Enjoyed that :) I played F-29, TFX, EF2000 and Wargasm back in my PC gaming days and ended up working for Evolution as an artist on the first two MotorStorm games around ten years later. Martin's a great MD and he's got an uncanny knack of having both solid game concepts and surrounding himself with ginromous game-dev brains, a lot of my ex-colleagues came from DiD. Simultaneously nostalgic and proud. :)
Wonderful video, thank you. I have to say, even now - playing flight sim's such as Ace Combat (arcade style with amazing graphics) on a big 4K TV doesn't come close to giving me the level of excitement that EF2000 did when playing over Wireplay from Birmingham with a 56k modem with teammates in New York on a 22" CRT display with perhaps 8-16 MB of RAM. How times have changed. I miss you DID. I read every single page of the EF2000 manual, then turned up at airshows as a skinny teenager and talked to real RAF pilots who hadn't seen the EF2000 sim' and wondered how on earth a young lad knew quite so much about it. Only on getting the manual out of my rucksack, I was able to show them quite how much knowledge was public domain. That's made my Friday morning remembering all of that from this video. Thanks again!
Yes, the EF/F22 era was the apex of flight sim games. The new stuff, like Lock-On, is visually better, but you need an awfully fast PC to run it decently. BTW, 22" is really big for a CRT; I had 17" back then, and that was already above average. Many users still had 14 or 15. The funny thing about the manual is that the military manuals are the same size and shape as the EF2000 manuals shown at 07:13.
tfx and ef 2000 were the closest thing to the real millions of dollars flight simulators at the time, and i must have had at least 1000 hours in these games if not way more. And what i can remember is that i had a 1mb GPU, and tfx came in a large heavy box with a manualas thick as a phonebook and about 12 floppydisks and took and entire day to install the game that took 100mb harddisk space on my 486 dx2 66mhz pc. Later i bought wing commander, a space game, and for that i needed a bigger GPU, so i swapped my 1mb for a 2mb GPU! Well that was over 25 years ago now, so time did fly by alright.
@@3DPeter But I played Wing Commander I, II, III and IV* onna' 486DX2 with 1MB onboard Cirrus Logic 5434? *Yup! It got a bit(VERY) slow in 1996! AH! Happy times when getting a new x86 = INSTA obsolete ;-) EDIT: Might be Wing Commander: Prophecy(V) WAY prettier with GLIDE ;-) ?
DID were such a 90's thing! TFX was more an 'experience' than a game for me. It ran like a dog on my PC and I was awful at it, but it was just awesome to look at and listen too. EF2000 was just a great flight sim with a pleasing British take to it, and Wargasm... well it had a certain charm! Good times.
Easily the best produced and narrated retrogame company video on UA-cam. It is not an easy job to tell us the DID story and highlights in 10 minutes, but you pulled it off remarkably. Appreciate the research and effort you put into making this video on Digital Image Design. UK game development at its best! RetroManCave, you are THE man! Request: perhaps you can do one for its cousin, Digital Integration (DI) as well. ;-)
I didn't know F29 Retal(iator) and F22 Air Dominance Fighter were made by the same company! Loved both infinitely! F22 was SO amazing, you could even play as the AWACs aircraft, refill fuel on air, challenge your friends in multiplayer, simulate engine, electrical and hydraulic failure (hydraulic was the hardest to dominate!) so rich, massive and great game!!!
@@DiegoSynth They should pick up where they left because i liked tfx and EF2000 very much and played those games for hundreds of hours, so imagine what they could do with the tech of today. They could make the best combat flight sim that could stand the test of time for at least an entire decade. Now i tried this free version of DCS, but don't like it a bit, because the graphics look outdated and the planes react like shit and the weapons systems hardly work, and the keayboard layout makes no sense, so i wish a 2021 version of TFX and/or EF2000 would come out.
@@3DPeter Happened something similar to me with DCS. The full keyboard is not enough to control everything... Graphics were not that good. I understand they can be improved with MODS and stuff, but I think sometimes less is more.
Nice work - there's a good 10 years of my life there, from Robocop right up to Wargasm. Some of the best years of my life. The next adventure was Evolution studios and another 10 years - wonderful stuff. Thanks Martin (Kenwright) and to everyone else - great friendships formed :)
This was fantastic. You did this so well, congratulations. The second we saw this game, my friend and I bought it and played it nonstop through 96, 97, 98, and 99. The memories from seeing it again after all these years was overwhelming. We thought it was so advanced, so futuristic, we were in love with it. Nothing ever came close to it. Thanks!
wonderful flying simulators from DID : i have even now EF2000 and F22 Total war; and their wonderful box, paper manuals and strategy guides from simtech, installed in my computer window 10. They never left my computers ! still playing sometimes with the mods to make it works on win10.
