Their Finest Hour: The Battle Of Britain (PC/DOS) 1989, Lucasfilm Games

The second of Lucasfilm Games' air combat simulations and follow-up to Battlehawks 1942, Their Finest Hour recreates the Battle of Britain during WWII in the summer of 1940.
Players can fly both for the German Luftwaffe and the British Royal Air Force.
On the British side, two planes are available: the Spitfire and the Hurricane. For the Germans, there is the fighter Bf 109, the heavy fighter/fighter bomber Bf 110, the infamous Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber, and the three light/medium bombers Do 17, He 111 and Ju 88.
Next to training missions for every plane, there are several historical combat missions to be flown. In accordance with history, most RAF missions consist of defense assignments - intercepting and destroying German bombers. Most Luftwaffe missions are attack runs - either flying the bomber escort or the bombers themselves. In the heavier planes, not only can the pilot of the plane be controlled, but also the gunner(s), and, in the bombers, the bombardier.
The special Campaign Mode allows one to actually change the historical outcome of the Battle of Britain. On a strategic map, planes must be organized into groups and assigned to missions, one of which must be flown. The outcome of that mission affects those of all others and also the status of the overall campaign. The British side wins by simply surviving for a certain time or by destroying enough German aircraft. The German side wins by destroying enough RAF fighters, either in the air or on the ground.
Also included in the game is a mission builder for designing custom missions, and a film playback option for reviewing recorded flight footage.

[@Cujo8600]

My favorite game of all time. Couldn't even guess how many hours I spent playing this.

[@SuperFusselbuerste]

Cujo8600 me too

[@winternow2242]

That just means you enjoyed the game.

[@VibeXplorer]

Great to hear from other devotees of TFH! I logged sooo many years on this sim during 1990! I am astonished at how I ever thought those smudges of color were airplanes back then! lol. And the godawful sound effects! Why bother, developers? Still, this title was quite an achievement for the time. The dev team did a masterful job of creating a sense of the history and packing in all the detail with the limited technology on hand.

[@ooSicknesSoo]

@@VibeXplorer I remember I killed so many bf109's. There was a scoreboard for it.

[@xmarine73]

I played this so long as a young teen with aspirations in programming that I started copying pilot records over and using a hex editor to change their names so they could fly as my wingmen.

[@zeus6793]

Remember the book that came with the game? It was fantastic. I wish they would make a game like this now, with modern graphics, but keep the RPG portion of it, by letting you create and develop pilots, design your nose art, customize your cockpit and plane, etc. Get to know your squad mates.... feel it when they get killed or shot down. How cool would that be??

[@lonelocustoftheapocalypse3700]

I'm a bit late to the party, but... Yeah, this one hit me EXACTLY when I was getting into "serious" PC games, and when I was going full-on as a WWII warbird fan. So...a LOT of hours blown on it. I remember buying one of the very very early sound cards (an Adlib of all things) and suddenly hearing the cannons WHUMP instead of tick-tick like the normal MGs. Good times. It's not the same by a long shot, but a lot of what you're talking about is sort-of-present in War Thunder. As you work up through a specific country's "tree" of aircraft, you can assign various skill points to pilots or gunners (if applicable), and they DO pay off. Likewise, you can slap decals onto your plane, and in some cases splurge for custom full paint jobs. They'll be happy to take your money. Graphics are solid, and you're often flying against actual humans, which adds an entirely different level of difficulty. I drifted away from it a few years ago, as there was a persistent issue with high-level players using MMO tactics and spawn-camping low-level missions, so newbies would be blasted out of the air 5 seconds after spawning. It wasn't pervasive, but it was around enough to sour me on it. They kept promising to work on it. No idea if they ever did. Also, Gaijin - the publisher - is a Russian company. It doesn't really appear overt in the game, but that may be an issue for some people these days.

[@staggabob]

I still have that book but from the Amiga version...which ran at about a 10th of the speed of this MS DOS version but maybe that's the emulator?

