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mmcirvinBruce Artwick of subLogic became known for a simple flight simulator for the Apple II and TRS-80 Model 1. After he wrote the vastly more powerful Microsoft Flight Simulator for IBM-compatibles, he backported those new features to an impressive new version for the Apple II called Flight Simulator II, which he sold through his own company.
They then ported that to other 8-bit platforms, including Atari. I never actually had this as a teenager but I remember being impressed by the magazine ads for it--it was clearly basically Microsoft Flight Simulator, which I liked to play on my dad's Compaq, but for Atari? Amazing! It didn't seem to get a lot of attention, though, mostly because it was subject to the limitations of Atari's hardware. It also required 48k of RAM, and I think primarily shipped on floppy disk, which in the early years meant that only the more well-heeled users could play it. (Years later I bought the much better Atari ST version.)
Atari, though, eventually put FSII for 8-bits out on ROM cartridge as, I think, the pack-in with the keyboard bundle of the XE Game System, their very late second attempt to rework the 8-bit computer platform into a game console. Out of curiosity I recently gave it a try. It looks, yeah, pretty much like the first version of Microsoft Flight Simulator:
(I tried to do some clever stretching of the image to approximate the slightly non-square pixels that an actual CRT television connected to an Atari would have given you, but that doesn't seem to have worked. Anyway.)
It plays like Microsoft Flight Simulator, too, except that the Atari was even more CPU-bound than the original IBM PC so the best it can ever manage for the changing 3D perspective view from the plane is about 1 FPS. That makes FSII very difficult to play. It's a game of tiny touchy adjustments, best played with the keyboard. It actually is bound to the joystick, but since the Atari joystick was functionally a digital d-pad, all it could do was nudge the virtual yoke like a keypress, and you got more precision with the keyboard doing that.
One theoretical difference from MSFS 1.0 is that the civilian light plane being simulated is allegedly different: the early versions of MSFS (and some versions of FSII) all claimed their default plane was a Cessna 182, but here, it's a Piper Archer. I don't know why or if that actually makes any difference to the flight model.
Actually, the colors above are the ones you would have seen on the original Atari 400/800. By the time it came out for the XE Game System, the colors in the bottom half would have looked a bit different--I think it would have been something like this:
I'm not 100% sure that's right. It was different, anyway.
But that's because the bottom half of the screen is actually in the monohrome high-res mode and using composite artifacting to produce its colors (like many things ported from the Apple II to the Ataris), and those colors were notoriously fickle, reversing when Atari went from the CTIA to the more advanced GTIA video output chip and then changing again in the XL/XE series. That's because they depend sensitively on the sub-pixel phase of the video signal, as I explained in this old post about artifacting on CRT televisions and composite monitors.
The top half, though, is not in that mode; it's in an actual 4-color mode, I think the one that Atari BASIC nerds colloquially called "GRAPHICS 7 and a half". So its colors were more stable between hardware revisions. Atari's ANTIC chip implemented a simple display list that allowed mixing modes in horizontal bands like this. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Flight Simulator was making use of it.
Regardless, I get the impression that this port was not well-loved, because the sluggishness of it even compared to Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 was a problem. Keep in mind, Atari owners were accustomed to the glass-smooth animation in more arcade-style games like Star Raiders, though the "serious simulation" aspect of this could excuse a lot to a person in a certain frame of mind. On an emulator, of course, you can remove the historically accurate speed limiter and play it at a higher frame rate that actually makes it fun, and since FSII's engine is not using the CPU for timing, it's still playable!
Still, the Atari ST version was much better, blessed with an 8 MHz 68000 to run the engine, and mouse-yoke support to make control a bit less painful.
They then ported that to other 8-bit platforms, including Atari. I never actually had this as a teenager but I remember being impressed by the magazine ads for it--it was clearly basically Microsoft Flight Simulator, which I liked to play on my dad's Compaq, but for Atari? Amazing! It didn't seem to get a lot of attention, though, mostly because it was subject to the limitations of Atari's hardware. It also required 48k of RAM, and I think primarily shipped on floppy disk, which in the early years meant that only the more well-heeled users could play it. (Years later I bought the much better Atari ST version.)
Atari, though, eventually put FSII for 8-bits out on ROM cartridge as, I think, the pack-in with the keyboard bundle of the XE Game System, their very late second attempt to rework the 8-bit computer platform into a game console. Out of curiosity I recently gave it a try. It looks, yeah, pretty much like the first version of Microsoft Flight Simulator:
(I tried to do some clever stretching of the image to approximate the slightly non-square pixels that an actual CRT television connected to an Atari would have given you, but that doesn't seem to have worked. Anyway.)
It plays like Microsoft Flight Simulator, too, except that the Atari was even more CPU-bound than the original IBM PC so the best it can ever manage for the changing 3D perspective view from the plane is about 1 FPS. That makes FSII very difficult to play. It's a game of tiny touchy adjustments, best played with the keyboard. It actually is bound to the joystick, but since the Atari joystick was functionally a digital d-pad, all it could do was nudge the virtual yoke like a keypress, and you got more precision with the keyboard doing that.
One theoretical difference from MSFS 1.0 is that the civilian light plane being simulated is allegedly different: the early versions of MSFS (and some versions of FSII) all claimed their default plane was a Cessna 182, but here, it's a Piper Archer. I don't know why or if that actually makes any difference to the flight model.
Actually, the colors above are the ones you would have seen on the original Atari 400/800. By the time it came out for the XE Game System, the colors in the bottom half would have looked a bit different--I think it would have been something like this:
I'm not 100% sure that's right. It was different, anyway.
But that's because the bottom half of the screen is actually in the monohrome high-res mode and using composite artifacting to produce its colors (like many things ported from the Apple II to the Ataris), and those colors were notoriously fickle, reversing when Atari went from the CTIA to the more advanced GTIA video output chip and then changing again in the XL/XE series. That's because they depend sensitively on the sub-pixel phase of the video signal, as I explained in this old post about artifacting on CRT televisions and composite monitors.
The top half, though, is not in that mode; it's in an actual 4-color mode, I think the one that Atari BASIC nerds colloquially called "GRAPHICS 7 and a half". So its colors were more stable between hardware revisions. Atari's ANTIC chip implemented a simple display list that allowed mixing modes in horizontal bands like this. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Flight Simulator was making use of it.
Regardless, I get the impression that this port was not well-loved, because the sluggishness of it even compared to Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 was a problem. Keep in mind, Atari owners were accustomed to the glass-smooth animation in more arcade-style games like Star Raiders, though the "serious simulation" aspect of this could excuse a lot to a person in a certain frame of mind. On an emulator, of course, you can remove the historically accurate speed limiter and play it at a higher frame rate that actually makes it fun, and since FSII's engine is not using the CPU for timing, it's still playable!
Still, the Atari ST version was much better, blessed with an 8 MHz 68000 to run the engine, and mouse-yoke support to make control a bit less painful.