Veteran PC Game 'Sopwith' Celebrates 40th Anniversary (github.io) 42
Longtime Slashdot reader sfraggle writes: Biplane shoot-'em up, Sopwith, is celebrating 40 years today since its first release back in 1984. The game is one of the oldest PC games still in active development today, originating as an MS-DOS game for the original IBM PC. The 40th anniversary site has a detailed history of how the game was written as a tech demo for the now-defunct Imaginet networking system. There is also a video interview with its original authors. "The game involves piloting a Sopwith biplane, attempting to bomb enemy buildings while avoiding fire from enemy planes and various other obstacles," reads the Wiki page. "Sopwith uses four-color CGA graphics and music and sound effects use the PC speaker. A sequel with the same name, but often referred to as Sopwith 2, was released in 1985."
You can play Sopwith in your browser here.
You can play Sopwith in your browser here.
[Fall Guy's 7-tier fabric-winged plane collapsing] (Score:2)
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Yes it did, no it didn't. The best way to play sopwith was very drunk, with the turbo button pressed on.
Poor, poor cows...
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Ah, Sopwith... (Score:2)
Best dog-fighting before Wing Commander :)
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Skyfox [youtube.com] and Wings of Fury [youtube.com] would like to have a word. /s
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Nah, Battlehawks 1942 came out 2 years before Wing Commander and was quite a kick-ass dogfighting game. Wing Commander was pretty when it came out, and it was in space...and it had nice live-action cutscenes. It totally lacked any feel of realistic dog-fighting, because it removed the concept of altitude. Battlehawks drove home the fact that altitude was valuable and to be spent wisely. A year after Wing Commander we got Chuck Yeager's Air Combat and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe.
For the original PC? (Score:3)
That's a pretty decent amount of game to be able to run in 64kB.
I did have a memory expansion on the ISA bus of my IBM 5150. The additional 384kB brought it up to 448kB, which was enough to run most but not all DOS software that would run on an XT (which could be expanded to 640kB onboard.)
I probably should have piggybacked the system memory, I could have gotten it up to 512kB which really would have run almost everything. But instead I got a 286-6 with 1MB and ran Xenix on it.
ISA (Score:2)
Kind of amazing to think that memory, serial ports, hard disk controllers and video cards could all sit directly on the same bus and, more or less, get along. Anything more complicated than a PDP-11 at the time had, at least, a separate memory bus.
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Yep. For all its drawbacks the PC was an amazing platform for its day.
When it came out, nothing could beat the Amiga for versatility, though. It was even better at having all kinds of stuff on its bus at once than the PC was. The bus wasn't any faster than 16 bit ISA in the real world, but it was at least a dozen times more convenient.
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The bus wasn't any faster than 16 bit ISA in the real world, but it was at least a dozen times more convenient.
The Amiga had a proper bus with a controller (the Angus.) It wasn't any faster than ISA, but the CPU could do things while the Angus dealt with DMA IO stuff. ISA could do DMA, but it was up to the expansion cards to do handle it, and *everything* had to place nice with each other. I remember a friend trying to get his shiny new AWE64 to work with his off-brand beige box. Either the printer port or the sound card could work, because they had incompatible DMA channel-address space combos.
Re: ISA (Score:1)
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I remember a friend trying to get his shiny new AWE64 to work with his off-brand beige box. Either the printer port or the sound card could work, because they had incompatible DMA channel-address space combos.
He must have had a strange LPT port and/or address then, because normally those wouldn't be in conflict. I've had cards with fairly huge numbers of dip switches, but as long as you could get your hands on some documentation you were OK. Even very cheap ATA multi-I/O cards usually had fairly generous I/O ranges. I had a 120MB Maxtor ATA disk in the 386DX25 on which I first ran Linux, on a $15 no-brand ATA card, and with a 1MB Trident VGA card. That $15 card had pretty decent UARTs, too.
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Yeah, I never had a problem with IRQ/DMA fuckery having a pretty loaded up (for the time) machine; Awe32 with Waveblaster daughterboard, ATI Rage 64 card, etc etc.
The main challenges back then were dealing with your low memory; figuring out the exact right order to load mscdex, memory manager, mouse driver and every thing else to squeeze out every bit of conventional memory, and using loadhigh to squeeze what you could into UMA, because that 1 kb difference could mean Wing Commander 2 didn't play the speech
Re: ISA (Score:2)
Indeed. QEMM was something of a hero in that department, but even memmaker was enormously helpful...
Sopwith biplane, attempting to bomb enemy building (Score:3)
Those Sopwith planes were fighters, not bombers.
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Those sopwith planes were fighter-bombers. Snipe and Camel could both carry "four 9 kg (20 lb) Cooper bombs".
https://airandspace.si.edu/col... [si.edu]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Sopwith biplane, attempting to bomb enemy build (Score:4, Funny)
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Those Sopwith planes were fighters, not bombers.
Sopwith Camels could also be used a bombers. They were used with great success to bomb the German airship base at Tønder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] That was the first air raid ever launched from ships. They were launched from the deck of a battleship.
Later Sopwith models even carried torpedos.
Active? (Score:2)
The game is one of the oldest PC games still in active development today.
Then I clicked on the browser-embedded game to see what 40 years of ‘active’ development looked like.
It looked a lot like clickbait.
Sorry, but I was expecting something quite different given the claim. Can someone elaborate?
Re:Active? (Score:5, Informative)
Sure. The SDL port (I'm the maintainer) is still under development, and new features continue to be added. The original graphics and sound are deliberately preserved - the goal is to make it a great old game and not a lame new one. The project was admittedly dormant for a number of years and I've just recently come back to start working on it again.