[@user-yk8tq9uz4g]

In 1991, in Russia, my father brought home from work the magazine Aviationweek and it was advertising this game. Through year played in it and Battlehawks 1942 with pirate floppy disks

[@winternow2242]

Ah the memories. Played this around 1990 on my 286 in CGA. I remember that at some really pivotal moments on a mission it felt like time was slowing down and I thought wow, this is dramatic. Eventually I realized it was just my 286 reaching the edges of its performance. Almost always flew the Spit. I tried saving my career under multiple names thinking I could basically create a squadron of pilots who had each shot down a thousand airplanes. In practice, when assigned as wingmen, they were as useless as stock ai pilots.

[@VibeXplorer]

Hilarious. "Harry1" was quite the aviator. lol

[@antartis73]

This game was amazing in its simplicity yet it was so immersive thanks to the research put into it and it made you feel that you were a part of the greater picture of the Battle of Britain. Being able to fly all the featured aircraft and man every position, Performing dive bombing attacks, planning the raids with a strategic goal to destroy the Radar installations then the airfields and factories and manage to pave the way for the ‘Sea Lion’ campaign was superb. Completing the campaigns with the winning screen was the cherry on top of a brilliant game.

[@TheGameCollector]

The nostalgia is strong with this one! I remember playing this game a lot on our 386 in my childhood! 😊

[@nequals151]

I too had 386. I believe I had a MASSIVE 4 meg of HIGH SPEED memory. LOL. How times had changed. The 386 had a turbo button too... Still have no idea why those existed. Worried about running out of high octane electrons or something?

[@RelativeStrengthFit]

@@nequals151 turbo button was used to slow it down so you could play games made for original ibm pc 8086

[@thijsdejong7355]

Loved training pilotes and crew, never found any other game like this

[@Leemz100]

wow this brings back a lot of fond memories. loved this game along with Blackhawks: 1942 and of course the fabulous: SWOTL - Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. Great games by Lucas Arts.

[@TheDoorman55]

There was nothing like taking off in a bomber and hoping you'd make it to your target. Really got into this game.

[@1teamski]

One of the first games I got for my Amiga back in the day. What a great game with excellent attention to detail. Great times they were!

[@ReclusiarchLP]

So much nostalgia. :) Back then, due to not being able to really connect to anyone because no internet, I felt I was the only one playing this. So fun seeing the comments talking about this game, I was very much not alone enjoying this!

[@winternow2242]

I flew it in the early 1990s. I probably was one of the few flying it because I had a 286, and people with better computers could fly Aces of the Pacific or Secret weapons of the luftwaffe.

[@OpenGL4ever]

@@winternow2242 Aces and SWOTL were released later. I played Their Finest Hour and Wing Commander 1 on my fathers 286.

[@GR8TM4N]

PC-speaker sound: Making your airplane engine sound like a long continuous fart, since 1981.

[@daniela_dundel]

wrong, adlib

[@TheGameCollector]

Love it! 😊😄 This game brings back so many great memories! I was 10 in 1989, but I think I was played the game some years later.

[@EJ205T]

@@daniela_dundel I remember these sounds in lucasfilm sims, when i had no any soundcard. PC speaker sounds exactly like this.

[@57thStIncident]

I got an Adlib during the time I was playing this game. It was an improvement over PC speaker, even though in some cases it was most obvious when games played music. Often this was just in the title screen & menus though in a game like this.

[@stevengabriel3269]

So glad I had a SoundBlaster then... this sound would have driven me nuts!

[@ronbaldwin6382]

Wow, I completely forgot that I was a playtester on this product... Good old days.

[@Nangleator22]

I was so good at this game... due to the hours spent.

[@alexkilgour1328]

I loved this game. Played it on my 286.

[@gitarafan]

I played it on my Amiga... 30 years ago and I loved this game.

