Pro tip: to make your crate really dance, leave at least half the fuel home. Things like the quick mission builder tend to put you in the air with a 100% full tank at the moment of contact. But a P-51 is an unbalanced pig when full. Put it at 50% and its a nimble dancing murder machine.
Because of time constraints I tend to use the quick mission/instant action things of my sims far more than the campaigns and things. Just a quick dogfight between dadly duties. I just realised one of the DCS quick flights for the viper is essentially the TopGun Maverick mission; a flight up a canyon followed by a pop up bombing. It’s exhilarating and only about six minutes ;)
Finally found the proper, IBM version of this (earlier I’d found a really cheap copy and in my haste to get it neglected to see it was for the Atari ST).
Yeah it’s from the era when the PC was the weakest platform video and sound-wise. The only games from this era where it doesn’t matter are Sierra games, which deliberately targeted the PC, and Microprose games, since Microprose tended to just take DOS versions and sprinkle in a few more colors for Amiga which tended to look godawful.
Most Microprose games ported to the Amiga were actually done by Microprose UK, which had a damn good feel for the machine (see: F-15SE 2).
Basically, there was this short 2-3 year period where the Amiga was the multimedia leader and games on every other PC platform looked like shit. Then, around 1990 or so, the PC started to catch up with VGA and Adlib cards. I picked up my first PC in '92 when it was clear that if I was interested in flight sims, the PC was now the way to go.
So it’s possible there was a difference between their sims and the other games. If you look at Railroad Tycoon for Amiga for example, it looks like crap. They just took the pretty decent EGA art and tried to fluff it up with some extra colors. Even worse is Covert Action, which used the same EGA-based engine with some great EGA graphics, but looks atrocious on the Amiga - especially the procedurally generated criminal portraits.
I didn’t really play too many of the Microprose flight sims of that early era. I was (and still am) really bothered by the lack of realism in their cockpit displays.
Even though the Amiga version might be better in some respects, DOS is what I’m familiar with and if I had played F-16 CP back then, is what I would’ve played it on, so I’m gonna stick with DOS for this one.
Um, I was trying to be helpful, Brian, and point out the best version. I gave up on the platform wars years ago, after the bad guys won and Microsoft finally came out with a version of Windows that didn’t lock up whole system when you formatted a floppy.
As for Amiga versions, reviews were definitely useful in those days. Sometimes they were awesome, optimized versions for the platform (subLogic’s Jet with frame rates in the double digits!), sometimes they were ugly PC portovers. But most PC games in those days targeted EGA 16-color graphics (with no viable flesh tones no matter what your heritage) fully powered by the CPU, and single-channel SoundBlaster audio. A good Amiga game had hardware-accelerated (2D, via the Blitter) graphics, a 4096-color palette (albiet 32-64 at a time), and four-channel digital stereo audio. The Amiga was objectively the best hardware platform until the 486 and SVGA became prevalent.
But seriously, just wanted to make sure you didn’t write off the Amiga versions of classic games. An emulated Amiga version of a lot of games is going to beat the pants off an EGA DOS version running under DOSBox. And no high-memory shenanigans.
I was heartbroken to learn that the gorgeous Amiga version of Defender of the Crown is also buggy as heck, and that the EGA version is superior if extremely ugly.
There is a thing with disk emulation on Amiga though, right? It’s slow and stuff? Dosbox is so effortless and last time I took a peak at Amiga emulation it was disk-sector slow.
The other disappointment I have is, once in a while I take a look at the “top” Amiga game lists. Almost inevitably they’re either games that have decent ports to DOS (Lemmings, Speedball 2) or ports of DOS games (Monkey Island 2). Despite Amiga being the leader for a good couple of years, the true age of amazing computer games didn’t really seem to start until the 90s when the PC got good.
