Game controller just doesn't work with the old Google Earth flight sim

[mmcirvin]

In my first burst of posts about flight simulators several years ago, I noted that the Easter egg flight simulator in Google Earth Pro tried to support game controllers, but didn't work well enough to be usable with them (it was an addendum to the post on X-Plane 11, which handles them with no trouble, though I did mess with the settings quite a bit there to make it work like I liked--back then, I think I was using an XBox One or XBox 360 controller hooked up through USB, rather than the slightly less ancient Bluetooth PS4 DualShock I'm using now).

Well, now it doesn't work at all. When I launch it on my current machine, going into the flight simulator mode with a controller active offers a "Joystick enabled" box that is checked by default, but if you leave that on, the simulation just crashes. Probably just as well, since it never centered correctly, which made joystick control basically unusable.

Comments

[thewayne]

That's too bad.

I wonder how many people remember the flight simulator built in to Excel, and if it's still there?

[mmcirvin]

In perhaps not entirely unrelated news, I tried updating Hatari, the Atari ST/TT/Falcon emulator, in the hope that it would deal with some little glitches and the program's seeming inability to detect the game controller, and unfortunately the latest version of Hatari seems to have more glitches and compatibility issues than the older one. That may be down to the thing's native development environment being Linux on Intel-compatible hardware, with less testing on other platforms. It runs SubLogic Flight Simulator II, but, for some reason, not the little apps I wrote in college (which ran fine under an older version of Hatari on my old computer).

I was wondering if the issue was that I was still running an older version of EmuTOS, the reverse-engineered open-source TOS/GEM replacement inside the machine, but, no, updating that doesn't seem to make a difference.

It happens sometimes in this world. I recall that for a while, there was a string of versions of the Atari800MacX emulator where I had to choose between broken sound and broken keyboard scanning--the version that fixed one introduced the other. But eventually they got it all squared away.

I think a lot of open-source software with Mac builds is still not quite over the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon (a flavor of ARM, like seemingly everything these days). Some stuff may run better under Apple's Intel emulation layer than in Apple Silicon-native builds.

[thewayne]

My wife and I play Lord of the Rings Online via Wine on top of Apple M2 and M3s, and we're resigned that on occasion the game will freeze or crash, or that we'll have to reboot to get it to work.  The company behind LOTRO gave up when Apple dropped support for a couple of generations ago - it still worked fine, but now they only support it on Windows and you're left to the community if something breaks.  We'll have problems if it ever stops working entirely.

[mmcirvin]

Oh, wow, Windows gaming on a Mac. Yeah, I figure that was never going to be quite as good on a non-Intel platform than on an Intel one. I haven't even tried.

I'm actually amazed at how well the Rosetta layer works with Intel-based Mac software. There are a few things I've had to update, most notably the Sagemath computer algebra system and MAME, but I was using very old builds of those which may not have been entirely working in the first place. Some things you'd expect to be tricky, like some other retro game emulators and the X-Plane 11 flight simulator, just worked with no trouble at all.

And in some other cases the Apple Silicon-native version is glitchier just because it's a new major version, not as mature yet.

[thewayne]

The game is pretty old, which is reflected in the old code base.  It doesn't optimize for modern CPUs well, so WINE/Crossover handles it just fine.  Except for it being slightly glitchy and crashing now and again.  The Mac version for older versions of Mac OS had an included WINE layer, but you need Crossover for newer MacOS or for the new Mac CPUs.  And Crossover is a lifetime license with pretty good support behind it, so not too bad of a deal.  We don't play latest/greatest games, not too worried about trying to play Witcher 3 or whatever on it.

[mmcirvin]

It's a whole scene I haven't gotten into--always thought of it as too much trouble to bother with, as most of my gaming had been on consoles in recent years aside from some retro stuff. Intel Macs of course had Bootcamp, which gave you a whole native Windows install on your Mac and effectively made it a Wintel PC, but I never actually tried that so I don't have a leg to stand on lamenting the loss of it.

Looking into controllers some more, I see some energetic Reddit discussions about "best game controller for Mac" that just come down to personal preference between the design of PlayStation or XBox controllers. My impression is that all the major modern wireless controllers are standard Bluetooth devices and just work. My XBox 360 and first-generation XBox One controllers don't just because they're very old. But even they can be made to work plugged in by USB (with the old USB Micro port).

I see that Apple actually sells PS5 DualSense controllers on their online store, along with a bunch of other third-party options.

[thewayne]

Computer games, aside from table-top games, have always been my thing because I've had seven operations total on both hands/wrists and I just can't handle console game controllers for any significant amount of time.  Keyboard/mouse: no problem.  I still have to be careful as I also have problems with my right shoulder/elbow.  Basically my body is a mess.

[mmcirvin]

Ah--the big RSI trigger for me is mouse clicking with my right hand, particularly if it's way over to the right of an extended keyboard. I think I wrecked myself between coding on Solaris X11 workstations and messing around with my Mac in the 1990s.

So I mouse left-handed, which for some reason is fine, or use a laptop trackpad, also fine. If I were a PC gamer, the FPS player's convention of mouse look + WASD would not fly--I'd have to remap those movement keys to be more accessible to the right hand so I could gun with my left. Cursor arrows would work. (When I play Atari games in Stella with the keyboard, I usually use cursor arrows for movement, which I figure is more Atari-like since the CX40 joystick was made to be operated with the right hand, left holding the base and left thumb on the fire button. It was an ergonomic nightmare, but we didn't know any better.)

I am not otherwise left-handed. But people who watch me working probably think I am.

(I recall trying to reverse the three buttons on those Unix mice for left-handed operation, and discovering that software support for it was really, really, really spotty.)

[mmcirvin]

...and in case you were wondering, this page rates MSFS 2020 under Crossover as "Installs, Will Not Run", which is not exactly surprising; I assume MSFS 2024 would be a similar situation:

https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/microsoft-flight-simulator-2020

Given that MSFS seems to be catching up with X-Plane on the hardcore-sim-pilot features that they used to prefer in X-Plane, and it graphically beats even X-Plane 12 to hell and gone, I suspect that going forward the main thing keeping X-Plane alive if it even survives at all will be Mac compatibility (X-Plane is actually developed on Macs; MSFS very much does not offer an option, and the days when it was a rebranded subLogic Flight Simulator and subLogic offered it on other platforms are long gone).

[mmcirvin]

...To be clear, the Google Earth Pro flight sim still works as well as it ever did, you just have to control it with the mouse or keyboard (which was all that really worked well anyway).

And since it's a toy flight sim with the primary aim of sightseeing in the Google Maps scenery world, that's fine. When the re-done Microsoft Flight Simulator came out in 2020, people were jazzed at the idea of flight sim in a streaming world based on real global map and scenery data, and I always found it amusing that Google had had that as a cute little Easter egg over a decade earlier.