Battlehawks 1942

The MS-DOS version is the one this page covers: the information, review and main screenshots are from this platform.

Battlehawks 1942 for Amiga is the conversion of Lucasfilm Games' naval air simulator. This copy is in English and its installer identifies the game as a 1989 production. It keeps the training and the missions for the United States and Japan in the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, the Eastern Solomons and the Santa Cruz Islands.

Getting into the Wildcat's cockpit

Click inside the player to capture the mouse. A is equivalent to the Amiga's space bar: it lets you advance through the menus and confirm the highlighted option. Choose Select Training, Fighter Intercept Mission and Gunnery Fundamentals. The Ready Room shows the F4F-3 Wildcat, the starting altitude and the ammunition, fuel and damage conditions. Begin Flight opens the recognition test.

The drawing of an aircraft must be compared with the plates in the Game Play section of the original manual. Each view has its own word. For example, the INFAMY plate shows the Zero with its wings running diagonally from upper left to lower right. Enter the word that matches the drawing shown; do not use the same example for every view.

The on-screen Amiga keyboard

V opens and closes the virtual keyboard. Move across its keys with the arrow keys and press X to type the selected one. That way you can enter the recognition word and press Return on the Amiga keyboard itself. The letters on the physical keyboard also work as controller buttons; for this test, use the virtual keyboard.

Once in the cockpit, move the mouse to fly. The tilt of the horizon and the roll indicator show the turn. Hold A to fire the machine guns: their tracers appeared during the test. For the game's own pause you can press P from the virtual keyboard; V lets you close it afterward. Esc releases the pointer to reach the player's controls.

The WHDLoad copy and the floppy disks

The main download keeps the WHDLoad package with its 15 original items, including the three disk files, the manual and the hints. To play in the browser, only a text launcher is added and the player's Amiga environment is used. The installer by Galahad/Fairlight indicates compatibility with the original PAL edition.

The second download keeps the two European floppy disks in IPF format. To use them outside this site you need an Amiga emulator compatible with IPF and your own Kickstart. The WHDLoad package requires an environment with WHDLoad. These are two ways of preserving the collection's Amiga edition.

Screenshots and video of this edition

The menu and the Wildcat turn were captured during a real game with this copy. The video lasts about 36 seconds and shows the cockpit of an SBD-3 Dauntless. The general DOS controls that appear in the guides on this page must be replaced by the Amiga ones when you choose this edition.