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Comment by imrehg | Hacker News Reader

Oh, this was one that I played a lot as a kid! (Alongside F-19 Stealth Fighter, F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter - the two that apparently came before and after this game - TIL, and to a lesser extent F-14 Tomcat)

I think, this needs the original game files to run, if I read things correctly. So probably just gonna read the dev journals, rather than fly this particular bird again...

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F-19 is a great game and one of my favorite Sid Meier titles ever. I remember buying it from Electronics Boutique in the late 1980s and playing it on our Packard Bell 286. The game's copy protection mechanism required you to look up aircraft in the manual and identify them. The consequence was that I memorized the entire set of aircraft in the game. I even bought a Gravis Analog joystick to play the game and I still have the keyboard overlay.

I would love a modern reboot of this game...

I can still remember the intro music for F-19 as played through the built-in PC speaker, the harsh tinniness just made it more of a banger.

And yep, that copy protection is why I can tell my Floggers from my Backfires at the limits of FLIR range lol.

Was this the one that you could play co-op with a friend in a front seat / back seat role? Or was it III? I spent so long ringing my friend on the landline to help set up his modem configuration,then having him dial in again, starting the game, him disconnecting again, me ringing him to see what had happened that time etc. etc. When we finally got it working, we played it so incessantly that his Mum banned him from playing it over the modem as we were tying up the sole phone line for hours.

I would love to find similar multiplayer in other flight sims, or space sims. I also really want to get this game working again and see if I can nostalgia bait my friend.

The dev blog is one of the best retro-reversing journals you can find. Happy reading!

Aren't these names trademarked? I can imagine lockheed selling the rights for a side income lol

Same as for any game that uses real car brands or gun manufacturers, quite a few of these companies are willing to license for certain types of game

The F-19 denomination was never used, they skipped from F-18 to F-20. The game was based on what they believed that the stealth fighter (F-117) was going to be before it was publicly acknowledged. So maybe it wasn't trademarked. (Or maybe they trademarked everything just in case...)

Vaguely similar to the F-29 Retaliator game, that was based in the X-29 experimental fighter, but not in an existing F-29 of any kind.

What about the Su-27 and Eurofighter games (from a bit later)?

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