Sopwith – a classic bi-plane shoot 'em up from 1984 in the browser | Hacker News Reader

Sopwith – a classic bi-plane shoot 'em up from 1984 in the browser

midzer.de

158 pointsmidzer62 comments

src: https://github.com/midzer/sdl-sopwith

via: https://fragglet.github.io/sdl-sopwith/

Open articleView on HN

This just looks like someone compiled someone else's SDL project using Emscripten and uploaded it.

Most of work was already done there: https://fragglet.github.io/sdl-sopwith/

Not even any commits in the fork, it's behind by 7 commits!

I did not realize there IS an Emscripten port already, sorry.

Nevertheless, I put build instructions in my fork here https://github.com/midzer/sdl-sopwith/tree/emscripten

There wasn't one, but just build instructions don't make a Show HN.

What makes you think that? I don't see that reflected in the rules. "Show" rules say nothing about how much effort one perceives someone put into something.

To quote what I think are relevant rules for this discussion:

"Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with." - check

"The project must be something you've worked on personally and which you're around to discuss." - check

Show HN is for original work other people can try out and provide feedback. The bar to 'original' is pretty low (a non-trivial port meets it, a Learner's First Project usually meets it, etc) but a straight fork-and-recompile stretches the meaning of 'worked on' to the point of meaninglessness.

You can't really respond to feedback if you didn't make the thing you're showhning.

"something you've worked on personally" pretty clearly does not cover pubolishing a completed project from someone else on a new platform.

My point was that it could have been a PR on the original repository, hosted by the original author, and that would have been a nice Show HN even if posted by the person who helped build it for the web. Contribute positively to a good project.

Would have been nice to share your emscripten build with the original project.

Ok, I've added "via https://fragglet.github.io/sdl-sopwith/" to the top text. I'm sure readers will appreciate looking at both. Thanks!

Not seeing it, what's the top text?

Eek, it disappeared. Is it back now?

Yes

I took this same port (SDL Sopwith) and ported it to Gamecube a number of years back [1]. It was surprisingly not that hard to do. As you said, most of the work was in the porting to SDL. The guy who did the SDL port was Simon Howard, by the way.

[1] https://code.google.com/archive/p/gamecubesopwith/

I remember playing this game on an old DOS laptop, even in the early 2000s.

This version is demonstrating an interesting gotcha with emulating sound. The old PC speaker hardware ran at over 1 MHz, and it would generate square waves at integer divisors of this rate. This version of the game is sampling these square waves at 48 KHz, and the jitter from the waves not lining up perfectly adds a bunch of noise known as aliasing artifacts. It's what's giving the music a sort of DTMF (touch tone) quality to it.

I recompiled the game locally with a mitigation for this effect, just by oversampling and taking an average, and it sounds a lot better.

Game Boys also have audio hardware that runs at such high frequencies. I wonder how many emulators run at that rate and downsample properly? High-quality square waves are tricky!

Ah Sopwith! I've got such good memories of playing this in the early 90s. Just 16 CGA colors but the gameplay is so good! :D

10 years later, in the early 2000s I made a fan sequel of Sopwith called 'Camel' https://sopwithcamel.sourceforge.net/ that helped me to get a job at EA. Long time ago now but I've just checked it and surprisingly it still works. Hats off to Windows backwards compatibility there. Anyway, please give Sopwith a go if you've missed it over the last ~40 years it's such a great game. As mentioned in another comment, the authentic experience is to play it on a 386 and then have to hit the turbo button to slow it down... :)

just 4 CGA colors, to be exact

I was a regular player when this was released. Thanks for the nostalgia!

Reminds me of this DOS jewel, Triplane Turmoil, which must have been inspired by Sopwith: https://www.mobygames.com/game/23228/triplane-turmoil/

Yeah, the first thing that came to mind. One of the gems of the 90s Finnish shareware gamedev scene.

Edit: Huh, I had no idea it has a sequel, released by 2006: https://www.mobygames.com/game/30613/triplane-turmoil-ii/

Blast from the past! Looking at its author David Clark's profile on LinkedIn, I see he went back to school ten years ago to get a PhD in geophysics!

Oh wow! I remember playing this as a kid! Thanks for posting this!

Me too! On my Tandy 1000 iirc.

So many hours on my IBM PC jr playing this. Thanks for the rush of nostalgia.

Me too on my 286!

I still have the phrase:

    Mission Completeorcycle

...burned into my subconscious.

The intro song blaring from from the “PC speaker” (any volume you want, as long as it’s MAX) is what’s burned into mine. This was on a pair of old computers running DOS at a Boys and Girls Club summer program I went to in the late 90’s.

Great! I wanted to play it for a long time. Searched online a bit ago, there was nothing. Thought it’s lost to time already.

I hope I’ll do better than when I was a kid

Not too long ago, archive.org put out a dos games library. This was the first game I looked for. I just looked again and they've got a nice interface for the library now! And, much to my delight, I just found an old fave

https://archive.org/details/msdos_International_Bridge_Contr...

It ain't much, but we only had the games my dad brought home from work back in those days. But I've been looking for this darn game for decades and couldn't remember the name. Guess it's high time to donate to the archive.

I played this game many hours as a 6 year old kid on my dads philips 8088 pc. It even had multiplayer, but never managed to get that working. I did manage making a giant hole with bombs in the void below.

This was also sold as "The Red Baron". I've looked online to see why it had two names, but haven't found a reason. Anyone know why?