The most significant development recently is the addition of support for custom levels. Until now there's only ever been a single level that can be played over and over. Other features added in previous versions include medals, swappable palettes (to emulate old displays), the in-browser version and TCP/IP networking.
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Excellent. Thank you for the detail! I do appreciate it.
hack & nethack (Score:2)
hack came out in '82, and nethack was a fork a few years later.
It is still in active development, despite the netcraftian rumors some time back.
And still the only game that *matters* . . .
hawk
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It's almost like the summary said "one of the oldest" instead of "the oldest" for a reason.
Classic (Score:1)
Anybody remember retaliator? (Score:1)
I loved sopwith. took me ages to develop the skills to shoot down other planes and not kill myself.
Retaliator blew me away with it's 3d graphics though. Landing my burning x-29? without engines perpendicular on the runway, my favourite all time achievement.
Play online, free and legally (Score:1)
Abandoned or Actve. Pick one. (Score:3)
Sopwith is abandonware, and can be played legally online, without any install or registration requirements https://www.retrogames.cz/play... [retrogames.cz]
The game is one of the oldest PC games still in active development today.
OK, I guess I’ll be the one to question how the hell we’re here celebrating 40 years of ‘active’ development, while using the term abadonware accurately.
I really miss the days when we didn’t have to question EVERY claim.
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Calling it abandonware seems like a strange choice of phrase: it has been open source (GPL2) since the early 2000s, and SDL Sopwith (linked in the post) is based on that source. So it very much still is in active development.
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Calling it abandonware seems like a strange choice of phrase: it has been open source (GPL2) since the early 2000s, and SDL Sopwith (linked in the post) is based on that source. So it very much still is in active development.
If you think calling it abandonware is strange, imagine what kind of definition you’re going to have to come up with for “active” in relation to “development”.
To be clear, I’m not attacking the game or those who created it. I’m more asking for the current definition of “active” after a claim of 40 years when the game itself appears to have not changed. Having a DOS game run in a current browser doesn’t exactly count as unique in my mind. We have
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Go read this comment [slashdot.org]
Basically, the look and sound are intentionally left the same and they've added features that were never a part of the original game.
Fond memories (Score:1)
Working on Sopwith, AMA (Score:5, Informative)
A handful of years ago I became one of two developers working to maintain the Linux/BSD port of Sopwith (usually under the name Sopwith SDL). It's a neat little game and still fun, simple but challenging at the higher levels. Feel free to AMA.
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Questions that readers might want to know about:
1. What has been the hardest part of the codebase / toolchain to update? Anything specific to Linux/BSD?
2. Are there any APIs / features that you wish were in Linux/BSD that would make working on Sopwith easier?
3. What has been the most enjoyable part of the code to work on?
4. Are there any upcoming features that you can talk about that you are most excited about?
5. What do you think part of the "charm" of Sopwith is? Nostalgia? Simplicity? Something else?
6.
Re:Working on Sopwith, AMA (Score:4, Interesting)
2. No, I don't think so. Linux/BSD are pretty easy to work with.
3. The code itself? I suppose fixing or improving little things. Like making it possible to jump to a specific level. With the project in general though my favourite part was getting to correspond with the original author, David Clark. He was super nice and very positive about the modern ports.
4. The other developer mostly focuses on new features and he may respond here, he's positing replies to other comments. My focus is always on minor maintenance - documentation, little bug fixes, keeping things more or less the same, but working with modern compilers/platforms.
5. Sopwith is super easy to stay playing, but really hard to master. Like chess, Pac-Man, or Tetris. I think there is an appeal in a game you can pick up and play for five minutes or dive into for an hour, depending on your time and focus. I feel the same way about some modern games like Mario 3D or Mark of the Ninja - simple controls and concepts, but the difficulty ramps up.
6. No, no hi-res mod or port. Though the other/lead developer is adding the ability to add new maps to explore and fight over.
7. Probably not a HUD or airspeed indicator or anything like that. With Sopwith you only have about three or four speeds so it's not needed. Part of the simplistic charm. If you want something more involved with airspeed and such you might want to try GL-117 or Search And Rescue.
8. Not exactly mods, but as I mentioned above, new levels.
9. I almost never play AAA games. In fact, I might never have played a full AAA game. I almost never touch consoles or high-end games. I'm really only interesting in smaller studios (Mark of the Ninja and the Tine series come to mind) and open source gaming, so I've never need affected by the loot box, advertising, enshitification, etc issues. You can just not play those types of games or on those platforms if you don't want that stuff.
The gaming ecosystem is huge, absolutely massive. So if you want big name titles, go for it. If you just want open source titles, there are lots. If you want small indie games with soul there are plenty. Retro gaming? We have lots of that too. Find what makes you happy and ignore the rest.
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Hi, I'm the lead dev so I can also answer:
1. Nothing specific to Linux/BSD. The hardest part of the codebase to work with is probably the movement/collision/AI code which is very hard to follow. It's hard to change because any change can break things in subtle ways.
2. Nope
3. Probably the networking code. Sopwith always had network code (it was written as a tech demo for an early LAN) but almost nobody ever got the chance to really use it. Seeing it finally working over TCP/IP was very satisfying.
4. I'm plan
I got this from a computer lab swap meet in 1989. (Score:2)
I was in third grade and the labs at school had different shit loaded on them you could copy to a 3.5" and take home like this and Scud Attack.
This was before the dark times, before the empire. I played this on the PS/2 long after I snuck back out of bed and was supposed to be asleep. Glad to see it's still around.
updated, Jetstrike (Score:1)
Jack Cole was my professor in University! (Score:2)
Taipan! (Score:2)