#war eagles

It would have been the greatest unmade fantasy fiction movie ever, if it actually came out: Merian C. Cooper’s War Eagles.

Conceived in 1937 as a follow up to Cooper and stop motion wizard Willis O’Brien’s King Kong. The script, which is still around, was by Cyril Hume, who wrote Forbidden Planet. If War Eagles came out, it would have been the first technicolor fantasy movie, beating the Wizard of Oz by a year. It would have changed film history at such an early, deep and profound point nothing after would be recognizable. The film went unmade as pre-production took too long, and Merian C. Cooper left movies to join the anti-fascist volunteer “Flying Tigers” aviators helping the Chinese push out the Japanese invaders. 

All we have is test footage for the special effects featuring dinosaurs, unreal prehistoric landscapes, and most of all, the giant riding eagles who were the core of the film. The plot is that explorers find a lost valley with stone age men who ride giant eagles.

It’s about damn time I got the hard drive initialized.

There were some weird things happening that made the Type 20/ST-4038 appear to be full of bad tracks.  I took out all of the cards I didn’t need, hoping to rule out interference issues.  Whatever it was that caused it, I think it’s all been sorted out now through a combination of luck, SpeedStor, & Ontrack Disk Manager.  MS-DOS 5.0 has been installed onto the hard drive, along with a handful of games. 

I also have secured an Intel Extended Memory board which I’m told will provide me with a full 640KB base memory, and atleast 1MB more!  It’s in the mail.

Does anybody know how many 5¼" floppies Silpheed came on (360KB or 1.2MB)? My copy is in storage, and so I’m curious how I should split up the files onto disks for installation on the 5170.

I wonder if this thing will run Putt-Putt games... or Wolfenstein 3D.

War Eagles

Welcome to the first video game I ever played, way back in 1994.  Armed with my Kraft KC-3 joystick, I take to the skies once more as a biplane dogfighter in World War I.  I’ve been waiting 23 years to play this game again correctly, so it’s nice to be able say that I can.

The Quest To Play War Eagles

Way back in 1994, I played my first video game on my dad’s IBM PC compatible.  War Eagles was one of the handful of games in his library, and it was the only one that used a joystick.  We had a Kraft KC-3, a 2-button joystick that worked with both IBM and Apple machines, and had both kinds of required connectors along with a switch to select which mode it was in.  The most unique feature it sported was the ability to turn off the centering springs for each axis.

Within the next year, Windows became relevant enough for us to make the leap to the GUI world.  The Kraft was put on a shelf, along with the DOS game collection, but the computer disappeared to parts unknown.

In 2001 or thereabouts, I spotted War Eagles on the shelf, and started asking questions.  I opened the box to find a 5¼“ floppy disk, the first one I had seen in a few years.  Immediately, I wanted to play it  -- the problem was how was I going to read the disk? 

If I’m going to be putting together an IBM PC AT, I definitely need one of these. 

Concept art and test shots from Willis O’Brien’s War Eagles, a film that would have followed up O’Brien’s triumph, King Kong. The script was by Cyril Hume, who wrote all the MGM Tarzan films and Forbidden Planet. The plot is that explorers find a lost valley filled with a lost tribe of Vikings who ride giant eagles. In the finale, the Nazis would attack New York with a zeppelin fleet and attackw with something like an early EMP, only to be defeated by our hero with an army of giant eagles.