F-19 Stealth Fighter | Masterpiece of Tactical Aviation Gaming | Retro Review on IBM PS/2 

Thank you for bringing my childhood back to life. Your video is inredible, and calling it just "awesome" is an understatement. It's comforting to know that I wasn't the only teenager obsessed with the game. I hope you've forgiven your father for not letting you fly the mighty F19 for a few days. :)

Myself and my dad logged many hours in F-19, Gunship, and Strike Eagle II on a 286 with EGA graphics. My favorite was F-19. Microprose titles in that era were incredible.

I played this as a kid. It was DOPE!

I appreciate you showing the game running on period-correct hardware at the correct speed.

I remember playing this game ALL THE TIME back when it came out. As a young kid, I was obsessed with Top Gun and at the time I had no idea what the difference was between the Air Force and the Navy. I just knew "both fly aircraft" and in my defense, I was maybe eight or nine and this game did sometimes let you take off and land on aircraft carriers. In the game I got to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, but I was never able to make it to Colonel for some reason. This game, along with Red Baron (created by Dynamix and released in 1990), fueled my interested in aviation and military history. I also read through the entire F-19 manual more than once, and I used to read and re-read the Red Baron manual as it was mostly history about WW1. I'm in my mid-40s today and I still have my Red Baron manual. In fact, the cover tore, so without me knowing my wife fixed it because she knew it meant a lot to me. BTW, I completely agree with you: it's your first introduction to some games that make an impression. Like I wrote before, Red Baron was hugely influential to me, and despite later installments being technologically superior, they never "felt right." I wonder why flight sims were once so hugely popular and today they've mostly disappeared. Sure, you have Microsoft Flight Simulator and DCS, but for the most part they've become extremely niche. Maybe they always were, but there was less competition on store shelves. Whatever the case, I miss the 80s and 90s, when flight sims were everywhere.

I too played F-19 but hours on end . parents were not that strict with me.i use to land in enemy bases, photograph and destroy the target cause i can.,used maverick missles on everything cause it was the easiest to use. I loved the sim games like 688 attack sub, silent service , m1 tank platoon, falcon ,I could go on. I remember i even had space shuttle sim.

Thank you so much for this video, I've spent many years on retrogaming but you've just unlocked a lot of memories I had forgotten. My first computer was a 286 12MHz PC clone, pretty similar to your machine, even the monitor. My father brought it home when I was 6 or 8 I suppose, after spending a small fortune in pesetas, and obtained some game copies from his coworkers, one of them being F-19. I remember launching the game and not knowing how to do anything (of course I didn't have the manual, nor knew english at the time), so I rotated my plane on the ground and gunned friendly planes to see them burst in flames. Some years later I got a digital copy of the manual and discovered I should change keyboard layout to us, then magically the thrust buttons worked! I then spent many time on it and passed countless missions, I enjoyed it a lot. I still have that computer and monitor on my parents house, and recently bought a sounblaster clone and more powerful VGA card, and upped the 512KB o RAM to a whole MB. One of the first things I did then is launching F-19 to experience it with proper sound effects and much improved framerate, proving my 286 was not so slow, but the Tseng ET3000AX VGA card was indeed a bottleneck. As I suggested you on Reddit, there were later patches to the game that added support for extra sound cards, one of them being the Roland MT32. They also changed the plane model from the one used to the real F-19, as it was a licensing problem, but years after release it was not important anymore. I remember spending many hours both playing to death F-19 and M1 Tank Platoon. I'm not a simulation guy, I love racing sims but haven't touched a plane, tank or similar sim game since then. But these Microprose games had something special. Something that, as you said, made many people remenber them fondly even today. Again, tank you very much and congratulations for a great video and a great channel I'll now explore deeper.

I think that I read the manual to this game multiple times over and spent hours every week playing through the missions. This game along with F-15 II and M-1 were so special to me.

This (except F117), Gunship, Red Storm Rising, Pirates and Silent Service were my life, back in the day, all on my C64 and 1541. Played them incessantly for years!

The original F-19 was just a small model kit, supposedly based on insider connections the designer had. It became one of the most sold model kits of all time. This might have helped distract from the F-117 project, but the game made certain aspects of stealth easily available to the public.

Great video! Really impressive game. We are missing the experience nowadays having nice thick manuals and overlays for most of the modern days. Maybe perhaps the complexity was about right for that at that time. I build the f19 as a model back than from a kitt. I still have a model-kitt waiting for beeing built.

Microprose manuals were 60% of the experience, from the minute you sit down on the bus home, and many nights reading it in bed. And also while the C64 loaded it, which took an hour, every mission. Every. Single. Mission.

If I remember correctly, Microprose claimed that the DoD actually approached them about the F-19 game because it was so accurate in some of it details.

Ahhhg! I remember the dreaded IL-76 radar plane! SAM missiles were impossible to evade when those were around!

The game of my childhood, the screeching sound of my parents nightmares!

I like how reflective the Videos on your Channel are!

Best video ever made. Subscribed. Great song..

Awesome video. Played it back in the day on my 286 IBM PC which had a very similar horizontal case like your have. Good times.

