Chocks Away on Archimedes: A Dad’s Return to 1990 RISC OS Flight

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What It Is

Chocks Away is a combat flight simulator written by Andrew Hutchings and published by The Fourth Dimension in 1990 for the Acorn Archimedes — the RISC OS workstation that, in the UK, was found mostly in schools and in the homes of engineers, teachers, and the children of engineers and teachers. It was a flight sim in the gentlest sense of the word. You flew a Sopwith-style biplane against First World War-themed opponents, including Fokker Eindeckers, Fokker Triplanes, and the occasional Gotha bomber. You had infinite ammo but finite fuel. You had six hit points. You could return to base and land for repairs.

That landing, incidentally, is the game’s central idea. Pretty much every other flight sim of the era was built around combat, speed, or flashy cockpit instrumentation. Chocks Away cared about flying. Pitch, roll, throttle, a flight model that rewarded patience. Ian Bell — of Elite fame — lived at the edge of the Archimedes crowd around this era, and the same sensibility is here: a British, understated, technically precise piece of software that trusted you to do the work.

Why This One Matters To Me

The Archimedes was never my computer. It was the computer in the school IT room, and at a handful of friends’ houses whose dads worked at places where the 32-bit RISC chip made financial sense. If you were a UK kid in 1990 and you saw an Archimedes running anything — a fractal generator, a desktop publishing demo, Chocks Away — you remembered it was fast. Unlike anything else at home, it did not whirr and lag. Everything happened immediately.

Chocks Away arrived in that context as something genuinely new. Flight sims on 8-bit micros had been chunky and slow. On the Archimedes, the biplane banked smoothly, the terrain ground away underneath, and the two-player split-screen held steady. It was the first time most of us had seen something that felt like a simulation rather than an approximation.

Playing it now, the Archimedes aesthetic is unmistakable. Thin, clean shapes. Generous use of the color palette. A UI that assumes you know what you are doing. The flight model holds up surprisingly well — a modern flight sim player would recognize most of the inputs. It is slower than a modern game would be, but that is part of the point. Chocks Away is about flying, not about flashing lights.

The boys watched for about two minutes. The older one asked why the plane was so slow. The younger one asked if it had missiles. Neither of them was wrong about what the game is, which is why neither of them wanted to play it. This is a game for a specific demographic — people who grew up in a country where the Archimedes was briefly, fleetingly, the computer that made you feel the future had arrived.

The Dad Filter

Worth Full Price?

Buy Cheap — or rather, emulate it. Working Acorn Archimedes machines are rare now, and the ones on eBay command collector prices. The best way to play Chocks Away today is with an emulator like Arculator and a disc image of the game. That is the supported-by-community route; it is free, and it works on modern hardware without trouble.

If you find a disc at a car boot sale, grab it. If you are holding out for hardware, expect to pay. For most people, the emulator route is the one that keeps this review honest.

Kid Appeal

Low. Children raised on Fortnite cannot understand the pleasure of a clean landing. There is no progress bar, no XP, no level-up sound. You fly, you land, you take off again. The pace is glacial by 2026 standards.

Kids may find the two-player mode briefly engaging — it still works as a competitive dogfight — but after ten minutes, they will be back with whatever game they came from. Not a failure. Just a mismatch.

Parent Tolerance

High. This is a game for the end of the day, with a cup of tea and the volume low. The pace is perfect for a tired brain. You can fly a mission, land the plane, switch off, and feel like you have done something.

There is a real meditative quality to the flight model once you learn it. The Archimedes rendered the ground at a steady frame rate, which means the sense of motion is honest in a way that is rare in games of this era.

Family Play Value

Two-player hot-seat. The split-screen dogfight mode deserves its own paragraph. In 1990, two-player split-screen on a home computer that was actually good was genuinely novel. This one worked. You could sit beside a mate and dogfight each other across a landscape you both recognised.

Modern kids will not appreciate the technical achievement. But the head-to-head tension still translates, and ten minutes with an older sibling or a cousin is legitimately fun.

Time Respect

Excellent. There is no save-game to protect, no open-world progression to resume, no lengthy intro. Boot, pick a mission, fly. Die — which will happen — and you are back in seconds.

This is a game built for 20-minute sessions. If you play it for an hour, that is your problem, not the game’s.

Replay Chances

Medium. The mission pack extended the content considerably, but the fundamental experience does not vary much from mission to mission. Attack formation, dogfight, home for repairs. Once you have internalized the flight model, each mission is a variation on a theme.

That is enough for a month of casual returns. After that, you will boot it once or twice a year for the nostalgia, which is the correct amount.

The Verdict

Buy Cheap — or better, emulate. Chocks Away is a quiet, precise piece of software that has aged far better than most things from 1990. The Archimedes was a machine ahead of its time, and the game was written by someone who clearly cared about flying rather than explosions. Both those things are why it still plays well.

It is not a family game. It is not even a game that many people under 40 will have heard of. It is a museum piece from a short, specific window in British home computing, when a 32-bit RISC machine made it into middle-class living rooms and the software written for it assumed you had a brain.

Worth a quiet Sunday evening. Worth showing your older kid briefly to explain what flight sims looked like before they got loud. Then put it away again. It does not need to be played often to be worth owning.

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• The Dad Filter Manifesto — How and why I review games as a dad, not a gamer.