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Sopwith – 1984 Game (2000)

sopwith.org

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Re: Sopwith – 1984 Game (2000)

#33
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.

Re: Sopwith – 1984 Game (2000)

#37
post #12
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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).

[deleted]

Re: Sopwith – 1984 Game (2000)

#38
post #12
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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).

AFAIK no first-party IBM PC ever had a turbo button, only clones, and my only personal recollection of pre-286 clones running significantly faster than 4.77 MHz were the Compaq Deskpro and AT&T PC 6300.

I don't know about the PC 6300 — I only ever used it to run Aldus PageMaker, which, running under Windows on an 8086, could use all the speed it could get — but the Deskpro had a keystroke combination to switch between native and compatible speeds rather than a button.

Re: Sopwith – 1984 Game (2000)

#39
post #8

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. :)

Was the utility called slomo? I recall having to do something like `slomo sopwith.exe` to bring the processing loop back down into human ranges of reaction times.

Re: Sopwith – 1984 Game (2000)

#40
post #23

The classic Sopwith clone from the golden days of the Finnish shareware game scene, Triplane Turmoil, turns thirty this year. It was open sourced in 2009 and community-ported to more modern platforms via SDL. Was a lot of fun back in the days of shared-keyboard multiplayer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplane_Turmoil

I love this game so much - the theme music randomly pops into my head at least once a year :)
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