| 2) CGA 320x200 | the classic palette 1 — cyan, magenta, white — with the cockpit redrawn as 1988 line art; H swaps the hardware palette in flight to green/red/yellow and back |
| 3) EGA 320x200 | sixteen colours on ANY EGA — the 64K launch card included |
| 4) EGA 640x350 | EGA's best: sixteen curated colours, the drawn grey cockpit, no dither anywhere |
| 6) VGA 320x200 | the game as born, 256 colours |
| 7) VGA 640x480 | sixteen colours at the crispest geometry of all |
| 1) HERCULES | marked NOT IN THIS MACHINE here — this browser machine is a VGA; the mono edition boots a real Hercules |
The menu quizzes the hardware before offering, exactly as the metal would: every entry states its resolution and colours, and a card the machine has not got refuses the key. Every retro mode converts the same finished 256-colour frame; the cockpit on the retro cards is its own drawn artwork, baked offline — not a per-pixel conversion. N switches day and night on every card.
Two more screens follow: GRAPHICS DETAIL — FULL, MEDIUM or LOW, conditions that skip work, not different games — and SELECT SOUND SYSTEM: the Sound Blaster's recorded turbine, the PC speaker bending one square wave the way 1988 did, or no sound at all. The speaker row is quizzed too — a machine with no Blaster gets a voice by default, not silence. ENTER on each screen takes the sensible answer.
The aeroplane is OWL FLY II's, key for key: arrows fly, Shift+W/S gate the throttle, A lights the burner, Enter locks, Backspace fires a missile, Space holds the cannon, F2–F7 are the views, L is the landing gear, Alt-Q leaves. The full manual lives on the OWL FLY II page.
ESC pauses — this edition's own key. The world stands still; the glass stays alive: F2–F7 keep switching views, the orbit camera still flies on the arrows, the radar and map still zoom, the MFD still pages. A red P sits on the panel while time is stopped — and it is the photographer's key: pause a dogfight, orbit it, frame the shot.
A touch screen gets a stick and eight buttons drawn over the picture: what you HOLD — stick, throttle, trigger. What you press ONCE — gear, flaps, radios, cameras — is on the panel behind the keyboard button in the side menu, spelled out: GEAR, FLAP, IFF rather than L, F, I. The last row of that panel is this edition's own: the digits the front step asks for, ENTER, and PAL for the CGA palette swap.