Great video. I loved F-22 ADF and remember sitting in a cafe in Epsom drooling over the screenshots in PC Gamer magazine - and had to buy it from that. In fact I remember I had a hot cheese croissant reading through the article. I went on to become a beta tester for Wargasm, and that propelled me into Falcon 4.0, from which I got involved in the community and then Lead Pursuit. Happy days.
I got that TFX that was released for the Amiga in a magazine cover CD IIRC. Later in the PC, the Super EF2000 was one of my favorite flight sims of the 1990s. Awesome video, I still have Robocop 3 and many others complete in box for Amiga.
EF2000 was the sim I waited for on the Amiga but it didn't get released for so long, that I bought my first PC! It was brilliant - mind blowing. That manual, right up there with Microprose's. 3dfx Voodoo 3 graphics card - feel the power. Wargasm was brilliant on Amiga & flipping difficult. I remember flying for the first time & seeing raindrops running down the canopy - mind blowing.
This makes me want a new Comanche game... I still have F-22 Raptor and F-22 Lightning 3 from Novalogic in their original box here. I can't believe these are more than 20 years old already!
I had the original 11 floppy disc version of TFX which after much cursing eventually managed to get installed and running on my early 486 machine. It was amazing for its time and some epic dogfights ensued. My current project is rebuilding a retro machine to run a CD version of the game at max resolution and frame rate.
thank you for the video, always sad to see these amazing studios be destroyed by big publishers. Our french friends at Infogrames bought a ton of studios and publishers and then renamed themselves Atari. They then destroyed everything!!!! thank you Bruno Bonnell.
Huge thanks for making this video. I searched for a DID documentary like this in the past, and could never find it on UA-cam, and now you've finally made the overview I've been wanting to see, =). I got a promo VHS of TFX and Inferno back in the day, yet never heard of DID beyond those two games, and given how impressive they both looked for the time (sadly I never got to play either), I've always wanted to know more about DID - the company behind them, =). This was a great overview, and gives me some other game titles to add to my search queries for more info on DID's history, =). Am grateful - again: thanks! =).
great video. tfx was my no. 1 simulator when i was a kid, then total air war in my late teens... amazing games. other favourites were chuck yeager's air combat, novalogic's commanche 3, f14 fleet defender, ka50 hokum.
So, I bought a Monster Joystick today (inspired by RMC and using link from RMC), and whilst I wait for it and my new Raspberry Pi to arrive I did some nostalgia watching on old C64 and Amiga games I might dabble with when all set up. On Amiga I watched an F29 Retaliator vid where, low and behold, who had commented? RMC! Mentioning this video you had done, and so here am I am, back (in some ways ) where I started. What a nice circular trip 😄👍
I remember Eurofighter and having my first VooDoo card. I thought it couldn't get any better than that. F-22 was so cool and high fidelity. Though I was ignorant of the whole stealth concept and used my radar all of the time. I learned, after getting my but handed to me, that turning on your radar is equivalent to hanging a neon sign on your plane.. regardless of how stealthy. So I'm in a mission and get blasted in short order. I complain from the desk just outside of our living room that I had already been shot down. My wife said, "That's kind of hard in a stealth fighter, isn't it?" 😂
The golden age of PC flight simulation was the 90s, when you even had, among many others, two successful companies with similar name acronyms (DID and DI) cranking out quality flight simulators...
Lesson to be learned: As soon as a large corporation hoovers up a studio that created great games, stop buying their stuff. They try to milk the name and dump it as soon as the husk is dry. For reference, see Westwood, Maxis, DID, BlueByte, MicroProse, SSI, Cinemaware, ...
My first day of computer classes in elementary school ~91 we found brand new computer lab full of outdated 286/vga machines loaded with F29 Retaliator, Centurion, Street Rod 1/2 and Turbo Pascal 6.0. Retaliator was the only flight sim-ish game I ever enjoyed, I even seem to have a memory of multiplayer over null modem. Didnt know same people did Juiced racing game.
F-29 Retaliator, my first PC game ever, 6 years old, non-english speaker, never learned to play it properly, just shooting rockets at everything that moved :D
I remember play some of this games on my 486DX4 100mhz with 16mb of RAM and a Blasting Trident 9680 with 2mb of VRAM! It's amazing... See and play some of the first 3D games, like Need For Speed, know the CD-ROM newest technology at this time, internet with my 28k modem! We're living a dream era of tech! But I allways have a good memories about old tech! Nostalgic!
They should really remake ef2000 and total air war. just graphics updates. the dynamic campaings are still unmatched. no flight sim has had that same feelign since
A thing to note - 7:27 those were not narrowed - you wont find them in the manual, those were additional functions that were introduced into the game most likely when the manual already hit the printing.
