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That was a nice trip down memory lane...
I had to save for a whole year to get my Amiga 500, I bought it for 1 reason and one reason only - Falcon. I loved that game, and soon got into Stealth Fighter F-19. I still have fond memories of me and my best friend playing F-19 together - one pilot, one navigator. I swear to god, mission planning was more fun than actually flying the mission.
I kind of miss the days when you needed a keyboard overlay to play a game, ( http://oagd.net/file/8358c6a052c1734431c0f16cb4fa8efd41daf37... )- and the later Falcon games had one of the biggest manuals I've ever seen.
Makes me think I should take a look at the current state of combat flight sims.
Any good recommendations that would work on a linux system? (it's a decent laptop, 16GB RAM and Nvidia card with 2GB)
This might not be the answer you like, but for "serious" fighter jet simulators there is pretty much two options, both of them Windows only.
There is still a community around Falcon 4.0 keeping it on life-support. But I wouldn't really recommend it as a starting point, considering the significant effort it takes just to get it up and running.
The other alternative, more modern and my recommendation, is DCS family. It consits of (gratis) core DCS "World" engine, and a selection of (paid) add-on modules (=planes etc). The nice thing about it is that you can just download DCS: World to try it out, it includes two planes you can fly. The not so nice aspect is that it is quite heavy, both in terms of hardware requirements and in terms of gameplay/learning curve. Its very much jumping to the deep end.
Have you tried http://tnlgame.net/ and/or http://www.heptargon.de/gl-117/gl-117.html ?
This is looks interesting, too: http://www.lgdb.org/game/arma-3
Falcon was indeed awesome. I remember taking the manual to bed with me since it was such a great read.
Even before that, F/A-18 Interceptor!
Loved that game. Flying under the Golden Gate bridge! F-19 was great as well.
Jay Miner[1] built some pretty awesome chipsets. I learned about computers on the Atari 400 and lusted after the Amiga. About the time I could afford it, he was gone and Commodore lasted not much longer.
What - no Ulitma IV screenshots? After moving over from the C64 version, I loved the Amiga graphics - plus who doesn't love a "Please Insert Thy Play Disk" prompt.
That video is not representative of anything - it's played in an emulator with some weird scaling going on (maybe hq2x).
And the prettiest ultima iv was of course on the fm towns: http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/u5lazarus/images/d/d8/Ul...
Thanks - I knew it looked better. I was afraid my memory was failing me.
The game didn't look anything like that video. It's the wrong aspect ratio and has some weird image filter applied to it.
Ah Deluxe Paint, still the pixel art app that I judge all others by.
When I needed to create some pixel art for my last game, Antigen, I used DPaint 4 running on an emulator. I still hit DPaint keyboard shortcuts by accident in Photoshop.
Brilliance was even better, but never really got the same mindshare. (Possibly because it was quite a bit more expensive.)
Still haven't found anything as fun to use.
MVP Paint was a cool DOS clone. I really admired that little company for some reason.
Modern "clone": http://pulkomandy.tk/projects/GrafX2
Can anyone recommend a good Amiga emulator? I would love to play Faery Tale Adventure again.
For Mac/Linux: FS-UAE http://fs-uae.net/
For Windows: WinUAE http://www.winuae.net/
Love it, i played so many of these games :) Also once made a ball bounce around the screen using amiga basic. Guess that was my first attempt at programming :D Thanks for sharing!
Ah, that AMOS screenshot brings back memories.
And Blitz Basic was a blast. It supported embedded assembler, which was hugely fun and educational to mess around with.
I loved Blitz Basic. It was great how it gave you access to the whole Amiga. You could use the built-in commands, write inline assembly, and easily use operating system functions/structures. Modern "game BASICs", even the latest iterations of Blitz are limited sandboxes in comparison.
Mainstream Amiga programming in C or assembly language was very expensive compared to today. As a teen I couldn't afford Devpac, or the Hardware Reference Manual, but Blitz gave me what I needed to make real progress as a programmer. One of my friends even got texture-mapped 3d going, although it wasn't quick!
I've recently got back into messing around with Amigas and Blitz is still fun, though a little weird for someone used to C#.
It's amazing how much more accessible all the documentation and tools are now. HTML versions of the RKMs are available on the web and for C there's a cross-compiling toolchain available on github (https://github.com/cahirwpz/amigaos-cross-toolchain)
This. It might seem odd to some to combine BASIC and assembler but a programmer friend of mine used that ability to start playing with assembler (which he'd never done before) and experimented with replacing some BASIC routines in his games with assembler. As a relative newbie his socks were blown off at the speed-up he could achieve, I feel sure that it spurred him on in his programming career. (Ironically he is now a contract programmer writing corporate software in Java, but there you go...!)