I've been playing both F-19 and F-117A recently and noticed a very odd difference. In F-117A, laser-guided bombs like the paveway are super-easy to use, get a lock, release, job done. In F-19 the same paveway will almost never hit the locked target, but weirdly always seems to hit 'something' as though it locks onto something else? I've tried different techniques for the bombing run, keeping the bay doors open etc. and nothing seems to work properly. Other bombs have no problem, it's just the laser-guided ones that seem to be pretty random. Very occasionally they'll work, but more often than not they just hit entirely the wrong thing.

Also, the HARM missile is a similar kind of deal, in F-19 (following it using the weapon chase-cam) after getting a missile lock, I fire and it just flies straight into the ground (firing from an altitude of 1500 so should easily clear the missile-drop distance).

Outside of the game I've also messed around with dosbox cycle counts (I've tried from 1000 up to 8000 with same behaviour).

Am I missing a trick with these particular weapons? The manual seems to suggest they should be pretty easy to use, and in F-117A they are, but here in F-19 they seem unreliable at best.

It could be a bug in F-19.

Remember that F-117A was released after F-19 and received some bug fixes on the source code side.
If that's the case, there's nothing you can do to fix it.

Unfortunately, there used to be no changelog files to see what was changed to the code base in the old days.

If it is a DOSBox problem, you could try it on an old real computer if you have one. Something like a 486 or older.
If it runs to fast, a program like slowdown.exe might be helpful.

As an alternative to DOSBox and a real computer, there are other emulators available.
Sometimes the problem lies in the x86 emulation of the machine.

Emulators such as PCEM, 86Box and QEMU are available as alternative emulators. Emulators are not as easy to use as the DOSBox, they require a legacy BIOS to be loaded and then a real DOS must be installed on the emulated machine.

That would be a shame, although even if they are definite bugs, F-19 is pretty playable even with those issues kicking around, just need to avoid certain weapons.

As for running a real old PC or full PC emulation, that's a bit beyond what my motivation allows for, I'll happily mess around with Dosbox (including trying out things in Dosbox-X or Dosbox-Staging) but that's my limit pretty much, so I think fiddling with Dosbox-X configuration would be about as close to that as I'd get.

I understand. But on the other side, it's not difficult to install FreeDOS inside VirtualBox or Qemu and then move over the game to the FreeDOS installation. The easiest way is by creating ISO image files and loading them in Virtualbox/QEMU on the guest OS.

I used to play it on the Tandy and the LGBs worked pretty well. I think it is something to do with the game environment. I've had lots of problems trying to use the paveways and rockeye IIs. I try to stick with Mavericks and Snakeyes. For certain hard targets I don't think those are an option, so you may just have to plan on the bombs not working well. I would forget about HARM entirely. Sub pen requires FAE. That's the only thing that can hit it.