EF2000 and TAW never left my computers ! they are so good, so fun, so easy to play. EF2000 and especially TAW is ENORMOUS, you cannot finish this game, the replay value is huge. With the adaptation for win10, we can continue to use it.
Worked with a lot of lovely talented people at Juice, a lot of ex rage, did, ocean peeps. Even though Juice was a racing studio, there was always a flight sim / airborne arcade battle shooter being developed in parallel, one which sadly was canned a couple of years before THQ went down the pan. Many chats down the pub about about MK, can’t say they were positive but hey so much drama in games.
Great video, I properly started enjoying flight games with TFX (Previously dabbled on Dads computers with F15 Strike Eagle 2, and Infiltrator on the Amstrad CPC-6128!) but TFX, EF2000 and F22 ADF were the ones I played to death, I even bought Inferno (although didn't really like it!). Thanks for such a great vid!
I remember when I first bought EF 2000 and opened the box and seen the massive book, I spent a while reading it. I never owned or knew about EF 2000 2.0 back then. I still have my EF 2000 disc (and probably the book).
i love this company,the retaliator preceded his era with speed and graphic,all late DID game is very realistic like Tornado,F-22,Eurofigher,superhornet, my favourite pc team with spectrum holobyte,i play all sim games from c64 dam busters to Comanche-Hokum from this list missing the fantastic apache/hind DID sims update:I always confuse with the "Digital integration", that other big name from the 90s and 2000s
I bought F22, Total Air War and Wargasm. Love them all. I think F22 was graphically slightly better than TAW because it supported 3DFX where TAW was strictly direct x
What happened to DID..? I came to this YT vid because I wanted to install my 16 bit F22 Total Air War...but failed on my 64 bit computer...WTF !? The best sim to this day.. 8 sept 2019...20 years later!! I think buying an old PC just dedicated to this game.. I salute you too DID
I had (and still have) F22 ADF when I was a kid. The game obviously went far above my ten-year-old head, but it fascinated me nevertheless. Sadly, it requires a lot of work to get it running on a newer computer these days. At least for me it had a lot of issues, starting from getting the game installed (which can be solved by using a 32 bit InstallShield version), and then getting the game to run for more than 10 seconds at a time.
Google TAW 2.0, I had much fun flying the good old sims (EF2000) though it never had high resolution graphics like games nowadays. It had so much athmosphere, dynamic campaign was so much fun. It was really challenging to play too.
I play Wargasm and have a problem with the M key and the map. Sometimes the map will not work and you can't find your targets. Have you ever run into that?
Ehm, sorry to be the guy but TFX did not have SVGA mode yet :) That's good old 320x200. EF2000 was their first one with svga. This is because at the time SVGA was so slow that could only be used for a specific kind of games (some adventure games, some strategic ones) that did not need scroll or animations, but I guess you know that, just talking to the audience
I've never heard why it wasn't released (because of Nintendo objecting to the title, or the game being too demanding for the Nintendo 64's hardware, or for business reasons…) or how far it got in development - or even if it wasn't a screw up by a PR department; I feel it might have been that a batch of footage was sent out and the recipient, seeing so much of the footage was for the N64, assumed that _all_ of the footage was for the N64; but I really don't know
@@youdontneedtoseehisidentif4939 If you do ever find that VHS tape- we'd love to see it. One of those lost treasures of unreleased game development that really should be brought back out into the light
got TFX on 6 floppy disks from a car boot sale when i was about 12.. Got f22 TAW demo from a pc gamer magazine shortly after that, not found anything as fun since.
You missed big one ... Strike commander ;) by Chris Roberts in 1993 and the most " beautiful and advanced for this year, with cinematics , speak interractions in menu"
+NumosG hi and thank you, this was an early video when I was still finding my pace and presentation style (which I still am) so it's quite different to my newer videos. I'd like to cover another software house soon if you have any requests let me know
Any old enough to remember when Wargasm was released it was to be part of TAW and DIDs Air and Ground engine - can’t remember it’s name, like it is 29 years ago that I got EF2000
Good memories. Thank you for reminding. Not sure why google only just showed me this video existed when I’m subscribed but hey ho. Loved F29 on the Amiga and still have my original. 3rd most played Amiga game after dungeon master then Falcon. And only beaten by Skyrim/fallout 4 &3. I loved the arcade approach having played Falcon F16 to death. Always enjoyed their games although the realism of the later releases was not appreciated as much as I never had the time to spend on them due to work. Again thank you for another great video. Happy Christmas
EF2000 supported two early 3D virtual reality goggles too one them the Forte VFX1 and virtual i/o glasses though they had low resolution like lower than even 320 by 240 pixels whereas the regular game could be played on a great looking 640 by 480 pixel resolutions on a CRT monitor. Here is a UA-cam video link on the Forte helmet ua-cam.com/video/J0n5B3fl-bU/v-deo.html
Good God, Retaliator and Epic were very poor games at the time they were released. As for the supposed "fast frame rate", this was achieved by having a ridiculously short draw distance, with objects popping into existence right in front of the player. The landscapes were barren and there was little sense of momentum - and no sense at all that you were flying an aircraft, unlike F18 Interceptor, where you could feel wind resistance and your aircraft being buffeted by cross-winds.