[@Thijsdejong1975]

Great game, played it for hours every weekend. I can't find a similar game with careermode on modern day PC.

[@bryanwilson1806]

Ties Battle of Britain II is a great game

[@izzovenegas2793]

Rise of flight!

[@wambooislustigram5789]

IL-2 BCliffs of Dover or IL-2 Battle of Stalingrad and its Addons

[@xmarine73]

So many great memories! I would copy my Ace over as another pilot and let him fly wingman.

[@mattxoom]

Could always try and play WWII Online too. Authentic old school feel.

[@Trusteft]

One of the best games of its generation/genre. Many hours were spent with it. :)

[@EJ205T]

SWOTL was top.

[@OpenGL4ever]

@@EJ205T SWOTL was great, but the campaign of this one was much more fun.

[@EJ205T]

@@OpenGL4ever something wrong with sprites scale in this game. Meanwhile these games use same engine and techniques.

[@CmputrBlu]

Damn shame these don't make sims like this (and others from that era and the 90s) these days. Where game play is more important than system modeling. Guess when PCs aren't all that powerful, game play is what you focus on. But even then you had things like dynamic (or close to it ) campaigns. Someone redo the 3 sims in this series with modern graphics and things like enemy lock.

[@winternow2242]

Didn't Falcon 4 have a dynamic campaign? Also, given the times, computers were high powered, though dwarfed by higher powered business machines that cost thousands. A few years after this game was released, a business PC with a 50 mhz 486 chip sold for a few thousand dollars. The advances were rapid, and new computers were soon outpaced. Think Moore's Law on speed, mixed with acid. In 4 years I went from the original Falcon to Jetfighter, which is big lead in a short time.

[@CmputrBlu]

@@winternow2242 Falcon 4 had a dynamic campaign, yes. So did sims like EF-2000 and F22-TAW. But all those sims came out in the 90s!. (A version of Falcon 4 did come out early 2000s) But that's ages ago. Weird that that feature has disappeared, and been replaced with systems modeling and graphics. Though I suppose the latter are probably just easier.

[@winternow2242]

@@CmputrBlu I'm guessing that since multi-player has become widespread publishers haven't seen the need to come up with dynamic campaigns.

[@OpenGL4ever]

@@winternow2242 coop dynamic campaign would be nice.

[@KingHaggis]

I remember bombing was very nice in this game, you could actually look down through the bay doors and see the bombs hitting their targets.

[@OpenGL4ever]

I never found out how to bomb with a Bomber. Thus i decided to use fighter planes to bomb and this worked. I won. Operation Sealion could be started.

[@Colaris99]

Great manual as well, full of background info if I recall correctly.

[@peter386]

I used to play this on my family's Packard Bell i386, this and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe!

[@triggSerable]

One of the first games i bought myself with allowance saved up for months. Played it on my dads 386. He got hooked and went on and played it too, later also Aces of the Pacific :)

[@BjrnOttoVasbottenbjovas]

Played this so much

[@schmitty1944]

I played this game on an Amiga 500. My frame rate was awful but I still loved it. The Amiga did have much better sound than the PC version though.

[@winternow2242]

PCs were very boring machines back then.

[@joojoojeejee6058]

@@winternow2242 PCs started dramatically becoming less boring just about when this game was released, in the early 1990s. And this game did support sound cards, which are not used in this video. And speaking of Amiga vs. PC, flight simulators were a genre that was much better suited for PCs, because A) PCs typically had much higher CPU performance and B) PCs had analogue joystics. Obviously other games started benefiting from the better CPU performance more and more as well, and soon whole new genres were invented because of this.

[@Slayghn]

@@joojoojeejee6058 I used an analogue joystick on the Amiga for "Gunship! 2000". It was a cheap model from Gravis for PC. I built an adaptor for it and it worked flawlessly. I found the schematics for the adaptor on a diskmag. But I know what you mean. Analogue joysticks weren't a common thing on the Amiga.

