1991?

I wasn't playing PC games back then.

The only PC I had back then was for work.

A 386 if I remember correctly.

I had a Sega Genesis console but I only played John Madden football and Sonic the Hedgehog on it.

In '93 I bought a 486/66DX2 w/17" NEC monitor and lots of other expensive peripherals (digitizer, plotter, tape backup) almost exclusively for AutoCAD. Other than Test Drive for my Tandy 1000SX, the only games I remember owning at the time were Wolf3D, DOOM and F-117A. And the first two were shareware.

I've told this story before so I'll make it brief, but I remember sitting in an Upper Crust Pizza in Atlanta with my wife, next to the CompUSA where I purchased F-117. Reading and looking at the pics (especially the FLIR MFD) on the back of that beautiful heavy blue box through the cellophane (didn't want to chance getting pizza sauce on it), I couldn't wait to get home and open it.

At the time I knew very little about military aircraft (I had a snap-together model of an F-15C), only that most fighters had a couple of different size missiles under their fuselage and wings and they sometimes carried bombs (I thought drop tanks were bombs). The F-117A Manual taught me the basics, like the difference between a Sidewinder and a Slammer. It was fascinating stuff.

My wife remembers how crazy nuts I was over that game and isn't surprised I haven't let it go over two decades later. The other day she commented that she knew I had an eccentric personality, but nothing like the continued passion I have for making my own game. I *think* it was a compliment, unlike in the past I try to maintain balance, taking time to take care of myself (workouts) and for us to spend time together. But she can read it in my face, the wobbly wheels up there are always turning.

++++++++++

My biggest disappointment in F-117 today (accentuated on an LCD) is that nighttime never gets very dark. The F-117 pilot in the book I mentioned above talks about the challenges they had with nighttime visibility, especially hampered by the canopy design (apparently having a roof is a big deal when you're use to a bubble). And to quote (paraphrasing), "...takeoffs and landings were about the only time we looked through the HUD."

This is the experience I'm shooting for, mostly keeping nose down in the sensors (the FLIR/DLIR are your eyes). I'm attempting to be feasibly realistic, even with the fictional F-19. But when it comes to advanced topics like flight, radar and missile modeling, I'll probably come up short (I give mission/campaign play and overall AI behavior a higher priority). But my project will be open source, if onlookers don't mind reading C with a BASIC syntax (what Blitz Basic amounts to).

But that's still a while off, when I posted my F-19 remake thread I really had no idea what I was committing to (mostly the time it takes to learn the aspects of game development). If there's one piece of advice that any beginner developer should heed, start small (simple 2D). Keep your dream game alive but work up to it. I may start working on a 'simple' separate 2D AWACS-like wargame over the same maps, to be incorporated later into the 3D flight sim.

Played a few missions today, the game is still running great. Correction on a previous post, I'm using Roland sound, not Ad Lib.

One very small issue: No speech (Ad Lib and Roland). The only speech I remember is "Cleared for takeoff" and "Nice landing", so no big deal. Besides, if they would have stuck to the original storyline you'd be flying from clandestine airbases located around sparsely populated areas, I doubt they'd be using tower comms, right?

Next I'm going to see if my Logitech Wingman has any ability to be programmed under DOSBox (i.e. hat switch for views), and then I'll look into the speech problem.

It hardly matters to me now, but I wish the game had a flyable F-19 option with a cockpit resembling F-19. I'm not taking realism too seriously with this one, but the futuristic hi-tech sensors seems a better fit on the fictional stealth fighter, IMO.

Was going to wait to pick this up on a GOG sale sometime, but my nostalgia kicked in and I couldn't resist, picked it up tonight.

This was one of my favorite games back in '89-'90 first as Project Stealth Fighter on my C-64 which I played tons of hours before and during Desert Storm, and then I remember being impressed by all the enhancements of the F-117 version in '91 once I bought it for my first IBM PC clone (386/DX40) where it competed with Wing Commander, Falcon 3.0 and Civ 1 for my attention, those were the days!

GOG did a great job with the default DOSBOX settings, and I was just able to jump right into it without reading the manual, and just using the included keycard and my memory of playing it in those days, I completed the first training mission and landed safely using just the keyboard to fly.

Still very fun and holds up well as far as gameplay goes, despite the blocky graphics, the challenge of skirting the radar coverage and sneaking through undetected to hit the targets is still something that I haven't seen in the newer sims, will enjoy reading the manual and revisiting this one often.

PS. will look forward to your version too MarkG

Ya, thought it funny to download the pdf manual was bigger then the game install download.

I remember playing all those Microprose flight sims on my Commodore 128 in my early years of the Army. My squad leader and I would send all our troops somewhere to clean while we stayed in my barracks room and played, one with the stick the other using the keyboard commands.

Nice to see F-117 make it on GOG, I really like their service.

Amazing to me that F-19 installed is under 1MB in size, yet it came with all this (borrowed pic, ignore the Atari)...



...and while it's hard to tell from this pic, the F-19 Manual and Official Handbook together are just shy of 300 pages...



...and since I'm digging in my pics archive, here's the book I was talking about (Stealth Fighter... top/center) which gives really good insight on flying the plane...




OT: Coffee break is over for me (occasional week-long posting spurts relieve burnout), time to get back to work.

In the next week or so we'll be meeting with my wife's nephew (our wedding ring bearer) and his new bride. He's out of the Navy and going back to school while working at a guitar shop, building and repairing. He was a Super Hornet avionics technician in Lemoore, Cal. and I'm hoping to learn a little from him, hopefully have some things explained to me in laymen's terms. And to find out where his dream of flying the F-35 went awry.

I read both Firefox and Firefox down in the 6th grade! And I still have my copy of Red Storm Rising in hardcover. Nice.

I also had F-117A for my old 386 machine. One of the first titles to get me hooked.


Jason

Well, speaking of the Firefox...

Silly to think long-term right now but I do have plans. I'd like one day to work on two sims simultaneously, to use F-19 as a creative silly sandbox with orbiting laser weapons, silent propulsion Typhoon class missile boats, and even...

Your F-19 FLIR targeting and recognition system momentarily detects an unknown aircraft at Mach 5+.

While working on a copy of the game for a realistic (as realistic as I can make it) F-117A sim. Same maps (North Cape, Central Europe, Persian Gulf, Libya), time period (1984-86) and time of day (late dusk to early dawn).

Both sims being free and open source, so I don't expect trouble from Lockheed nor Warner Brothers/Paramount Pictures. I'm sure anything I do will remain under their radar anyway, but if I decide one day to try commercial indie I'd like to revisit something like SubWar 2050 (anything stealthy and with a "cockpit").

I'm not really a flight simmer (i.e. dog fighting in the daytime) but I've had a fascination with the stealth "fighter" (real and fictional) since Desert Storm and the Microprose sim.

The game won't recognize my Thrustmaster Warthog. I set all the switches to Off but it is not taking an input to set up the stick and throttle.

WC

If I remember correctly, there is a file you can run in DOS that turns the F19 into a F-117.

One of my favorite games. Ever.