Yeah, getting the rate right for F3 is like finding a needle in a needle stack. The last time I tried to fly it was over a decade ago and I recall ripping off the landing gear and exploding within about 2 seconds of throttling up on the runway.
Of course, getting the “magic free RAM” to enable the B-52 cockpits and other details was super frustrating.
Uuh, wat?
In Falcon 3 if you didn’t have enough “low” RAM (the under 640k part), B-52s had no windows on the front, among other lost details.
So many of us made custom autoexec.bat and config.sys for playing F3 that would bypass loading drivers for CDROMs and such. We even found a super-slim mouse driver (it was like 8k resident) so we could use a mouse in the menus still without violating that limit.
I believe you needed to have 610k free (so mouse, system, and other drivers had to total less than 30k) or it was insufficient.
Many switched from MS DOS to DR DOS, or used QEMM386 instead of MS’ own EMM386 because they used less low RAM.
Those were the days ;).
Do you guys maybe happen to have something like this for DOSBox?
I still have nightmares about that. My grandfather and I (he a retired IBM software engineer) spent an entire month to get the boot disk to work right, and even then we only had sound maybe half the time.
Oh dear messing around with autoexec.bat and config.sys sure was interesting. My dad and I made boot discs for many games.
Falcon and Wing Commander were examples that just needed every bit of power so they could run well.
…sigh…I don’t miss it really. It was a pain in the behind. 
I remember that I managed to get around 612kB (or was it 622kB?) of free conventional memory with all the drivers (mouse, CD-ROM, sound card) loaded. I used memmaker.exe from DOS 6.22 to optimize the driver loading and some manual tweaks in config.sys and auoexec.bat. I was able to run Falcon 3.0 without issues with all things working. Had to run it from plain DOS command prompt though as running Norton Commander would eat those extra few kB needed for Falcon 3.
Yeah I think it was 610kB for Falcon 3.0. I remember you could load some of the drivers to the Upper Memory Block area to leave as much of the 640k free for the user.
Some time ago I played with PCem (PC emulator) and installed DOS 6.22 on it. Here are some results from memory status:
and contents from config and autoexec
although there are no drivers for mouse, sound card and cd-rom loaded.
Oh btw, here’s another mission from Harrier Jump Jet , this time with some air to ground action and a bit better landing than the last time. 
Did y’all every play these games? The strike series was pretty amazing. Desert, Jungle, Urban were all amazing games. Nuclear Strike was a little ridiculous. But overall another great game series from the 90s.
Yeah I played Desert Strike on Amiga 500 long time ago. Never finished it though. It was pretty fun isometric shooter. Also played some of Jungle Strike but that was it.
Desert Strike had pretty cool intro.
I played ‘recently’* F3.0 via dosBox on W7 without any issues. Sure I managed to change some settings. I can have a look somewhere about my dB setup.
I wish I have more time for all this retro. I never got beyond F3 training missions 
*recently:
As someone who was a LAN admin in the early 90’s, I look those file listings with a certain amount of horror.
Here’s another classic from Microprose …
… and I’m mentioning this because:
http://community.combatsim.com/topic/43382-stealth-a-retro-style-f117a-simulator/
That F-117 simulator being rebuilt in Unity looks great - that going to be quite the labor of love, and it’s really nice to see people doing stuff like that.
Let’s just hope he see it through. There were many who just gave up. I would gladly pay for such remake.
I bought the original some time ago on GOG.com but played it once or twice.
I guess I will wait for the remake now