[@jtanner1853]

Used to spend weekends rewriting the games code to do things like import Zeros from 1942 and had an Africa Corp. And Eastern front version. Great games.

[@ilaser4064]

Wow, memories! Although I didn't have a soundcard (sound-blaster) so I'm watching muted. So cool!

[@markusadanitsch648]

Brings back really good memories to good times... Now life sucks in an world getting more idiotic every day

[@raftonpounder6696]

Amen to that.

[@WychardNL]

My favourite air combat game. The AI was good for that era, I could lure my enemy at my rear into the sights of my computer wing man. Also the ballistics of your gun fire was spot on.

[@burgek1]

Oh I loved this game, I totally forgot about the radio frequency decipher card you got with the game.

[@benjaminapeterson]

We photocopied it and sick a thumbtack in the center to rotate

[@OpenGL4ever]

@Fabric Their Fines Hour BoB had a great thick handbook with lots of additional informations.

[@Cantimule]

This is what it looks like?! I remember playing this at like 3 frames per second in 4 colors...

[@BVargas78]

I used to play this a lot on the Amiga back in high school. I remember the sequel Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe being one of the reasons i managed to get my dad to upgrade to PC!

[@randydelucia]

good ol' memories!

[@kanalsstorecom]

Unbelievable how playable this was. Atari1040STFM and hundred of hours and days there.

[@zzxd7720]

This old game has better simulation than battlefield V.

[@SubBrief]

this was my first flight sim-ish game. loved it. Does anyone know if there is a remake?

[@KrGsMrNKusinagi0]

had this on the tandy 1000 fun fun

[@jtanner1853]

I still have all the games and books. I just can't get them to play on my new computer. It was Battlehawks 1942.

[@asian_seasoning8257]

Oh my goodness!

[@dr.vonslifeinvesting6485]

Forgot about this game I got good at level bombing in it. The good old days.

[@typxxilps]

the copy protection was nice: this wheel with icons displayed and and raf radar station or airfield you hadto type in or chose on the pc, nice box and booklet too.

[@blandoworthlessness]

I had a pirated copy but it wouldn't load past the start screen. I had no idea it was this good! I played aces of the pacific and I loved it but it doesn't look as good and it's three years newer.

[@nequals151]

Oh thats right. The ol bitmap shapeshifting. None of the newfangled 3d object stuff. Cool. Lol.

[@blueskys6265]

Any way to play these old sims on modern hardware?

[@towhee89]

Do you play the flightsims with a joystick or keyboard only? I was wondering out of curiosity. Aces over Europe and Red Baron were my 2 favorite games as a kid, thanks for the playthrus.

[@thriftweeds]

Joystick sometimes keyboard + mouse! This game and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe i always played with with keyboard+mouse. Sierra / Dynamix sims Red Baron + Aces series i play with CH Flightstick.

[@aaroninclub]

Great video, but PC speaker sfx are painful to listen to compared to SoundBlaster.

[@MultiDivebomber]

Shooting down fat He 111 was fun in this game.

[@alastair4839]

This was so much easier playing as the Germans.... all you got to do is focus on shooting down the RAF fighters. As the RAF, you have to take out the bombers and worry about the fighters - and you really had to do it fast otherwise, no matter your kill count, you still loose. Really great game though!

[@Naksu76]

Fun game

[@mikewoodman7700]

what version is this? I remember the Amiga was much better

[@pelimies1818]

Very advanced for it’s time (pre-90’s game). I remember it got near top score in game-magazine review. The plane sprites look a little bit worse than in SWOTL, and I have to say the visual effect of planes constantly switching sprites was always something that bothered me immensly. It didn’t work in Wing Commander, nor in Falcon XT.

[@OpenGL4ever]

Well in that case you had to wait for Aces of Pacific and X-Wing. These two games used real vektor graphics for the aircrafts and spaceships.