The "Red Baron" version was just from a company that sold freeware games and changed all the names presumably hoping that nobody would notice.

http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Strike_F...

Wow, that's wild. I feel like you could sue for damages now, but I can't be sure if that was possible then.

Interesting. So the Sopwith code was always out there?

The site mentions Striker. I assume it is this Striker? https://www.mobygames.com/game/33720/striker/screenshots/dos... I also had that game. It claims Striker is a copy of Scramble but the Scramble game I find online is significantly different.

I also recognize Flightmare.

Thanks for the memories!

So many games of that era were superficially similar. The helicopter looks similar to Blue Thunder or Fort Apocalypse. The picking up people bit seems similar to Fort Apocalypse. The landscape and launchers might be reminiscent of some of the several Scramble versions. But it doesn't look like a copy of any of them to me.

There was also a Red Baron by Dynamix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Baron_%281990_video_game%2...

I loved that game, It felt so advanced for its time.

From the CGA era that brought you Alleycat... with far better sound... https://rawgit.valky.eu/gabonator/Work-in-progress/master/Do...

Alley Cat has a remake called the "Remeow Edition", which looks pretty good and also has some levels that weren't in the PC version. However the executable is flagged by online scanners and I'm afraid to run it: https://www.joflof.com/alley.html

Oh no, the pull down key isn't available on my keyboard, I have to loop to go down.

For some reason that I can not remember there was no pull down key available in the first version of Sopwith I remember playing. Possibly something with the layout of the (Swedish) keyboard I played on. But a later copy I got from some friend had a key to pull down, making the game far easier. But I want to remember I managed to get quite far even when only being able to pull up.

I remember playing this on my roommate's 386 DX 33 in 1992. It was way too fast so we had to hit the turbo button to slow the CPU down to 16 MHz in order to not immediately crash because it was too fast to control

I loved this game as a kid. I managed to play the networked 2 player version once ... I think it was over a parallel port connected between two PCs, but it was terribly laggy.

I once wrote a sprite editor for Sopwith. The sprites are encoded in the binary in a manner very similar to those on an NES ROM.

I wanted to make a mod where you could fly as the ox, but I couldn't rotate the ox well enough that it didn't look horrible.

Earlier this month, I actually started to recreate the sprite editor in JS. It's a back burner project, not sure when it'll be done.

This plays rather faster than I remember on my 8088.

My favorite was to launch the bomb while making a vertical climb. It goes off-screen but eventually comes back.

Tip: If pull up/down feel backward to you when the plane is flipped, go into the options and enable "Harry keys mode" :)

Altitude is a very nice multiplayer game inspired by biplanes https://store.steampowered.com/app/41300/Altitude/

Yeah, played it with multiplayer modes.

That’s a great game. Early versions were more like Sopwith. The game was called Biplanes and only one plane type was available, and you played multiplayer dogfights.

Is there any connection to the level in DuckTales where you are traveling between locations on the map with the help of Launchpad McQuack? The flight mechanics are very similar.

I’m not sure exactly what DuckTales game you’re referring to, but this game very likely predated it.

The Quest for Gold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckTales:_The_Quest_for_Gold

I like how you can enter full screen mode from the menu that requires you to hit escape to exit the menu, but the browser traps that as exit full screen.

i forgot how brutal this game is. almost every explosion has a human body flying through the air, sometimes multiple.

you basically go bomb buildings, there is no concept of civilian vs military targets. your job is to completely obliterate every single standing structure that is not the same color as you. the enemy pilots you fight are all suicidal, they come directly for your plan without even a hint of trying to avoid you.

the only way to 'win' is to triumph over a desolate landscape of complete and utter destruction, not a single standing building left in the entire area except for your hangar and fuel depot. no concept of roads, houses, anything, it presents a kind of dystopian industrial void where life only exists for one purpose - to create airplanes to blow up each others buildings.

not only this but it has landscape deformation, something many games still do not have in 2023. the idea of explosions without craters, a kind of sanitized version of how pressure waves work in real life. Sopwith had it realistic in that aspect at least.

but what a bleak and desolate lanscape. a small valley, no way out, except mass extermination of all other signs of life. a denuded pixel landscape of harsh white is all that stands after victory.

anyways still loads of fun. not sure what it means to have us as a species programmed to love destruction.

> it presents a kind of dystopian industrial void where life only exists for one purpose - to create airplanes to blow up each others buildings.

Fortress: the last day of war

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

This is fun! I didn't know that it was possible to play games over IP in 1984.

Exception thrown trying to launch on iOS

Works for me on iOS 17.2, but I don't have an external keyboard connected so I can imagine steering will be impossible.

I loved this as a kid. Not sure it has a lot of attraction outside of nostalgia though. It’s not like Mario or something where it’s timeless.

Holy crap! I used to play this video game 40 years ago! Playing it awakened decades-dormant memories of tricks I used to do like flying upside down while dropping a bomb! I just sent this to my buddy who I used to play this with all the time on his original IBM PC!

Thank you for this!

Sky Kid 8D

This is lovely. Thanks for sharing. I used to play this game a LOT.

Same here, what a nostalgia hit! Immediately got a huge grin on my face the first time I blew myself up by dropping a bomb while upside down - a classic mistake I've done hundreds of times.

One of my favorite childhood games!

Me and my friend would wake up a couple of hours early before going to school in order to play a few sessions!

Tips when playing against the computer: Try to make the enemy planes crash into each other or into the ground.

More info: http://sopwith.org/

There seems to be a lot of video game content on HN lately, and I like this very much :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com