Can someone help me out with Wargasm? The game does run in Windows 10 but only runs in windowed mode at 640x480 so it's a tiny window in the corner of the screen. Anyone know how to get it to run fullscreen?
Is it the original release or a GOG.COM repackaging? Apparantly setting the compatability mode properties of tank.exe to Win98 mode is a known fix for this on XP. Might be worth a try.
It's a cd image I got off an abandonware site that included the patch. Nothing I tried works, I think the problem is that I can't save the config settings.
I am fairly sure I wrote the installer for that game back in 1998 (when I was at DiD). My memory is a bit hazy (it was the 90s), but this might work: Back then we wrote a small config text file (can't remember the name) that should be in the Wargasm directory in 'Program Files'. From about Vista onwards Microsoft discouraged developers writing data into the Program Files directory. So to fix this, try running the game in Windows Administrator mode, that should provide it with the rights to write the config file out. Or run notepad in admin mode and try editing the config file in the Program Files directory. There are some compatibility modes in Windows that might be worth trying with it too. Hope that works.
DID Flight simulators and Novalogic were my introduction to gaming. I'll never forget where it started
Enjoyed that :) I played F-29, TFX, EF2000 and Wargasm back in my PC gaming days and ended up working for Evolution as an artist on the first two MotorStorm games around ten years later. Martin's a great MD and he's got an uncanny knack of having both solid game concepts and surrounding himself with ginromous game-dev brains, a lot of my ex-colleagues came from DiD. Simultaneously nostalgic and proud. :)
Wonderful video, thank you. I have to say, even now - playing flight sim's such as Ace Combat (arcade style with amazing graphics) on a big 4K TV doesn't come close to giving me the level of excitement that EF2000 did when playing over Wireplay from Birmingham with a 56k modem with teammates in New York on a 22" CRT display with perhaps 8-16 MB of RAM.
How times have changed. I miss you DID. I read every single page of the EF2000 manual, then turned up at airshows as a skinny teenager and talked to real RAF pilots who hadn't seen the EF2000 sim' and wondered how on earth a young lad knew quite so much about it. Only on getting the manual out of my rucksack, I was able to show them quite how much knowledge was public domain.
That's made my Friday morning remembering all of that from this video. Thanks again!
Yes, the EF/F22 era was the apex of flight sim games. The new stuff, like Lock-On, is visually better, but you need an awfully fast PC to run it decently. BTW, 22" is really big for a CRT; I had 17" back then, and that was already above average. Many users still had 14 or 15.
The funny thing about the manual is that the military manuals are the same size and shape as the EF2000 manuals shown at 07:13.
TFX and F22 were classics of their time. Still look good now, remember going down the 3DFX route purely for these.... and not being disappointed :o)
tfx and ef 2000 were the closest thing to the real millions of dollars flight simulators at the time, and i must have had at least 1000 hours in these games
if not way more. And what i can remember is that i had a 1mb GPU, and tfx came in a large heavy box with a manualas thick as a phonebook
and about 12 floppydisks and took and entire day to install the game that took 100mb harddisk space on my 486 dx2 66mhz pc.
Later i bought wing commander, a space game, and for that i needed a bigger GPU, so i swapped my 1mb for a 2mb GPU!
Well that was over 25 years ago now, so time did fly by alright.
@@3DPeter But I played Wing Commander I, II, III and IV* onna' 486DX2 with 1MB onboard Cirrus Logic 5434?
*Yup! It got a bit(VERY) slow in 1996! AH! Happy times when getting a new x86 = INSTA obsolete ;-)
EDIT: Might be Wing Commander: Prophecy(V) WAY prettier with GLIDE ;-) ?
DID were such a 90's thing! TFX was more an 'experience' than a game for me. It ran like a dog on my PC and I was awful at it, but it was just awesome to look at and listen too. EF2000 was just a great flight sim with a pleasing British take to it, and Wargasm... well it had a certain charm! Good times.
Easily the best produced and narrated retrogame company video on UA-cam. It is not an easy job to tell us the DID story and highlights in 10 minutes, but you pulled it off remarkably. Appreciate the research and effort you put into making this video on Digital Image Design. UK game development at its best! RetroManCave, you are THE man! Request: perhaps you can do one for its cousin, Digital Integration (DI) as well. ;-)
Frankie Kam Very kind thank you!
