Sopwith - The Author's Edition (2000)

From David Clark's webpage:

"In the spring of 1984, I joined BMB Compuscience in Milton, Ontario as an R&D programmer. My first task was to development a piece of software to demonstrate the use of BMB's new PC network product, soon to be named Imaginet. What better crowd catcher at the trade shows than a multi-user arcade game being played over the network. Hence, Sopwith was born. Since then, Sopwith has gained a small following on the Net.

 

If you choose to download Sopwith, please don't be too critical. Keep in mind the what PC's were like in the early '80s: 640K was a dream, megahertz weren't invented yet, 2400 baud modems were the rage if you could find something to connect to, and you had 9 megabytes of hard drive to play with. Sopwith, all 43K of it, hasn't changed much from those heady days. Please note that the multi-user functionality has been removed since it was based on BMB's proprietary Imaginet network. Some day, I will get to work on writing a simple enhancement to communicate over today's network protocols."

Sopwith - The Author's Edition is a greatly modified version of the original Sopwith with the following features:

- Faster framerate
- Novice (with unlimited ammo / no stalls) and Expert mode for Single Player
- Includes new sprites (bullet holes and dead birds)
- Allows your plane to be damaged and still be flyable
- Missiles and Flares(!)
- Enemy planes drop bombs and fire missiles
- Altered status bar
- A few new surprises (try colliding with the oxen!)

Click here to Download Sopwith - The Author's Edition

Command line options are:

-n	Novice single player	Only one of -n, -s, -c or -a may be specified
-s	Single player
-c	Single player against computer
-a	2 players over asynchronous communications line
-k	keyboard only	Only one of -k or -j may be specified
-j	keyboard and joystick
-q	begin game with sound off
-p#	overrides communication port COM1 to another port COM#
-x	Activate missiles & flares in game

 

In-game controls are:

, (comma)	Elevator up
. (period)	Flip over
/ (slash)	Elevator down
Z	Throttle down
X	Throttle up
H	Take 'er home
Space Bar	Gun
B	Bomb
C	Flare (in -x mode)
V	Missile (in -x mode)
S	Sound on/off
Ctrl-Break	End game