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| Dogfight | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer(s) | Bill Basham [1] |
| Publisher(s) | Micro Lab |
| Platform(s) | Apple II |
| Release | 1980 |
| Genre(s) | Multidirectional shooter |
| Mode(s) | Single-player, 2-8 players multiplayer |
Dogfight is an aerial combat video game written by Bill Basham for the Apple II and published by Micro Lab in 1980. The game is a clone of Atari, Inc.'s 1975 arcade game Jet Fighter .
The player controls an aircraft that always moves in the direction is it pointed and can be rotated left or right and shoot. The screen wraps around at the edges, such that a player heading off the right edge of the screen will re-enter from the left.
Players can play solo against the computer or up to 8 humans can play against each other. Since all input is via the single built-in keyboard of the Apple II, this involves the players crowding up against each other to reach their 3 keys. Each plane is identified by a number drawn next to it.
When a plane is shot, it becomes a parachuting figure, which transits the screen from top to bottom a few times and also may be shot.
The game was written by Bill Basham in Rockford, Illinois. He began programming the Apple II in machine language and wanted to explore animation. He was able to smoothly animate up to 56 items on the screen at the same time, optimized with a lookup table. [2]
Dogfight was number 6 on Softalk's "The Top Thirty" list in the February 1981 issue. [3]
Programmer Bill Basham: "After writing Dogfight and publishing it through Microlab, I went on to write Diversi-DOS. Microlab wasn't selling Dogfight by then, so I decided to include it as a freebee with Diversi-DOS". [2] [4]
Dogfight II is a 1981 update with support for the Joyport device and two new game modes: multiplayer and anti-aircraft gunner. [5]
Asteroids is a space-themed multidirectional shooter arcade video game designed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg released in November 1979 by Atari, Inc. The player controls a single spaceship in an asteroid field which is periodically traversed by flying saucers. The object of the game is to shoot and destroy the asteroids and saucers, while not colliding with either, or being hit by the saucers' counter-fire. The game becomes harder as the number of asteroids increases.
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Diversi-Dial, or DDial was an online chat server that was popular during the mid-1980s. It was a specialized type of bulletin board system that allowed all callers to send lines of text to each other in real-time, often operating at 300 baud. In some ways, it was a sociological forerunner to IRC, and was a cheap, local alternative to CompuServe chat, which was expensive and billed by the minute. At its peak, at least 35 major DDial systems existed across the United States, many of them in large cities. During the evening when telephone rates were low, the biggest DDial systems would link together using Telenet or PC Pursuit connections, forming regional chat networks.
Softdisk was a software and Internet company based in Shreveport, Louisiana. Founded in 1981, its original products were disk magazines. It was affiliated and partly owned by paper magazine Softalk at founding, but survived its demise.
Donkey, often known by its filename DONKEY.BAS, is a video game written in 1981, and included with early versions of the IBM PC DOS operating system distributed with the original IBM PC. It is a top-down driving game in which the player must avoid hitting donkeys. The game was written by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and early employee Neil Konzen.
Beyond Castle Wolfenstein is a 1984 World War II stealth game. A direct sequel to Castle Wolfenstein, it is the second game in the Wolfenstein series, and the last installment to be released by original developer Muse Software before the name was revived for a first-person shooter in 1991. Castle Wolfenstein was written solely by Silas Warner for the Apple II, while the sequel was developed simultaneously for the Apple II and Commodore 64 by Warner, Eric Ace, and Frank Svoboda III. It was quickly ported to the Atari 8-bit family and MS-DOS.
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Nasir Gebelli is an Iranian-American programmer and video game designer usually credited in his games as simply Nasir. Gebelli wrote Apple II games for Sirius Software, created his own company Gebelli Software, and worked for Squaresoft. He became known in the early 1980s for producing fast action games for the Apple II, including 3D shooters.
Super Invader is a video game written by Japanese programmer M. Hata for the Apple II and published by Creative Computing Software in 1979. Super Invader is a clone of Space Invaders.
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Triplane Turmoil is a sidescrolling dogfighting flying game for MS-DOS by Finnish developer Dodekaedron Software. The game is based on the 1984 MS-DOS game by David Clark, Sopwith. Originally released as shareware, in 2009 Dodekaedron placed the source code, documentation, images and sounds under the GPLv3 on SourceForge, hosted later on github.com. The community continued the support and ported the game via SDL to other platforms as Linux and Windows.
Dogfights is a military aviation themed TV series depicting historical re-enactments of air-to-air combat that took place in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, as well as smaller conflicts such as the Gulf War and the Six-Day War. The program consists of former fighter pilots sharing their stories of actual dogfights in which they took part, combined with computer-generated imagery (CGI) to give the viewer a better perspective of what it is like to engage in aerial combat.
Jet Fighter is an arcade shooter video game released in 1975 by Atari, Inc. It was distributed in Japan by Nakamura Seisakusho (Namco).
Down in Flames is a computer video game for Microsoft Windows, developed by American studio Dan Verssen Games and published by Battlefront.com in 2005. Closely based on a card-driven tabletop game of the same name, Down in Flames is a turn-based simulation of dogfights between World War II fighter planes. Some parts of the game also involve escorting and intercepting bombers.
Jet is a combat flight simulator video game originally published in 1985 by Sublogic. The game was released in 1985 for MS-DOS and the Commodore 64, 1986 for the Apple II, 1988 for the Atari ST and Amiga, and 1989 for the Macintosh and NEC PC-9801.
The Battle of Shiloh is a 1981 video game published by Strategic Simulations. It is regarded as one of the first Civil War strategy computer games, and was the first Strategic Simulations game available on the TRS-80. Intended as an introductory war game, it was available on the Commodore 64, Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, TRS-80 and IBM PC, and was originally developed by David Landry and Chuck Kroegel through their studio "Tactical Design Group".
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