TFX IBM PC MS-DOS 1993 Digital Image Design

Tactical Fighter eXperiment

Digital Image Design of the U.K. released TFX in 1993 for IBM PC MS-DOS 5.0. TFX stands for Tactical Fighter eXperiment.

TFX is the follow-up to F29 Retaliator of 1989 and was followed up by EF2000 of 1995.

In TFX players pilot the Blue Angel prototype of the Eurofighter EF2000 Typhoon, the Superstar prototype of the Lockheed F-22 Raptor or the Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter.

TFX was the second combat flight sim to employ a virtualized cockpit (Strike Commander was first). Also, TFX is one of the first combat flight sims to employ Gouraud-shaded texture-mapping. In addition, TFX features over three million square miles of terrain and a built-in mission construction toolset.

TFX requires an i80386DX-33 MHz CPU, 576,000 bytes of free conventional RAM and 1 meg of EMS RAM, but a 486 and 4 megs is recommended.

TFX displays in 256-color VGA 320x200. TFX employs the math coprocessor of iDX CPUs. TFX config.exe examines floating-point speed and video display speed.

TFX was distributed on 8x 3.5" 1.44MB HD diskettes or 1x CD-ROM and extracts and installs to hard disk drive via TFX Installer and TFX Configuration Menu. The install size with did.dat manually copied over is 12 megs and consists of 20 files.

TFX sound effects support AdLib, Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster 16, Roland LAPC-1 and Gravis UltraSound. TFX music supports Sound Blaster, Roland LAPC-1, Roland SCC-1 and AdLib.

TFX control supports mouse, keyboard, Flight Stick Pro and Thrustmaster.

TFX was designed by Martin Kenwright and lead-programmed by Colin Bell. Russell Payne coded the 3D engine.

TFX Features List

• Dogfighting and Air-to-ground aka Search & Destroy missions
• 5 Scenarios: Europe, South Atlantic, Middle East, West Africa, Central America
• 200 missions based on geopolitics
• 6 Modes of play: Arcade, Training, Simulator, Tour of Duty, Flash Points, UN Commander
• 4 Flight models: Arcade, Simple, Realistic and Military Specification
• 3 detail levels: low, medium and high
• 6 different times of the day
• 4 internal virtualized cockpit views
• Flyby view, 2 tracking views, missile view, enemy view
• Weather conditions (wind, rain, temperature) and cloud-cover

TFX Flight Maneuvers

• Break
• Loop
• High Yo-yo
• Low Yo-yo
• Immelmann Turn

TFX Ordnance

• M61A1 20mm Vulcan (six-barrel gatling gun-style cannon) [1]
• AIM-9L Sidewinder All-Aspect missile
• AIM-9L Sidewinder short-range anti-aircraft missile
• AIM-120 AMRAAM Air-to-air Medium-range Radar-homing missile
• AIM-132 ASRAAM Advanced Short-range Air-to-air missile
• AIM-152 AAAM Advanced Air-to-air missile
• ARM Anti-radiation missile
• MK 82 Snakeye Re-Bomb
• GBU-10/12/16/25 Laser-Guided smart bombs
• CBU-55 cluster bomb
• BLU-109 bunker buster bomb
• Durandal Re-Bomb anti-runway cratering munition
• AGM-65D Maverick thermal-imaging air-to-ground Guided Missile
• AGM-109H, AGM-88, AGM 122A, AGM 84
• Chaff
• Flare

TFX was released on the Amiga in October of 1997, five years after the MS-DOS version.

[1] F-22 and EF2000 only. F117A has no cannon.

cf.

• Early 1990s IBM PC Games that made Amiga owners jealous
• 1980s IBM PC Games that made Atari ST and Amiga owners jealous
• History of Computer Games 1976-2024
• History of 1990s Computer Games
• History of Shoot 'em Ups 1976-2000
• Western Computer-game Machines