I can't even say this is just nostalgia, I played this well into adulthood (under the impression it was abandonware). I'm glad I can finally absolve my guilty conscience of all those pirated hours. This must be the first time I've ever heard the sound effects as they were meant to be heard instead of just beeps and bloops, too.

PRO TIPS FROM THE PROS:
- Tired of hearing the engine whine? alt + v will let you cycle through different levels of sound. All but the highest leave out engine noises.
- On a long boring stretch of flying back to your landing site, with nothing to do in the meantime? Alternate hitting shift + z and shift + x every couple of seconds. Shift + z speeds up time, but only seems to work for a few seconds. shift + x puts you back into normal mode.
- The way to earn the big points is on Cold War, not Conventional War. You make more points for flying around unseen than you ever could from blowing stuff up
- If your game is running really choppily and your controls suck, it's not the game. What you're experiencing is lag. "Lag? This game? On my modern machine? How could that be?" Well, DOSBox isn't emulating a modern machine. Throw some more cycles it's way with ctrl f12. Somewhere in the 15000 cycles range will cure all your problems (default is 3000)

More controls here: http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/docs.php?id=603

When I was in the 10th grade or so, my best friend and I had bonded over a shared love of jets and military stuff. Plus we were both generally nerds in every sense of the word. He used to come over to my house and I'd load this up on my old 386. He wasn't very good at flying with a joystick, and since this game has so many keyboard commands (seriously, download and print out a keyboard guide off the net if you want to play this), he'd run tactical/nav with the keyboard and I'd pilot.

We got fairly good, where we were playing on Veteren difficulty. We'd racked up a few medals, earned some ranks, and since we thought we were superheroes, we decided to go for the highest score possible. We loaded up with the best missiles we could find and set out. Our goal was to not only destroy the primary and secondary objectives, but take out any targets of opportunity we came across.

We did, we spent every single missile and every single bullet, taking out tanks, convoys, bridges, SAM sites, enemy fighters, airports, you name it. By the time we were done we were completely out of fuel and ammo. We had to coast in for a landing, but we made it! Then the debriefing screen, then the ranks and medals. We got at least 4 or 5 medals on that mission, including the Congressional Medal of Honor! We were screaming, we thought that was the coolest thing ever. And still, 25 years later, we talk about that epic mission.

Well, I'm happy to report that this game still works perfectly. I have a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro, it got picked up and works fine. I downloaded a keyboard shortcut sheet off the internet and sent my friend a picture of it, said "Hey, I have a working copy of this, wanna play?" 10 minutes later he's at the house with a few beers, we fired the game up, and, well... it wasn't quite just like riding a bike. But a few missions later and we were stomping heads just like old times, it was great!

This game has a full damage model, with various info screens you can switch to. You can get a camera view of your target, or you can look at your fuel/waypoints, you can check damage, look at mission objectives, and that's all on the right screen. The left screen lets you switch between a nav map and a radar. In the middle is your radar signature. The filled area at the bottom is how much signature you're giving off, then you can see radar pings coming down from the top. Red bars are ground radar and blue bars are air radar.

The goal is to stay low and slow enough to keep your signature down, sneak in, take out the targets, and sneak out. It's very tense and satisfying. Maybe there's a SAM site pinging hard, and it's causing a lot of problems for you. There's nothing quite like taking out that monster with a sneak attack before it sees you. If someone does get a ping on you, you'll start getting notifications like "F-5 taking off from such and such airbase" as they scramble jets to look for you. Watch out for the F-4's, they have mean radar capabilities.

So yeah, pick this up. They don't make games like this any more. Horrific graphics aside, this is still one of the best flight sims ever made!

Night Dive Studios has been able to get the rights to F-19 Stealth Fighter and make it available again commercially like this, which is great.

You won't see a lot of playtime on this game on my account yet as of when I'm writing this review, but that's because I played this game bunches as a kid and as of this writing just launched this version to be sure it was working etc.

This was a fun game I enjoyed. It's a simulation in that there's a lot of things to keep track of (how you first successfully take off by actually getting the momentum and then getting yourself to lift off the ground, how you deploy chaff when being targeted, how you go after mission objectives and try not to be captured, etc.). I'm actually super happy it's available again like this.

That said, I recommend reading the game instructional material linked to from the game page. Back in the day, even I as a veteran player would sometimes forget which key would push the throttle to max or get the brakes to quit so that I started moving forward, and referring to at least jotting down some keys common to my play was useful since the game is spending visual space on your cockpit and not on what keys interact with that cockpit.