+1 for Digital Integration.
Nice username 😂
Fantastic video! Really enjoyed the story of DID and overview of all their software. Thank you!
I had ALL of their flight simulators., they were the best ever
Me too! I would love to play Total Air War on todays computers.
I didn't know F29 Retal(iator) and F22 Air Dominance Fighter were made by the same company! Loved both infinitely! F22 was SO amazing, you could even play as the AWACs aircraft, refill fuel on air, challenge your friends in multiplayer, simulate engine, electrical and hydraulic failure (hydraulic was the hardest to dominate!) so rich, massive and great game!!!
@@DiegoSynth
They should pick up where they left because i liked tfx and EF2000 very much and played those games for hundreds of hours,
so imagine what they could do with the tech of today. They could make the best combat flight sim that could stand the test of time for at least
an entire decade. Now i tried this free version of DCS, but don't like it a bit, because the graphics look outdated and the planes react like shit
and the weapons systems hardly work, and the keayboard layout makes no sense, so i wish a 2021 version of TFX and/or EF2000 would come out.
@@DiegoSynth that awacs mission was the best, only managed to pass the first one
@@3DPeter Happened something similar to me with DCS. The full keyboard is not enough to control everything... Graphics were not that good. I understand they can be improved with MODS and stuff, but I think sometimes less is more.
Nice work - there's a good 10 years of my life there, from Robocop right up to Wargasm. Some of the best years of my life. The next adventure was Evolution studios and another 10 years - wonderful stuff. Thanks Martin (Kenwright) and to everyone else - great friendships formed :)
Andrew thanks for dropping in. If you are interested in sharing your experiences at DID for a video I'd love to chat
Yo, G! :)
sounds good, I'd be happy to help
I would like to know which Windows, is best for Wargasm
Great job
This was fantastic. You did this so well, congratulations. The second we saw this game, my friend and I bought it and played it nonstop through 96, 97, 98, and 99. The memories from seeing it again after all these years was overwhelming. We thought it was so advanced, so futuristic, we were in love with it. Nothing ever came close to it. Thanks!
Brings back some great memories, thanks!
Well look what I found while looking for footage of flying above the clouds in TFX :D Hi Neil! :) Loved this. You NEED to do more :)
wonderful flying simulators from DID : i have even now EF2000 and F22 Total war; and their wonderful box, paper manuals and strategy guides from simtech, installed in my computer window 10. They never left my computers ! still playing sometimes with the mods to make it works on win10.
How to play Wargasm On In 7
mods? could you elaborate on this please!
Great video. I loved F-22 ADF and remember sitting in a cafe in Epsom drooling over the screenshots in PC Gamer magazine - and had to buy it from that. In fact I remember I had a hot cheese croissant reading through the article. I went on to become a beta tester for Wargasm, and that propelled me into Falcon 4.0, from which I got involved in the community and then Lead Pursuit. Happy days.
I got that TFX that was released for the Amiga in a magazine cover CD IIRC. Later in the PC, the Super EF2000 was one of my favorite flight sims of the 1990s. Awesome video, I still have Robocop 3 and many others complete in box for Amiga.
EF2000 was the sim I waited for on the Amiga but it didn't get released for so long, that I bought my first PC! It was brilliant - mind blowing. That manual, right up there with Microprose's. 3dfx Voodoo 3 graphics card - feel the power.
Wargasm was brilliant on Amiga & flipping difficult. I remember flying for the first time & seeing raindrops running down the canopy - mind blowing.
Nice, they used my Wargasm video, i feel quite honored.
This makes me want a new Comanche game...
I still have F-22 Raptor and F-22 Lightning 3 from Novalogic in their original box here. I can't believe these are more than 20 years old already!
I had the original 11 floppy disc version of TFX which after much cursing eventually managed to get installed and running on my early 486 machine. It was amazing for its time and some epic dogfights ensued. My current project is rebuilding a retro machine to run a CD version of the game at max resolution and frame rate.
Awesome video as always. I have great memories with these games.
thank you for the video, always sad to see these amazing studios be destroyed by big publishers. Our french friends at Infogrames bought a ton of studios and publishers and then renamed themselves Atari. They then destroyed everything!!!! thank you Bruno Bonnell.
Thanks for such a great video! Brought back lots of memories!!
