-one CD version, which was simply not cutting the mustard.

Back in 1993 before we had a PC (we had an Amiga A1200 in those days), there were two reasons I wanted a PC bad: Flight Sim Toolkit, and SEAL Team. When we did get a PC a year or so later (a 486dx4-120), I immediately downloaded the SEAL Team demo. It was simply amazing. Although it was lumped together with DOOM, Duke Nukem 3D and the rest of the new first-person shooter genre, it was actually a completely different beast. I t was really a military simulation, and quite a tough one at that.

Awesome VGA graphics and MIDI music - aaahhh....

Like a lot of the military sims of the day, it dripped with atmosphere (as much as 320×200 VGA graphics allowed!).The game was set in during the Vietnam war, and had you in a squad of four SEALs carrying out various missions.The focus was very much on real-time strategy. You controlled your own guy, but finishing the missions really required you to skillfully give orders to your team mates and the various helicopters and gunboats which supported you on a mission. In fact, there was no aiming of your gun as such. You shot at enemies by designating them as the active enemy, and then whether you actually hit or not was determined by the game using a role-playing like mechanic.

Touches of realism abounded - like the hand signals to communicate with your team

Another important consideration was dealing with enemies and civilians. Missions typically took place near villages, so you had to be careful with not killing any townspeople. This was fairly easy if you attacked with your own weapons as those aimed fairly accurately, but if you called in a support helicopter or boat (which was often the difference between life and death), these were far more indiscriminate and could kill everything in the area they attacked. This was particularly a problem in the missions which called for you to capture enemies. Oh, and if you wanted a really high score on the missions, yo uhad to search each dead enemy for papers and weapons. Each mission took a lot of patience.

Selecting a mission; they were pre-baked, but there were 25 or so available

If things ever got this hectic chances are you would not be making out in one piece...

The music was simply great, although the sound effects were only mediocre (although the bad guys did yell out in Vietnamese, which added to the atmosphere). I remember trying for days to extract the MIDI files from the game to listen to, and then somehow finding a tool for U.S. Navy Fighters which finally let me extract them (I wish I remembered where I put those files…). I also remember digging through st.exe with a hex editor and discovering a lot of strings for unimplemented features in there – night vision goggles, rocket launchers. All the great things that could have been.

People these days take the ‘Stealth Shooter’ (the Rainbow 6 series, the Splinter Cell series) for granted. This is the game that started it all (Some grant this honor to Airborne Ranger, but although that was a great game, it was too arcadey and not 3D, so it is in a different class). If you enjoy those, get a copy of DOSBox, and start hunting around the interwebs for this classic.

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