Star Fighter 3000 Archimedes Fednet 1994

Star Fighter 3000 1994

Developed by World Federation Entertainments Network aka Fednet, Star Fighter 3000 of 1994 was easily the most advanced 3D shoot 'em up of the early 1990s. This is because Star Fighter 3000 was coded for the most powerful Western microcomputer of the late-80s and early 90s, the legendary Acorn Archimedes of 1987-92.

Star Fighter 3000 was programmed by Tim Parry and Andrew Hutchings.

The Archimedes' stock-standard 32-bit ARM RISC-based microprocessor was clocked at 8MHz and came in at 4½ MIPS, which is five times the computational power of the Atari ST's 8 MHz Motorola 68k.

And when it came to polygon-pushing and sprite-scaling, this showed -- bigtime.

In 1994 Star Fighter 3000's polygon-pushing power and graphical detail were impressive. In comparison Zeewolf on the Amiga ran like my Aunt May after she's had to much sherry to drink.

To be fair though, we are talking about the Archimedes 3D powerhouse. It's such a pity it never took off as a computer-game machine. ST/Amiga owners knew of the Archimedes: "That micro that is so much more powerful than ours, but doesn't get that many big-name games".

The Archimedes original SF3000 requires 2 megs of RAM and is best run on A4000 ARM3s clocked at 25 MHz + FPU.

Ported from the 3DO console port of the Archimedes original, the IBM PC MS-DOS / Windows 95 version of SF3000 came out in July of 1996. On IBM PC, SF3000 requires i80486-33 MHz, 400K conventional RAM and 5.5 megs of EMS, but Pentium 90 MHz and 8 megs of RAM is recommended. 

The IBM PC version displays in 256-color VGA 320x200 or VESA VGA 640x480. It employs framerate-tailoring fogging (tailorable draw distance), texture-mapping and transparency effects. It is also switchable to a Zaxxon-like isometric perspective.

cf.:

• History of Shoot 'em ups
• History of Computer Games 1976-2024