Huge thanks for making this video. I searched for a DID documentary like this in the past, and could never find it on UA-cam, and now you've finally made the overview I've been wanting to see, =). I got a promo VHS of TFX and Inferno back in the day, yet never heard of DID beyond those two games, and given how impressive they both looked for the time (sadly I never got to play either), I've always wanted to know more about DID - the company behind them, =). This was a great overview, and gives me some other game titles to add to my search queries for more info on DID's history, =). Am grateful - again: thanks! =).
thx so much for this video, I finally found the first game I ever played TFX and another game forgotten from my childhood, F22 ADF
great video. tfx was my no. 1 simulator when i was a kid, then total air war in my late teens... amazing games. other favourites were chuck yeager's air combat, novalogic's commanche 3, f14 fleet defender, ka50 hokum.
So, I bought a Monster Joystick today (inspired by RMC and using link from RMC), and whilst I wait for it and my new Raspberry Pi to arrive I did some nostalgia watching on old C64 and Amiga games I might dabble with when all set up. On Amiga I watched an F29 Retaliator vid where, low and behold, who had commented? RMC! Mentioning this video you had done, and so here am I am, back (in some ways ) where I started. What a nice circular trip 😄👍
Really nice, did not know about their space sims at all!
I remember Eurofighter and having my first VooDoo card. I thought it couldn't get any better than that.
F-22 was so cool and high fidelity. Though I was ignorant of the whole stealth concept and used my radar all of the time. I learned, after getting my but handed to me, that turning on your radar is equivalent to hanging a neon sign on your plane.. regardless of how stealthy. So I'm in a mission and get blasted in short order. I complain from the desk just outside of our living room that I had already been shot down. My wife said, "That's kind of hard in a stealth fighter, isn't it?" 😂
The golden age of PC flight simulation was the 90s, when you even had, among many others, two successful companies with similar name acronyms (DID and DI) cranking out quality flight simulators...
Thanks for this video ! Bring me lot of nice memories !
Lesson to be learned: As soon as a large corporation hoovers up a studio that created great games, stop buying their stuff. They try to milk the name and dump it as soon as the husk is dry.
For reference, see Westwood, Maxis, DID, BlueByte, MicroProse, SSI, Cinemaware, ...
Special prize for EA, on this matter.
You effed it up!
My first day of computer classes in elementary school ~91 we found brand new computer lab full of outdated 286/vga machines loaded with F29 Retaliator, Centurion, Street Rod 1/2 and Turbo Pascal 6.0. Retaliator was the only flight sim-ish game I ever enjoyed, I even seem to have a memory of multiplayer over null modem.
Didnt know same people did Juiced racing game.
Exactly same era here in Finland ’89-92.
We played in the class (secretely) LLLL, M1 Tank Platoon, Moria, Epic Pinball, etc.
School was fun!
Excellent travel down memory lane! Subbed!
F-29 Retaliator, my first PC game ever, 6 years old, non-english speaker, never learned to play it properly, just shooting rockets at everything that moved :D
I still have both copies of EF-2000 including the books. Crazy how far things have come.
I remember play some of this games on my 486DX4 100mhz with 16mb of RAM and a Blasting Trident 9680 with 2mb of VRAM! It's amazing... See and play some of the first 3D games, like Need For Speed, know the CD-ROM newest technology at this time, internet with my 28k modem! We're living a dream era of tech! But I allways have a good memories about old tech! Nostalgic!
How to play Wargasm on W. 7
Fantastic video! I grew up with these games.
Loved to read those thick manuals for the flight sims, wish i still had them
They should really remake ef2000 and total air war.
just graphics updates. the dynamic campaings are still unmatched. no flight sim has had that same feelign since
A thing to note - 7:27 those were not narrowed - you wont find them in the manual, those were additional functions that were introduced into the game most likely when the manual already hit the printing.
Ahh what memories!! My EF2000/TAW originals have survived many a software clear out. What awesome software.
EF2000 and TAW never left my computers ! they are so good, so fun, so easy to play. EF2000 and especially TAW is ENORMOUS, you cannot finish this game, the replay value is huge. With the adaptation for win10, we can continue to use it.
Worked with a lot of lovely talented people at Juice, a lot of ex rage, did, ocean peeps. Even though Juice was a racing studio, there was always a flight sim / airborne arcade battle shooter being developed in parallel, one which sadly was canned a couple of years before THQ went down the pan. Many chats down the pub about about MK, can’t say they were positive but hey so much drama in games.
I loved (still do) these games - such a treat
Great video, I properly started enjoying flight games with TFX (Previously dabbled on Dads computers with F15 Strike Eagle 2, and Infiltrator on the Amstrad CPC-6128!) but TFX, EF2000 and F22 ADF were the ones I played to death, I even bought Inferno (although didn't really like it!). Thanks for such a great vid!
