This brings back memories. I still have the Falcon Gold boxed set that brought EVERYTHING! Besides Falcon 3.0, it had F/A-18 Hornet, MiG-29 Fulcrum, the extra theaters, separate manuals and reference cards for everything, giant wall maps of the theaters, and an instructional video course called Art of the Kill and its manual. There was so much literature. It was amazing. 12 year old me could've probably taken off in a real F-16 given the chance!
I recently picked up a copy of this from a retro game store while on vacation. The box was covered in dust and slightly damaged on the corners. To my surprise everything inside was in mint condition. Simulators obviously have a higher standard of documentation, but it really made me miss game manuals in general.
Tunic, a game released last year, contained an in game manual in the style of older games. I personally found it legitimately useful, and fangamer recently released a hardcover version that is now out of stock.
If you're into modern games with useful manuals check out EXA Punks and Shenzen I/O. They are both Zachtronics programming puzzle games. And you have to print the manuals yourself (or order them online), but they're every cool and done in character. For example, the EXA Punks manual is a pair of 'zines.
Thank you for reminding me! I actually own the printed zines for EXA Punks. They also came with a secret envelope to be opened at a certain point in the game. I ordered them mostly out of a love for anything Zachtronics did. I don't have the Shenzen I/O one, but should really get it printed. If I recall there was also a physical manual for TIS-100 at some point.
I remember getting into scripting creating a menu system that could boot with either mouse or keyboard drivers loaded, but not both, because falcon 3.0 required about 610K of conventional memory, leaving only about 30K for sound, joystick, and mouse drivers.
I had a very tiring Christmas day (mostly tiring for my dad, though) putting together boot floppies for various games.
Eventually I got really good at it - selecting what drivers were required and packing them efficiently into base and extended (I think that was it...) memory.
Sometimes IIRC I'd swap boot disks around and discover extra features in games that only appeared with even more base memory.
