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Posted by elvis70 5 hours ago

Sopwith – 1984 Game (2000)(www.sopwith.org)
72 points | 33 comments
NikolaNovak 3 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 :)

emmelaich 6 minutes ago||
Great game. I was hoping for a webgl/wasm version but oh well.
abroun_beholder 1 hour ago||
I loved Sopwith as a child and back in 2004 I made my own version 'Camel' as a homage to Sopwith https://sopwithcamel.sourceforge.net/ to get myself a job in the games industry. Hard to compete with the original though. :)
danw1979 3 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 2 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplane_Turmoil

digitalsushi 1 hour ago||
I got sopwith.exe from my uncle's "big blue disks" subscription. plus a lot of other racy games an 8 year old shouldn't have played.

I tried playing a copy on a modern computer and the game started and finished on its own in about 1/4 of a second! i'm not that fast anymore!

I got very good at dropping the bomb while upside down and then flipping and getting outta there. i was also obsessed with disney's tale spin and imagined it was the seaduck.

bananaboy 1 hour ago||
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!
pan69 4 hours ago||
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.
qingcharles 1 hour ago||
One of the PC games that worked great on the sorta-PC 186 RM Nimbus which a lot of British schools had in the 80s and 90s.
jedberg 4 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 3 hours ago|
I think ours had a turbo button that would double/half the clock speed. Good times indeed :)
jedberg 3 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 1 hour 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 3 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).
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