I remember when I first bought EF 2000 and opened the box and seen the massive book, I spent a while reading it. I never owned or knew about EF 2000 2.0 back then. I still have my EF 2000 disc (and probably the book).
i love this company,the retaliator preceded his era with speed and graphic,all late DID game is very realistic like Tornado,F-22,Eurofigher,superhornet,
my favourite pc team with spectrum holobyte,i play all sim games from c64 dam busters to Comanche-Hokum
from this list missing the fantastic apache/hind DID sims update:I always confuse with the "Digital integration", that other big name from the 90s and 2000s
the music did make it nice. f22. loved ef2000. played it for years, daily. Total air war was also nicely done
Those old sims actually supported a VR peripheral that was available at that time.
I bought F22, Total Air War and Wargasm. Love them all. I think F22 was graphically slightly better than TAW because it supported 3DFX where TAW was strictly direct x
What happened to DID..? I came to this YT vid because I wanted to install my 16 bit F22 Total Air War...but failed on my 64 bit computer...WTF !? The best sim to this day.. 8 sept 2019...20 years later!! I think buying an old PC just dedicated to this game.. I salute you too DID
And still to this date
Very well done summary! I realy liked TFX and Inferno on my 386..:)
EF was such a nice surprice when it landed in my computer; and as said in the vid, it was in many areas better than Falcon 3.
I had (and still have) F22 ADF when I was a kid. The game obviously went far above my ten-year-old head, but it fascinated me nevertheless. Sadly, it requires a lot of work to get it running on a newer computer these days. At least for me it had a lot of issues, starting from getting the game installed (which can be solved by using a 32 bit InstallShield version), and then getting the game to run for more than 10 seconds at a time.
Google TAW 2.0, I had much fun flying the good old sims (EF2000) though it never had high resolution graphics like games nowadays. It had so much athmosphere, dynamic campaign was so much fun. It was really challenging to play too.
@@markeypaints4711 can you elaborate on this? i tryed on virtual pcs but doesnt work
DiD were so good... quality of their games was amazing.
Need more of such games on GOG and Steam.
Wargasm was an awesome game.
still is
Tornado is still hands down one of the best simulators ever. No other sim really gets the torndado right.
I play Wargasm and have a problem with the M key and the map. Sometimes the map will not work and you can't find your targets. Have you ever run into that?
I don't know. It seems to me that whenever a company acquires another company, the end result is rarely desirable. :-\
I played some of these but I also heavily played Tornado and Strike Commander
Thanks for putting together this fantastic overview!
Added to the Museum playlist at www.migman.com/org/DiD/index.php
You're welcome, thank you for adding it to your site
Really happy to have lived through the golden age of combat sims, before the advent of the dark ages of call of doody and counterstrike
Still playing TAW today. Now that is what I call replayability.
I still have TFX on cd. I love night missions and firing a tomahawk with cam.
about time for a follow up RMC! how about a Janes Series, er, series?
Ehm, sorry to be the guy but TFX did not have SVGA mode yet :) That's good old 320x200. EF2000 was their first one with svga. This is because at the time SVGA was so slow that could only be used for a specific kind of games (some adventure games, some strategic ones) that did not need scroll or animations, but I guess you know that, just talking to the audience
then a memory poked me "hey, svga harrier". YES. Ok. But any way, cannot find anywhere a screenshot or anything with TFX in svga.
Somewhere in my house there might still be a VHS promoting the never released - never finished? - port of _Wargasm_ to the Nintendo 64…
Oh wow I didn't know they intended to port it. I loved Wargasm
I've never heard why it wasn't released (because of Nintendo objecting to the title, or the game being too demanding for the Nintendo 64's hardware, or for business reasons…) or how far it got in development - or even if it wasn't a screw up by a PR department; I feel it might have been that a batch of footage was sent out and the recipient, seeing so much of the footage was for the N64, assumed that _all_ of the footage was for the N64; but I really don't know
@@youdontneedtoseehisidentif4939 If you do ever find that VHS tape- we'd love to see it. One of those lost treasures of unreleased game development that really should be brought back out into the light
got TFX on 6 floppy disks from a car boot sale when i was about 12.. Got f22 TAW demo from a pc gamer magazine shortly after that, not found anything as fun since.
DID was the DCS and Arma of the 90s
Put about 1000 hours into EF2000. The Best dynamic campaign of any flight sim, in my opinion!
You missed big one ... Strike commander ;) by Chris Roberts in 1993 and the most " beautiful and advanced for this year, with cinematics , speak interractions in menu"
This wasn’t made by DID
Still have a lot of those games in my spare room
You have a spare room?!?!
As usual, another highly informative top quality video without the douche bag attitude so prevalent elsewhere. Thank you for the great output.
Thank you Pedro, your support is greatly appreciated
My first PC had a game package that included F-29 Retaliator, Epic, and Robocop 3.
