Discussion

NooneAtAll3: I fondly remember what essentially is a more modern clone of Sopwith - "Pe-2 diving bomber"It is fun. Shoot-bomb-rearm/refuel in missions, upgrade your plane in between

contingencies: Superior successor was Wings of Fury.

jedberg: 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. :)

pan69: 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.

hencq: I think ours had a turbo button that would double/half the clock speed. Good times indeed :)

jedberg: 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).

stephenhuey: Discovered this on an old Apple 2 in the 90s. Loved the basic physics of things like flying inverted or flying down low and then releasing a bomb while pulling up into a steep climb so the bomb would fly more laterally to a target.

vasac: 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).

ChrisArchitect: More info on the SDL Sopwith port project https://fragglet.github.io/sdl-sopwith/

nikolay: I've spent endless hours playing Sopwith! What a legend!

pavel_lishin: I remember playing this game on my dad's computer, and being largely baffled at what I was supposed to do. Shoot, drop bombs, of course - but how do I land, refuel, how do the points work?Still a core memory, though.

hencq: 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.

bananaboy: 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!

digitalsushi: 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.

qingcharles: 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.

kkotak: Reminds me of Defender, a faster version with a 'Smart Bomb!' that was so fun to use :)