This was the very first game, designed in 1992, seen in U.S. arcades in 1993 and where the later Ace Combat series on PlayStation originated from.




The Air Combat arcade machine of '92 / '93 used Namco's System 21 arcade board with flat-shaded polygons. The original name for the System 21 hardware used in older Namco arcade games such as Divers eyes and Winning Run was the "Polygonizer".

The Polygonizer / System 21 hardware was Namco's equivalent of SEGA's Model 1 arcade board co-designed with General Electric Aerospace for flat shaded polygons used in Virtua Racing (1992) and Virtua Fighter (1993).

Video of the coin-op arcade Air Combat machine:




The first PlayStation game, Ace Combat in Japan / Air Combat in North America, was released in 1995. It was really a whole new game and not based directly on the arcade Air Combat from 1993.








The arcades got another game in 1995, Air Combat 22:





It was called Air Combat 22 because it ran on Namco's System Super 22 arcade hardware. The System Super 22 was a more powerful upgrade of the System 22 hardware that powered the original arcade Ridge Racer, which itself was a lot more powerful than the original PlayStation and Namco's PlayStation-based arcade board, System 11, first used in arcade Tekken.

Air Combat 22 was totally different than Ace Combat 2 for PS1 released in 1997. This time, Air Combat 22 had fully texture mapped polygons unlike the first arcade game. Air Combat 22 is extremely rare, I played the arcade machine only on time in my life in the late 90s.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Combat