F-19 was a popular game here in Moscow in early 90's, when 286 computers were considered as cool gaming machines along with Prince of Persia, DeathTRack and the GoldenAxe. There's a psyhodelic writer here, called Viktor Pelevin, who wrote in early 90's a story "Prince of Gosplan" about people who play at work computer games in the last months or years of the USSR period and have halucinations of that game's stories in their life - real life and scenes from games in that story merge into one other in their minds) Main character of that story lives in the world of PoP game, while his boss in one of Soviet ministrys - in the world of F-19. As for myself I use and collect vintage computers - have it installed on my 286 machines as well as on Amiga 3000 and sometimes I still play that game on a good old 286 - along with the Knights Of the Sky, Red Baron I and F-15-III )

I played this game for hours on a Tandy 1000 (I think) when I was 9 years old.

One of my favourites!

I had that same exact joystick. A few years ago, I was so nostalgic that I bought a new old stock and a USB adapter. Man, did it feel good playing again with it! Oddly enough, me and my family used it to play platformers! Our first big loved game was Bio Menace (Apogee) and so that's my favourite childhood game, as you so eloquently explained 😃

Played it on about the same PS/2 (model 30, 8086, MCGA). The PS/2 was a moloch. Super well built.. with totally outdated technology compared to ST and Amiga. F-19 was quite something with it's stealth mechanics.. Keep that bomb bay closed!

Maze of Galious on MSX is glorious... Any Konami game for MSX in the 80s is pure magic. Perfect control, perfect adjusted playability, music and graphics.. The overall experience.

Looking forward to the inevitable Mechwarrior 2 review, because THIS is fantastic and I'd love to see the effort and skill put into the very first PC game (I played Command & Conquer 1 a few hours later). Keep it up dude, happily subbed!

Hell yeah. Long live retro simulators! It's my favorite niche in classic gaming. I love how, even with limited graphical and processing potential, folks were trying to create simulations that make you feel like you're manning a complex machine while also balancing a fun factor with it. The Star Wars X-Wing and Tie Fighter sims are a few of my favorites and do a good job at emulating machines that don't exist. Thank you for the video.

Thank you for this video, but especially for the time you spent focusing on the manual. In the glory days of Microprose their manuals were the absolute best. I read them before bed, I read them while eating breakfast, I brought them along to read on the school bus. I learned a ton about the real world from those game manuals. Great video - I'll happily subscribe. Also -- my dad also only let me play 1 hour a day 🤣

The first flight simulator i really grasped, spent endless hours on it in glorious cga graphics on 286 12,5MHz

OMG this game was the shit back in the days.

Great review of this classic flight sim. It really holds up even today. The game mechanics are well thought out and I only truly appreciated them much later when I was older. I first played it on Amiga 500 around 1990. I remember one of my parents' friend while visiting us saw I was playing F-19. He said he played it too but he sucked at landings and asked if I could teach him proper techniques. And so I did (I was pretty good at it, with proper on speed AOA, even carrier landings were no match for my skills) - I explained the ILS (which btw works not as IRL), and how to properly align with the centerline, how to slow down to approach speed so your main gear touches first etc. He was impressed, I was maybe 10-11 at that time. Another story - back then in Poland you couldn't buy original game releases, official game distrubutors were absent and piracy run rampart. You couldn't get properly boxed game with the manual. I was able to get a hold of translated game's manual in a book store once. I don't believe it was official, but someone probably had original one, translated it and published it. It was so good I took it anywhere with me. That one time, when visiting my family, my uncle wanted to see what I was reading. He started getting through it and got so interested in force dispositions in the theatres he started to reading it hmself. I can't remember if he was aware that this was a game manual ;)

Excellent video very well explained everything, what memories when with very few computational resources it was enough to enjoy them, Now looking at the low FPS how they moved one filled those missing fps with imagination and everything seemed more fluid. I am surprised with the size of the manual, I had never seen it before and I would surely have enjoyed reading it a lot at that time.

I remember the day, I was in year 8 at high school, at Mt Clear Technical High school, Ballarat, when two of these showed up in the office for the admin users and all I could think of was hijacking one of them to play. I'd been cracking cartridges for the MSX for some time and was aware of the PS/2 but not of any games...

You should voice over cinema trailers. 😁

Some of those missions you could literally walk away for ten minutes and make a sandwich and it would still be flying over desert

So, you all think MPS was one cool company? Think about this, then - this game, and number of other awesome complex simulators - were made for C64 and cassettes! Even for ZX Spectrum and 48K of RAM! Now, that's not cool - that's way beyond supercool! Packing so much goodness in such limited resources - pure alchemy. And MPS knew the secret of the ancients.

You should do Aces Over Europe / Pacific series

Same thing with Chuck Yeager.

A terrific video on an astounding game. Thank you.

Great review, great channel!

I remember ….😅

I remember playing Flight Simulator on my Tandy 1000. In my 8 year old brain, I thought the game was designed to be one game a second. Only until I played it on my Pentium 100mhz pc and it blazed at 60 FPS and that's when it clicked how computers really worked.

Great video !!! I loved this Sim :)

why most of you retro reviewers dont have fully stretched picture on a monitor? i had CRTs and i always used whole available area.

Love the content but I can't stand looking at the computer the whole time. It's cool in the beginning but then it's all just wasted space. I want to see the game not the monitor, wall, desk, plant, etc.

this got me all emotional.

I remember trying to read the giant Gunship 2000 manual for my Amiga 1200, I did not fully understand english at that time (french quebecois here). Amazing times to be alive back then.

Gunship

3-4 FPS

The concept of "classic computer game" is more broad and subjective than say "classic nintendo game"

I still have the manual but lost the game disks years ago :(

JFC get a faster PC for this game its crawling at seconds per frame.

Frame rate is terrible, got any footage of game running better?

... but why did you use an AI voice? 🤔

Yay, FIRST!