[@pelimies1818]

@@OpenGL4ever Actually, there was no need to wait; I played the excellent F-15 Strike Eagle II already in 1989; the same year than Their Finest Hour was released. F15 II is a filled polygon vector game and the it was amazing: just the right balance of simulation and fun gameplay.

[@OpenGL4ever]

@@pelimies1818 I know, but i was referring to a replacement for a WW2 aircraft game and a space simulation game. F-15 Strike Eagle II is none of them. BTW, i played F-19 Stealth Fighter at that time and later F-117.

[@pelimies1818]

@@OpenGL4ever the Falcon I mention is F-16… not WW2. I disliked the F-19 anf F-117 design as ugly as F, so I skipped them back then. Red Baron was also a cool early vector sim, from 1990.

[@OpenGL4ever]

@@pelimies1818 And that's the problem. It's not WW2. Thus it's not a vector based replacement for BoB or Swotl. For that, you need Aces of the Pacific or Aces of Europe. The games were still great. I prefered Gunship 2000 and M1 Tank Platoon over Red Baron. Red Baron had nice graphics, but i didn't like the slow aircrafts.

[@PlatonsArm]

That’s not how I remembered it sounding like. At all.

[@nequals151]

Loved this game. Never managed to win campaign though. Can't remember if it was lack of skill or lack of patience or both. I honestly thought the graphics were a little better than that, but maybe that's just nostalgia talking.

[@OpenGL4ever]

You needed 3 things: 1. skill 2. patience 3. a good joystick I ruined over 3 joysticks while playing the game. And in 1990 finding good joystick was hard. Sometime i bought a CH Flightstick and this was a good reliable Joystick.

[@nequals151]

@@OpenGL4ever Thanks heaps for the advice. I can't remember what joystick I had back then. I'm gonna say it was an old thrustmaster if they had joysticks back then. Anyhow. Its amazing how much enjoyment I got from those old simple games. I also loved the Comanche heli sim.

[@OpenGL4ever]

@@nequals151 Try Gunship 2000 a heli sim from Microprose. The good thing about that is, it does have a career mode and if you get better, you can even fly a squad. I liked it much more than Comanche.

[@OpenGL4ever]

@@nequals151 And when i am talking about sims. M1 Tank Platoon is another great sim.

[@nequals151]

@@OpenGL4ever thanks heaps. I'll check em out.

[@ErossMcCloud]

wow so o l d. so glad we have games like IL:2 today!

[@MarcCelisKuss]

Eross Van Leer well you never played so how do you know? This game had a far better story telling and « game », you could manage the entire campaign operation in an initiative way, manage pilot, get them improved, get medals etc... it was a far better « package » than IL2

[@thatfriggingbathroom2656]

Fun fact: IL2 was published 12 years after this and 18 years ago, so it's much closer in time to this than to now

[@thatfriggingbathroom2656]

I do agree that tfh had the better campaign mode. Sounds crazy, but it's true

[@winternow2242]

@@thatfriggingbathroom2656 that's because in the late 1980s, PCs weren't really gaming machines. They were business and school machines, and had little multimedia capabilities. It wasn't unusual to find machines with no hard drives, and cd rom drives were still in the future for most. Computer graphics advanced quickly because they were starting from virtually nothing. The growth in the next few years was staggering, from Falcon AT to Falcon 3.0 in just 3 years (the game was advertised in magazines for months ahead of time). If you told an Il2 owner in 2001 that people would still be flying that game nearly 20 years later, he'd think you were nuts. Advances were fast, but then things slowed.

[@BVargas78]

PC version has a much smoother frame rate than the Amiga version! (Amiga had better sound though).

[@winternow2242]

It would probably depend on what your hardware was. On my 286 it ran OK most of the time, but slowed when a lot of stuff was happening on screen (you catch up to a flight of He-111s that are dropping their bombs, and tons of spits and Me-109s are also in the air. I can't believe that that would happen on a 386-DX or a 486.