TAW and Eurofighter dynamic campaigns...there are no such anymore
Very well presented history.
+NumosG hi and thank you, this was an early video when I was still finding my pace and presentation style (which I still am) so it's quite different to my newer videos. I'd like to cover another software house soon if you have any requests let me know
Check out the weird PS1 port of TFX, only released in Japan. Its fully in English so totally playable if you import a copy.
Was playing the first part of the video on a expanded Amiga 1200 at the time up too TFX at least.
I loved Epic but id forgot about Inferno! I actually bought and owned all these game back in the day, I remember hating Eurofighter Typhoon.
Any old enough to remember when Wargasm was released it was to be part of TAW and DIDs Air and Ground engine - can’t remember it’s name, like it is 29 years ago that I got EF2000
I remember TFX and Inferno. DiD was the king of the 3D games on PC.👍 Like Doom programmers, they pushed the PC capabilities
Definitely, their games had somewhat unique minimalistic graphic style.
EF2000 deserves a re-make. There are so many geographic errors in the game.
DID had the best soundtracks imo.
Tactcom wouldn’t be hideous to play now. Still looks alright.
Nothing was better than Falcon 4
Ef 2000 was the best, if you bail out right over the ground your piolt turns into a red streak
TFX number one game of first half of 90.
I'd happily pay $75 for a modern version of EF2000. Could be virtually the same game, just with modern graphics.
F22 2.0 is a modernised and free download
community.combatsim.com/topic/20202-f-22-total-air-war-230-final-released/
Wargasm was a great game :)
But I could never get it to run after I upgraded to WinXP from '98 though :(
> Wargasm was a great game :)
I'd even say it was _warsome_ .
They used my video too :¬)
Good memories. Thank you for reminding. Not sure why google only just showed me this video existed when I’m subscribed but hey ho.
Loved F29 on the Amiga and still have my original. 3rd most played Amiga game after dungeon master then Falcon. And only beaten by Skyrim/fallout 4 &3. I loved the arcade approach having played Falcon F16 to death. Always enjoyed their games although the realism of the later releases was not appreciated as much as I never had the time to spend on them due to work.
Again thank you for another great video. Happy Christmas
EF2000 supported two early 3D virtual reality goggles too one them the Forte VFX1
and virtual i/o glasses though they had low resolution like lower than even 320 by 240 pixels whereas the regular game could be played on a great looking 640 by 480 pixel resolutions on a CRT monitor.
Here is a UA-cam video link on the Forte helmet
ua-cam.com/video/J0n5B3fl-bU/v-deo.html
Could you post more about. Wargsam
Many videos? Not a single Inferno let's play on YT.
theeltea That's surprising! I may have to do that one then
RetroManCave Indeed it is... Thanks for the awesome video on DID
Novalogic has the same sort of pedigree, well as a flight simulator company for the American market.
I'm a fan of Novalogic, I don't know a lot about their history but I was a huge fan of the Comanche series. Great games.
Good God, Retaliator and Epic were very poor games at the time they were released. As for the supposed "fast frame rate", this was achieved by having a ridiculously short draw distance, with objects popping into existence right in front of the player. The landscapes were barren and there was little sense of momentum - and no sense at all that you were flying an aircraft, unlike F18 Interceptor, where you could feel wind resistance and your aircraft being buffeted by cross-winds.
Can someone help me out with Wargasm? The game does run in Windows 10 but only runs in windowed mode at 640x480 so it's a tiny window in the corner of the screen. Anyone know how to get it to run fullscreen?
Did you try holding alt and pressing return?
Yeah, doesn't work. I'm thinking there might be a command line parameter but theres not much info out there.
Is it the original release or a GOG.COM repackaging? Apparantly setting the compatability mode properties of tank.exe to Win98 mode is a known fix for this on XP. Might be worth a try.
It's a cd image I got off an abandonware site that included the patch. Nothing I tried works, I think the problem is that I can't save the config settings.
I am fairly sure I wrote the installer for that game back in 1998 (when I was at DiD). My memory is a bit hazy (it was the 90s), but this might work:
Back then we wrote a small config text file (can't remember the name) that should be in the Wargasm directory in 'Program Files'. From about Vista onwards Microsoft discouraged developers writing data into the Program Files directory.
So to fix this, try running the game in Windows Administrator mode, that should provide it with the rights to write the config file out.
Or run notepad in admin mode and try editing the config file in the Program Files directory. There are some compatibility modes in Windows that might be worth trying with it too.
Hope that works.
I thought ATF was one of theirs...oh well!
+Cartay if you mean Janes ATF that eas an Electronic Arts developed game back in 1996. It did have the Eurofighter like EF2000 though
Ah, good game, thanks for that :)
But no, I meant this one:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_(video_game)