Flight Simulators of yore
Aug. 31st, 2020 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinMicrosoft recently came out with a brand-new, apparently well-liked version of its venerable Flight Simulator, for our Windows PC-using friends. LGR celebrated by reviewing Flight Simulator 4.0, from 1989:
The version of Flight Simulator I first encountered was probably Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 on the little green monochrome screen of my dad's Compaq. Marco here is playing a slightly later version, I think, but the monochrome display takes me back. Anyone who played Flight Simulator in this era will remember starting out at (the now-defunct) Meigs Airport on the lake in Chicago:
Flight Simulator was the creation of the immortal Bruce Artwick, who I mentioned earlier as the author of Night Mission Pinball. The first version was apparently a relatively primitive, but revolutionary, program for the Apple II, sold through his company, Sublogic; its enduring legacy was the World War I dogfight mini-game that was retained in most of the early versions of the program. The strange gridded landscape bordered by billboard-like, two-dimensional mountains from that mode was Flight Simulator 1's entire world. Microsoft had Artwick develop the much more sophisticated Microsoft Flight Simulator to show off the capabilities of MS-DOS PCs, then its features got back-ported to other platforms and sold by Sublogic as "Flight Simulator II".
I eventually bought this version of Flight Simulator II for myself. It came out around 1986 for the Atari ST, and this is the one I have the most nostalgic memories about:
FSII for the Atari ST was more sophisticated than Microsoft Flight Simulator 2.x; this was the version that introduced mouse control, a custom windowed interface, and the ability to get a third-person view of your plane, and for the first time you had a choice of planes in the main simulation mode: a Cessna 182 or a Learjet. It shipped with a San Francisco Bay Area scenery pack that was much more detailed than the ones that came with previous versions, and the default airport switched from Chicago Meigs to Oakland International, to show it off. Eventually, these features found their way into Microsoft Flight Simulator 3.0.
I spent countless hours in college just noodling around with this thing, flying around exploring its little world with no particular goal in mind. Flight Simulator has always been like that--while you can certainly set piloting challenges for yourself, and just landing the plane at an airport is a challenge in itself, aside from the World War I mode it has no scoring or narrative. It's quite educational about aviation if you choose to take it that way, and it shipped with a huge amount of paper documentation, but I suspect for most users it was always just a way to goof off and relax, with enough serious "simulation" trappings that you could tell yourself you weren't doing something completely aimless.
This 1986 ST version plays remarkably well under the Hatari emulator, though it probably plays better if you're using a real mouse and a keyboard with a numeric keypad, since it's very much built for those. Hatari can also emulate a 32 MHz Atari TT, which plays this game at a pretty sweet frame rate--Flight Simulator was intelligent enough that for the most part it didn't rely on the processor clock for timing, so it adapts smoothly.
Playing it now, one thing that does strike me is how little the game does to hold your hand when it comes to navigating its world. There are a few preset situations on the game disk, but they actually don't cover all of the scenery areas that the game ships with (SF Bay Area, LA, Chicago, NY/Boston and Seattle). Out of the box, there's no way to just say "start me at Boston Logan".
There's a "slew mode" that lets you suspend physics and just move the plane freely about the world, but the easiest way to jump from one populated scenery area to another is to type in coordinates, and the coordinates are not latitude/longitude but Flight Simulator's own idiosyncratic system. So you pretty much had to rely on the paper charts that shipped with the game, which gave positions in these coordinates (I suppose that was an extra layer of copy protection). And even so, the coordinates could be imprecise enough that it could be difficult to position the plane at a runway without dropping it from a height and immediately crashing it.
These quirks were things people just lived with, because nothing was quite like Flight Simulator back in those days.
The version of Flight Simulator I first encountered was probably Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 on the little green monochrome screen of my dad's Compaq. Marco here is playing a slightly later version, I think, but the monochrome display takes me back. Anyone who played Flight Simulator in this era will remember starting out at (the now-defunct) Meigs Airport on the lake in Chicago:
Flight Simulator was the creation of the immortal Bruce Artwick, who I mentioned earlier as the author of Night Mission Pinball. The first version was apparently a relatively primitive, but revolutionary, program for the Apple II, sold through his company, Sublogic; its enduring legacy was the World War I dogfight mini-game that was retained in most of the early versions of the program. The strange gridded landscape bordered by billboard-like, two-dimensional mountains from that mode was Flight Simulator 1's entire world. Microsoft had Artwick develop the much more sophisticated Microsoft Flight Simulator to show off the capabilities of MS-DOS PCs, then its features got back-ported to other platforms and sold by Sublogic as "Flight Simulator II".
I eventually bought this version of Flight Simulator II for myself. It came out around 1986 for the Atari ST, and this is the one I have the most nostalgic memories about:
FSII for the Atari ST was more sophisticated than Microsoft Flight Simulator 2.x; this was the version that introduced mouse control, a custom windowed interface, and the ability to get a third-person view of your plane, and for the first time you had a choice of planes in the main simulation mode: a Cessna 182 or a Learjet. It shipped with a San Francisco Bay Area scenery pack that was much more detailed than the ones that came with previous versions, and the default airport switched from Chicago Meigs to Oakland International, to show it off. Eventually, these features found their way into Microsoft Flight Simulator 3.0.
I spent countless hours in college just noodling around with this thing, flying around exploring its little world with no particular goal in mind. Flight Simulator has always been like that--while you can certainly set piloting challenges for yourself, and just landing the plane at an airport is a challenge in itself, aside from the World War I mode it has no scoring or narrative. It's quite educational about aviation if you choose to take it that way, and it shipped with a huge amount of paper documentation, but I suspect for most users it was always just a way to goof off and relax, with enough serious "simulation" trappings that you could tell yourself you weren't doing something completely aimless.
This 1986 ST version plays remarkably well under the Hatari emulator, though it probably plays better if you're using a real mouse and a keyboard with a numeric keypad, since it's very much built for those. Hatari can also emulate a 32 MHz Atari TT, which plays this game at a pretty sweet frame rate--Flight Simulator was intelligent enough that for the most part it didn't rely on the processor clock for timing, so it adapts smoothly.
Playing it now, one thing that does strike me is how little the game does to hold your hand when it comes to navigating its world. There are a few preset situations on the game disk, but they actually don't cover all of the scenery areas that the game ships with (SF Bay Area, LA, Chicago, NY/Boston and Seattle). Out of the box, there's no way to just say "start me at Boston Logan".
There's a "slew mode" that lets you suspend physics and just move the plane freely about the world, but the easiest way to jump from one populated scenery area to another is to type in coordinates, and the coordinates are not latitude/longitude but Flight Simulator's own idiosyncratic system. So you pretty much had to rely on the paper charts that shipped with the game, which gave positions in these coordinates (I suppose that was an extra layer of copy protection). And even so, the coordinates could be imprecise enough that it could be difficult to position the plane at a runway without dropping it from a height and immediately crashing it.
These quirks were things people just lived with, because nothing was quite like Flight Simulator back in those days.