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Comment by fabiensanglard | Hacker News Reader

I first heard of that name with Chuck Yeager's Air Combat on MS-DOS. An amazing game associated to hours of good time.

I can still hear the slightly tinny / distorted "Welcome to Chuck Yeager's Air Combat!" in my head. Good memories for sure.

EDIT: Nice, it's playable in a browser here: https://playclassic.games/games/combat-flight-simulator-dos-...

Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator for me, one of the first games I played as a kid after a couple Infocom games I would play with my Dad.

Main thing I remember from it was, every time you would crash, you'd get a full-screen monotone bitmap of Chuck Yeager's stern face, ribbing you for your bad flying.

I had this game as well and also recall the bitmap and insults about your flying when you would crash. Also the comically understated 'wings ripped off' message you would get at the bottom of the screen when you pulled way too many Gs in a plane. :)

That was my first flight sim as well. I remember playing it on an amber monochrome monitor. I then recall watching a TV show where they were playing the game in color and thinking "wow, that game has colors?!".

Didn't Falcon 3.0 include video training courses on dogfighting tactics taught by Chuck Yeager? I was like 7 or 8 and distinctly remember watching video of a small room where he projected game footage on a screen behind him and several rows of audience dressed like fighter pilots

Pretty sure that stuff inspired me to want to become a fighter or bomber pilot. (Though to be fair I was in way over my head with that game) I became a programmer instead but sometimes I still think of that

edit- upon looking it up, I guess it wasn't him. Probably got that mixed up with his flightsim game

You made me look up the Falcon 3.0 tutorial videos, now on YouTube, obviously...

For some nostalgia a video of game play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmqPoI936K4

It was as enjoyable to me then as any modern title is today. Perhaps more so.

It was a fun game. Most interesting was that all in-game texts suggested that F-86 Sabre was better than MiG-15, but in practice MiG-15 was much better. You could easily win a dogfight against 5 Sabres in MiG, but not the reverse.

I still remember the advice on learning to land a plane. If you're going too fast, pull the nose up, too slow, push the nose down. If you're sinking too quickly, add throttle, sinking too slowly add throttle. This is the reverse of what you'd normally think in airplane controls. Push the stick down to point the nose down and sink faster. But, Chuck Yeager's advice was that intuitively, you actually get better control of the glide path by thinking about throttle as up/down rate and stick up/down as speed control.

I played the Mac version with my brother. We would often dogfight over the AppleTalk network in our home. My brother would often, possibly always, win.

Here's [0] a video of the Mac version, seems to have much better graphics than the DOS version and perhaps different quotes of Yeager as well.

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[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzQ5-o0s0Ao

The Mac (classic) version is how I first played the game as a kid and it was definitely the better version. Higher resolution and multiplayer over AppleTalk. Sadly the only Mac emulator I know of that can even attempt to do AppleTalk networking is Basilisk II, but it only works for posix OSs. The state of Mac emulation is still sad in 2020.

It's one of my favorites of all time. It has a great balance -- not overly complex so it's very casually playable, but enough good physics to make it really interesting and challenging. I still like to fire it up occasionally. It's not hard to find if you look around and it plays well with dosbox.

Same here. That game was amazing.

It had a decent physics engine for the time, which I appreciated. They talked about the basics of flight, energy management, maneuvers, and more.

Chuck would yell out "Check Six!" when an enemy was coming up behind you.

One of my favorite memories about that game was having to reverse engineer their anti-copying system. Growing up in Latin America getting legit games wasn't really a thing (both because of cost, but also availability), so I remember getting a copy of that game from a friend, who had copied it from a friend, etc.

I don't know if you recall, but the system worked by asking you a random question from the user manual ('what is the altitude ceiling for the MIG-15?', 'what is the maximum speed for the B-29 bomber?', etc.) My friend knew only one of the answers, which he wrote on a piece of paper for me. To start the game, I'd have to restart it a bunch of times until it asked me that specific question. Of course, that sucked so every time it'd ask a question we started taking notes and finding the answer from the awesome in-game plane database next time I got it to run... within a couple days we had transcribed most of the answers. It was my first encounter with such a security system and got me really interested in reverse engineering, which got me interested in understanding how programs worked... which ended in me being here 30 years later :)

was a great reason to buy a flight joystick controller!

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