Best combat flight simulator ever - on Linux
I still consider Yeager’s Air Combat to be the best combat flight simulator I ever flew. Sure, the graphics are simpler polygons. But the controls, flight information and above all the responsiveness of the flight controls were the best I’ve ever flown. The only one that comes close was SVGA Air Warrior, but that flight simulator was better suited to heads up modem play than play against the computer. Dosbox lets you run this classic on Linux with USB Joysticks on a basic laptop with a nothing special graphics card. What better way to recycle (old computers) and save money (on operating systems and new games).
I’d kept my Air Combat disks around all these years because it was such a good program. Though some diligent Googling should allow you to find archived versions. Neverlock was a nifty piece of software back in the day that let you not have to grab the instruction book and answer questions for the piracy protection.
Neverlock works splendidly in Dosbox, just like it was dos. So I can no open a terminal, mount the Yeager Air Combat directory as a drive letter (C: for example) and then go to that drive. Just like dos, type in the name of the executable and you are flying. After applying Neverlock, the name of the executable was changed so that any answer is acceptable. It means I can travel anywhere with my laptop, toss a portable USB joystick into my bag, and be able to fly anytime. Since there are several programs from that vintage I like that used the manual for copy protection, it is very nice to be able to apply Neverlock and play any one I wish without hauling my manuals everwhere.
Air Combat flies great. Very smooth, and the action is well paced for a flight sim. You can get right into the action. The only thing I’ve found that doesn’t seem to translate on my PC is that his voice is garbled. The sound in the sim isn’t the best, but it is OK. Air Combat is also unique in that you can fly WWII fighters, Korean War jets, or Vietnam era jets. Some of the features that Electronic Arts got right about the simulator was the information display as shown in the picture above. Heading, altitude, zoom (incase you forgot what it was set to), thrust. Very intuitive stuff. If a bogey is found, you can also lock onto him and an indicator will show you his direction even when he has gone out of view. I think this is the greatest challenge of a combat flight simulator, how to “look around”. It is very hard to do and fly. The indicator tells you where to fly to reacquire visual of the target, and it is a great device to make the game playable. EA made many choices in the game that IMHO made the perfect tradeoff between playability and totally realistic sim.
Dosbox is available for other operating systems too, including Macs. I find something very ironic about running Dosbox on a Windows machine to run dos applications. But run them it does. It can also run other applications besides games, something I tend to forget. Many of the very old dos applications were really useful. You can resurrect them with Dosbox.
- the MuseTags: Linux