Retro Air Warrior 8)

[Amiduffer]

Hey guys, I had a wild and scarry idea, I'm not sure if it should go in the general topics area or the gaming area, but here goes anyway. This is a question that is part fond rememberance, part hope, and wonder at how it could be built. I hope there are people who have done this kind of thing who can give me advice on the nuts and bolts of how it works. It sounds pretty far fetched, but what the hell. It doesn't hurt to throw the idea out just to see what response I get.

I don't know if anyone here used to play the old Air Warrior on the GEnie dial up system, but the funnest part of the 90's, next to doing radio shows, was using my stock A2000 with a 14k modem, whereby I wasted waaaaay too much time flying the unfriendly skies with people all over the country (time I should have spent studying!), and having a blast (and getting blasted (out of the sky)). Nowadays, there's AirWarrior, but only to those with a decent PC and a fast internet connection.

So my question is, what would it take to set up a BBS-type of system to have the means of people with older computers (like us natch, but I imagine Atari users might apreciate this too) to dial in and play a multi-player AW game, like you could with GEnie. This happened when I was at this computer surplus warehouse nearby, and one of the employees was assembling a internet server with parts donated to this place. So getting equipment I think, would be relatively cheap, and I just happened to find my old copy of AW on an old backup disk and unpacked it and flew a little around the arena for kicks, although I missed all my old buddies. I imagine, that with retro gaming in vogue, and the number of people with older computers, that something like this would be worthwhile, if not profitable. Although that might be wishfull thinking.

So, what do you think?   :-)

[Amiduffer]

Oh well, guess I won't be able to satisfy my curiosity.  :-)

[dovegrace]

I remember playing Kesmai's Air Warrior on my A500, as well as a CGA PC (May have been EGA or Tandy Graphics...).

Didn't it have an option to dial another user directly for a two-player game as well?  I seem to recall comparing it to "Air Duel: 80 years of dogfighting" which had this feature, but memory is a bit hazy...

Have you had any luck finding info?

[AmigaMance]

@Amiduffer
 When this game was released for our platform i didn't even had an internet connection. I'm a flight simulator fan and i have many fly-hours on my record with this game. Without a modem, i was just flying all alone without doing any dogfights but i did it because it has a very realistic flight model and this is what i appreciate on a flight-sim! ;-)
 I would still be interested but dialing to a BBS? ouch.. Isn't there another way for us to get connected? Like an air-warrior internet server or something?

[Amiduffer]

AmigaMance wrote:
@Amiduffer
 When this game was released for our platform i didn't even had an internet connection. I'm a flight simulator fan and i have many fly-hours on my record with this game. Without a modem, i was just flying all alone without doing any dogfights but i did it because it has a very realistic flight model and this is what i appreciate on a flight-sim! ;-)
 I would still be interested but dialing to a BBS? ouch.. Isn't there another way for us to get connected? Like an air-warrior internet server or something?

Well, currently, if you google Air Warrior, you'll bring up the current setup, which is like most online games (Ultima Online for instance), requiring a fast PC and fast internet connection. Which leaves us out unfortunatly being solely a dial-up program. I doubt that the current company would commit any resources porting it to Amiga, unless some crazy person would want to try coding such a thing in his personal time. I imagine, that you would have to have a video card and minimally a 68060 accelerator and DSL line to play online (if it was ported). I have no idea how it worked in the old day, but you did have to dial into a central system, in order to dogfight/bomb, so if you can connect to another person, I'm not sure that you would be able to dogfight, but I'll look again at the instructions. That's why I need some advice. Maybe I'll have to ask someone from the old company.

What would be the cost, for instance, if you setup a toll free number for people in the US? What kind of fee would you have to charge? The advantage of GEnie, was having a local number to call into. I imagine, that this is like setting up a BBS, and was curious, for those who did, what it was like.