I bought my copy of F4 even though I had a lowly 486 and wasn't able to run it. It wasn't until 6 months later when I got a Duron o/c'd to 700mhz that I could finally fly.

LOL...I splurged and got the 486 DX...

I originally had Falcon on the Amiga when it first came out around 1989 and loved the 'realistic' graphics and sound. AS I remember it I had to buy the memory upgrade (half a meg?) for the Amiga just to get the thing to run.
Since then I've tried every incantation on Falcon and even though other programs come and go, I still love the blend of features from superb graphics to the incredible campaign that Falcon offers through the hard work of dedicated groups to keep it updated.

I got all the Falcons in a box in Storage, from i think Falcon AT through 4.0

I'm with Mike....cut my teeth on Falcon 3...Op Fighting Tiger, MiG-29 addon....F/A 18 addon....Art of the Kill....Falcon 4.
I remember D/L a demo of Falcon 4 back in around '97 using a Diamond Shotgun modem setup.
Then upon viewing the demo, I felt like a kid at Christmas.
Have tossed flight sims over the years, but I'll never part w/my Falcon 4 and its awesome 3-ringed binder...and the 400 some pages that define a real combat simulation work.

Hail Falcon 4

I'll add a much-belated story of how I came to own a copy of Falcon 4.0

It was my 16th birthday. I had been into flight sims since I was much younger - the first one I played was MicroProse's F117-A Stealth Fighter on my first ever PC which, if I remember correctly, had a Pentium 60mhz chip installed and ran Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS 6?

Anyway, my Dad went shopping at a computer software store and asked the clerk which sim was one of the best and most difficult to play. I was obsessed at the time with Red Baron 3D but alas, I had no joystick and piloting Fokker Dr1's with a keyboard isn't the easiest thing on earth. So he picked up a Microsoft Sidewinder and the massive, three-ring binder version of Falcon 4.0 It was one of the most memorable birthdays I've ever had.

I remember heading upstairs to our upstairs loft (we lived out in the rural mountains of northeast Georgia) were our computer sat and quickly installed Falcon. I remember leafing through the binder and thinking how difficult of a sim this thing had to be. The first thing I did in the sim was head over to the Campaign and sat, stunned, and watched the Campaign engine just run. I kept hearing other pilots calling out targets and I remember how impressed I was to see my Dell XPS R400 Desktop computer simulate a full-scale war in Korea.

I can't say I played it much - sadly. Red Baron kept me firmly in its grips and Falcon was just too difficult for a 16 year old kid to really learn. Over the years the binder sat and computers came and went. You could say that I finally started playing Falcon 4.0 this year, at 30, when BMS released their latest edition of their Falcon 4.0 mods. It was, far and away, the easiest version to install and run and I am finally happily working my way through my binder and the BMS manuals learning the ins and outs of the F-16. Of course, I'm in a PhD program in History now - so I don't have the free time I had at 16. But what I do have is an appreciation for a remarkable sim and a remarkable community that has kept this amazing thing going for all these years.

Here's to Falcon 4.0 - the undisputed king of simulations.

Falcon 4 has cost me thousands of dollars
I had home computers since 1993,and any replacement computer before then only came when the machine broke down
From 98 onwards, computer upgrades happened min every two years, max four years- just out of need for more speed. I only recently scrapped the pentium 2 450mhz that I upgraded to in 98 to play Falcon 4.

I decided to get into flight sims in 2010 and bought AF in Game for only five pounds. I've since experienced BMS.

My mom bought the original Falcon as a present for my dad back in the late 80s. I was maybe 9-10 years old and played it more than him.

Years later I bought a used copy of Falcon 3.0 Gold with money from my first job. I remember naming the other people in my squadron after people I worked with.

I bought Falcon 4 probably 2 years after it released, for maybe $15-20 at a computer store in the mall. It was the binder version. It took 2 years to get a PC that could actually (barely) run the game. Never played much of it.

Tried again in 2005 with Allied Force. Bought it to play LAN missions with my brother. That didn't last long because it would always crash on one PC or the other.

So yeah, long history with the series, but never spent a lot of time with any of them.