Also, recommend saying YES to playing with a joystick when you launch the game. The game is really played with a joystick with the keyboard having some supplemental actions on it that were too excessive for the two (at the time) joystick buttons. The way Night Dive has packaged this with DOSBox means current gamepads will work as your joystick if you wake them up before launching the game - whatever counts as the first two buttons on the gamepad or flightstick or whatever you have will be the two buttons that the game listens to.

I know Night Dive released Strife: Veteran Edition and I've heard their involved in rescuing other games that have disappeared from apparent ownership before... I'm glad to see this on here and I'm about to click on their link to see what else they've rescued so far. Kudos to Night Dive for bringing this out!

F19 Stealth Fighter is a gem from Microprose of late 1980s.

Early Microprose released several fight simulators which gradually became better and better, especially from gameplay perspective. F19 is the top Microprose game before Civilization and it has the last Sid Meier's flight simulator gameplay, the endpoint of Sid's flight evolution if you will.

F19's gameplay is a brilliant mixture of flight simulator and stealth. To my knowledge, currently it is still unique. In other words, you will not find a similar gameplay in modern games.

The core idea is the following. You, as a pilot of a stealth plane, go into the night far behind enemy front lines to hit special targets. The sky is full of patrolling MiG's, a lot of SAM's keep watch, and any clue or radar blip can alarm and the enemy will start to intensively search you. To be stealthy, you need to use landscape, watch the radar's and plane's activities, and, the most important, understand doppler and impulse radars and make relatively flight according to them (skim the manual due to it is a core feature).

Beware, the controls is tricky and you have to read the manual to take off and use weapons.

The game is realistic and not very hardcore, but deep and replayable. There are three types of bombs (among >20 weapons) with different way of using (bombing), more then ten types of targets (bunkers, ships, SAM, ...). Enemy units are randomly generated and you will have to think how to sneak through the enemy, hit target/take photo, and safely back home.

If you prefer better graphic you can look at the game "F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter 2.0". It has the same gameplay, but more pixels and more scenarios.

One of the things I like about the game is it works on Windows 10 without any issues. When this game was released my Brother and I fought over who got to play it first. this game has a lot of good things to say about it like the level of realism it's almost as if the missions are part of an Admiral's handbook and you get to read it. you get to fly into places like Iran and Lybia and you can play it in 3 different modes. I can't say that I have made it through one mission I can't even say that I have made it to the first target but with practice comes perfection. for a game that was released in 1988 this is one of the favorites I keep coming back to. this simulation is more realistic than some of the games that have been released recently. I would recommend this game to everyone Thumbs up.

I originally played this on a 386 computer with 4MB of sys RAM and an integrated graphics chip. It came on a single floppy disk and played via DOS. I played this virtually every day until it's sucessor F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter 2.0 (which had slightly better and more colorful graphics) and the first of Sid Meiers Civilization games were released in 1991 and loved it to death. Back then the graphics were basic compared to todays amazing flight sims. At the time I never imagined the realism we would have today would be available in my lifetime. Even though the graphics are very basic, I can still happily play this game today. It would be several years before we could play more realistic and better combat flight sims (not counting Microsofts Flight Sim, which did have a combat add-on and which I purchased v4 about a year after F-19 Stealth Fighter was released; however, at the time I much preferred the Micropose stealth fighter to the more commercial Microsoft version).

I loved the various missions that were available and the theatres of war you could choose to fight in. You could play either in a cold war setting where stealth was your number one priority; getting in and out without being detected by enemy radar, and where fuel consumption became very important as you'd have to fly around the radar pulses that you could see on your monitors. I also enjoyed playing the other modes (limited and conventional warfare), though I much preferred the former, that said I did enjoy the occasional dog fight in a more conventional setting.

Once you've played through the initial tutorials such as taking off and landing; (which I remember took me ages to get right) and using the various keyboard commands to bring up different displays on the HUD; for example, the radar or a map showing your waypoints, you'd move on to your pre fight orders, then on to selecting the various ordinace you would require for the mission you had chosen. For me these were all enjoyable part of the game. If you didn't select the right missiles for the type of mission you were undertaking, you would more than likely either not return, or at the very least fail your mission. You also had to balance the amount of ordinace you took to the amount of fuel you carried, as you could if not careful be flying on fumes before you returned to base and would then find your plane in a cloud of what now looks like very weird looking smoke. If you died, you'd have to start a new character; your dead pilot coming up in the roster as KIA or deceased (I can't remember which offhand). Thankfully, there was an eject command that you could use if you did run out of fuel, or your plane was hit catastrophically. This would enable you to bail out and continue your career. If you bailed out in enemmy territory, you'd get a newspaper headline saying you'd been captured and then exchanged for one of their own.