[@BVargas78]

@@winternow2242 I'm just basing it on what i see in this video. To be honest I only had the game on Amiga, it was a lot less smooth looking than what we see here. But I liked it a lot and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, it's follow up was what made me convince my dad to get a PC. Which was a 386sx 25mhz.

[@joojoojeejee6058]

Amiga newer was well suited for flight simulators (and other 3D games), too low CPU performance for that. It was a 1980s home computer that was best suited for simple 2D games. And this game did support sound cards on the PC, but for some reason only PC speaker is used in this video.

[@rodo_art]

how the hell the cipher wheel works?!! I'm stucked!

[@lancecougar]

Memory lane

[@lurkerrekrul]

It's faster and smoother than the Amiga version, but the sound kills it. Your gun sounds like you're playing Donkey Kong. :(

[@TheDutchGhost]

Maybe this game did not support sound cards yet, I have no idea when some of the better ones were released for PC. Or maybe the user forgot to configure the sound settings.

[@nietzsche77666]

@@TheDutchGhost The PC version actually had a "better" sound mode than what we hear in this video. This is the PC Speaker sound, but there is also an adlib sound mode, which sounds less cranky and distorted, but a little weak to my ears, too. The Amiga sound was better than both of them, iirc it had digitized gun and engine sounds which sounded lots more realistic. But the framerate is worse there, so everyone is probably best of with this version, still. It's funny, I didn't even know there was this Speaker sound mode that is used in this video. My version I play with dosbox defaults to adlib mode. I looked it up and it seems you can enter this video's PC speaker mode only by adding an i to the main executable, i.e. start the game with "bob i" instead of just "bob" within dos (there is no setup program coming with the original game). But there are just those two modes on PC, adlib and Speaker sound, there's nothing else to configure about the audio.

[@TheDutchGhost]

@@nietzsche77666 Too bad that the developers could not add the sound card support its sequel would have. For a moment I accidentally mixed up sound and music but I think Lucasfilm/Lucasarts games would have some good sound support starting in the 90s? (I have not heard the sound effects from SWOTL so I am not sure) I think around the time Their Finest Hour was released that the PC started to show that it processors and memory space could pull of better technological performance than Amiga games, especially with flight sims. It still would take some time before the PCs really would surpass the Amiga in general when it came to games in general as the Amiga still often had the best version of more common genre games (platformers, shooters, etc). Scrolling but also sound and music. When do you think sound and music in PC games really surpassed that of Amiga games?

[@nietzsche77666]

@@TheDutchGhost Around one year later already, roughly estimated, maybe? TFH came out in 1989 and didn't feature any music in any version, they didn't seem to care that much about extended audio features on any platform for this game. The predecessor Battlehawks 1942 had at least flight and engine sounds as "intro music" on the Amiga version, while The Finest Hour and the PC version of both games came without any background audio feature in the menus and gameplay altogether. AFAIK the Soundblaster card came out in the same year, 1989, and became common in the 90s then and there were certainly better sounding PC titles shortly after that that surpassed the Amiga eventually with that setup. I think especially when they relied more on those Creative cards' digital sound output and tended to use CD background music more often, they really levelled up to what Amiga was before quickly. Personally, I remember that Wing Commander in 1990 was the first time I got jealous of a well set-up PC at that time sitting on my Amiga, before I didn't take PCs seriously much in in any (Action-) game platform sense.