For me the main draw to this game was the varius controls; the dials and displays were more fun than the actual flying, though I also loved to select the ordinance. Sometimes, I'd just load up with my favorite missiles and just blast away at various targets before makeing a run for home. I'd fail the mission, but hey, it was only a game and a lot of fun, especially if I successfully hit lots of targets and even more fun if I managed to shoot down an enemy plane or two, which incidentally was hard, especially if I'd not loaded enough AIM's. You could fly in real time, but I would usually increase the time frame to cut down on the flying times to the target, but more so on the return journey after completing a mission, otherwise a mission could take over an hour to complete.

The game does come with a pdf version of the original manual (I still have the original stashed away up in the attic) which is accesible from the right hand menu when you open your Steam library to the F-19 Stealth Fighter. The original game also came with a keyboard overlay (which you can find online HERE[www.mobygames.com]. There are several to be found if you Google keyboard overlay for the F-19 Stealth Fighter. You can pick up the original manual for as little as a few £/$ via E.Bay, and usually it comes with the overlay and the original disks, though I've also seen it for as much as £25/$30.

Most simulation games came with a keyboard overlay due to the number of keys you needed to remember to play the game, for example deploying chaff, changing your ordance to the correct one when attacking, switching on the radar, ILS, IR Jammer, System Damage, Flares, Auto Pilot, Reset Waypoints, various views either in cockpit or off plane such as slot view, chase plane, side view etc. You could even select views of your missile in flight either as a tactical or inverse tactical view. Brilliant. I loved following my missiles flight right to the target.

You can check out some game play videos HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE. I've also included a video of the F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter 2.0 gameplay for comparison HERE. If you love flight sims and are into retro games, both are well worth buying, especially when on sale, when you can get them less than a few £/$.

Sweet merciful crap. It's back! It's really back!

One of my earliest memories from when I was a tiny micro-kid back in ancient times was going to my grandpa's house and seeing this game on his computer. He had a tendency to earn distinguished flying crosses and then die horribly before he could get back to base. ... Anyway. I naturally sank about 11 billion hours into this game before the advent of things like graphics and operating systems that weren't DOS came along and drew me into other things.

But now it's back! Having tried it out (And earning a distinguished flying cross and then dying before getting back to base on my first mission; grandpa would be proud.) I can say it is still epic and awesome. ..Probably. You might have had to have been there back when it came out to really -get it.- And by that I mean it doesn't really have graphics. Or decent sound. Or a particularly responsive flight model. But dammit it's a piece of my childhood and I love it to death for that. Plus, you know, it has on the fly generated missions that nothing else does. And who doesn't want to strive for those super shiny medals you can awarded after a mission if you do good? Or try to survive 99 missions and make it to brigadier general? You know you want to. And besides, it's super cheap to buy. Who doesn't love cool cheap things?

11/10 for people who thirst for nostalgias.
7.5/10 for people who like old school cheap things that are also good, but who might not have played the original or have any idea what's going on when they try to fly the plane or why things keep exploding.

Absolute belter of a game. Played this and F117A and the original Gunship! back in the nineties on a Commodore Amiga 500 then on a 1200 Amiga. (also played Gunship! and F19 on a Commodore C64 complete with wire frame graphics!) Later played on a PC not as good as on the Amiga's. but then no PC is as good as the Amiga.
The game still is one of the best OK I am lucky I still got the original manuals, maps and keyboard overlays etc. which makes the games much more enjoyable for me than for those who do not. So here I am a 68 year old playing these games from decades ago which says a lot about the standard of gameplay from Microprose. In fact I am still playing my Microprose collection Gunship!, F19, F117A, Pirates!, Red Storm Rising, etc. on the Amiga 1200 (how many pc's form the eighties are still going strong?) but well done to those involved in bringing this and other classics to a new generation.

Classic sim, challenging levels, and breath taking next-gen ultra hyper realistic graphics that will melt your GPU. Your SX-386 isn't ready for this.

This is an amazing game of my childhood.
Full 3D and open world. Playing this I have learned the look of planes and geography of game regions.
Unfortunately i can't recommend buying this. The game is bugged with long mission bug that will mess up your map, screen and cannon if you fly for too long. This kills all the fun. I don't remmeber this happen on original 386 hardware. Too bad so-called developers (they just picked the game and bundle it with dosbox) don't give a damn.
I recommend playing the game but don't recommend buying it in this condition.