[@TheDutchGhost]

@@nietzsche77666 Looks like the sound revolution really went fast on the PC once the first proper cards started to come out. I have heard before that Wing Commander was the title that showed the home computer gaming community of what the PC was capable of. When I started playing PC games I used a Soundblaster card, thinking that was the highest standard. Only long after I was already playing games on various Windows versions did I learn that a number of DOS games also supported the Roland MT-32 midi device. After hearing some of the music of games I had played as it was meant to be I was really disappointed that I never got a Roland MT-32 of my own, though of course it would have been expensive. About the Amiga Very understandable. Up to the 90s PC gaming in general could not compare to games on the Amiga. Graphic wise, music and sound obviously, but also gameplay tended to fall somewhat short. This was definitely noticeable in the games that were released on Amiga, Atari ST, and PC. PC original games in the platform and action genre did perhaps do better than the ported games, but they could almost never match a lot of the games in the same genres on the Amiga. I bet a lot of younger gamers who had to rely on the PC for gaming were rather envious of games on the Amiga or the home consoles. No Mario or Sonic for quite somet time, only these homebrew games that kind of looked like the original thing. Poor versions of Contra and Castlevania and various arcade games. I for example disliked how the Cinemaware games on the PC looked so poor compared to the Amiga originals like Rocket Ranger and It Came from the Desert.

[@danielt.p.3692]

Never afforded to buy it, just watched the fancy advertisement and friends having it. First time watching the actual game, now I am a looser without job, screw life.

[@GetRealBaby]

I'll send you the game on a CD if you want to play it, but you'll have to have an old/slow computer, otherwise a newer computer will put the game in a mode too fast to enjoy. You'll also need radio frequency decipher wheel. Each start of the game asks you to use it to enter the game. If you don't use it, it will allow you to play for a few minutes, and then it bumps you out, asking you for the 'pass-code'.

[@DCTib]

Just download DosBox and go to myabandoneware.com to download the game.

[@auletes]

VGA with 160x200px resolution...

[@57thStIncident]

320x200 i think. Not sure if they used more than the 16 color palette on this, IIRC while VGA could do this res as 256 colors, EGA could do only 16 and it may have been tailored to support both?

[@auletes]

@@57thStIncident Maybe they used an 8-Bit-graphic-engine like the old SIERRA-adventures.

[@57thStIncident]

auletes you’re right that they were creating with similar hardware constraints with classic Sierra games which were of similar vintage. I wasn’t aware that BOB1940 (Their Finest Hour) was a sequel to Battlehawks 1942 from a year earlier. Within that context it’s easy to see the engine re-use and why it makes sense that BOB1940 looks the way it does. A game of that time would be expected to support EGA as well as VGA and possibly even CGA (but those typically really looked like poo) EGA allowed 16 simultaneous colors (8-bit) out of a 64-color (6-bit) palette, while VGA supported 256 simultaneous out of a much larger 262,144 (16-bit?) palette. I imagine BOB1940 uses 16 colors (even on VGA), but better-selected colors without the more constrained EGA palette. You can see in EGA versions of these games people often had sort of orange skin, etc. Next edition Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe finally got 256 colors in 1991.

[@OpenGL4ever]

@@57thStIncident EGA was 4 bit = 2^4 = 16. VGA was 8 Bit = 2^8 = 256.

[@OpenGL4ever]

It's EGA with 320x200 resolution and 16 colors plus a lot of dithering.

[@tommylakasi3022]

Are games like this worth the money? I heard they are laggy and bad graphics

[@OpenGL4ever]

Framerates won't be fluid. In the early days, everything was rendered by the CPU. So 15-23 fps were very common and CPUs that were faster couldn't work very well with these games. I played and own Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain and SWOTL. Gameplay was great, especially the campaign mode. But from a todays perspective i would say, Their finest Hour. The Battle of Britain is at least too old. SWOTL is old too, but much more playable from a todays perspective.

[@MarcCelisKuss]

Like you would buy them for their graphics... seriously ?

[@haitolawrence5986]

You had to be there mate. 😉

[@sherpaderpa1]

Sun is very yellow in this game, in our current reality the Sun is white. Strange.

[@OpenGL4ever]

It was a game that used EGA video mode. You had to choose 16 colors from a palette of 64 colors. 2 years later, SWOTL was released. This supported VGA mode which supported 256 colors.