Flight Simulator
Well, I've been messing arround with home PC flight simulation since the early 80's. The first program I had was for our TI 99/4A. It was written in assembly language and loaded on to the 99/4A via the cassette player. It was a very basic simulation of an ILS approach, with little graphics. Infact the only thing modeled were the primary flight insturments with locallizer and glide slope. Control was achived entirely via keyboard commands. It was very limited but did teach some basic concepts. Later, when my dad purchased a used Toshiba laptop with and Intel XT processor, monocrome LCD screen (no back light) , RGB video out, and twin 3.5" 1.44MB floopies, we discovered the PC came with a version of Microsoft Filght Simulator, version 2.0 I think. On the monocrome screen it looked like this:
This was a big improvement over the program I had on the TI 99/4A has it did have some some basic graphics of the outside world. It was pretty hard to distinguish beteeen the land and water, and runways were represented by jagged lines. Still it had all the basic elements and provied a nice way for my dad, a commercial pilot at the time, to teach me about flying. Later on in the early 80's my dad bought a new desktop PC to replace the TI 99/4A. The Packared Bell, IBM AT clone sported a 10 MHz 286 processor, 640K of RAM, EGA graphics card, and the increadible 40 MB harddrive (wow how would we ever use all that space ;-). When played on this computer the graphics of Microsoft Filght Simulator v2.0 was much improved and looked something like this:
Now some of the runways appeared grey which made it much easier to find them from the air. During this time I learned about using VORs to navigate with. Somewhere along the line I bought a joystick port card and joystick to add to my Dad's PC. Of course this greatly improved the realism. How much more real could we possbily get then this? In 1986 I went off to college to Embry-Riddle in Daytona. At first I used the old TI 99/4A, that my dad had retired as my school computer. Somewhere along the line, my brohter loaned me his TI portable computer. This was a semi IBM compatible, but also had a version of MSFS on it. When this blew up in 1989 I bougth my first real IBM clone, an aged 12 MHz 286 with 1MB ram. I upgreded it along the way with a Sound Blaster sound card. In 89 I got a new version of MSFS for Christmas, version 4.0. This version brought many improvements over MSFS2. These included amongst others; improved aircraft models, as well as an upgraded model of the Cessna Skylane, programmable dynamic scenery (non-interactive air and ground traffic on and near airports moving along static prerecorded paths).
What was cool about this version was it was the first verison that you could aslo by thrid party add on packs for. Most notably of these was the Aircraft and Scenery Designer (ASD) integration module. This allowed FS4 users to quite easily build, on the fly from directly within the program, custom scenery units know as SC1 files which could be used within FS4 and traded with other users (this activity was quite popular in the FS Forum on CompuServe). Also, ASD provided the addition of the Aircraft Designer Module. Again, from directly within the program the user could select one of two basic type aircraft frames (prop or jet) and proceed to parameter customizations ranging over 4 pages of flight envelope details and visual aspects. Finally, ASD provided additional aircraft including a 747 with a custom dash/cockpit (which required running in 640 x 350 resolution). Armed with this addon I was able to reproduce KLAL (Lakeland Linder regional airport), which my dad and I enjoyed a lot. We also added the Sound, Graphics, and Aircraft Upgrade (SGA). This added digital and synth sound capability to FS4 (which previously was only via PC speaker.) Second a variety of high resolution modes became available for specific types of higher end video cards and chipsets, thus supplying running resolutions up to 800 x 600. As with ASD, the SGA upgrade also came with some additional aircraft designed by BAO, including an Ultra-light. In the early 90's I upgraded my Dad's PC several times. Eventually he ended with an AMD 486 clone mother board and processor, an amazing 4MB of RAM, VGA video card, and a 120 MB hard drive (seriously, how would we ever use all that space this time!). After graduating from Embry-Riddle in 1991 and finding a very tough job market, I spent some of my free time building a set of rudder pedals from PVC pipe, plywood, scrap metal, and a potentiometer out of an Atari game controller. Wow, this had to be as real as it gets...with digital sound, AI traffic, KLAL, and rudder pedals.
Newer versions of MSFS came out but I never got them because M$ never provided an upgrade option to MSFS4 users. So it was many years before I got back in to the hobby. In 1999, after moving to Chicago with my future exwife, I purchased a nice new AMD 600MHz Athelon PC, with sound blaster live sound card, super VGA graphis card with 32MB of RAM on it, 8 GB hard drive (no way in hell I'd ever use that much) and 256 MB of RAM. Having this and with the release of FS2000 I decieded to get back in to the hobby. FS2000 was released as a major improvement over the previous versions, and was also offered in two versions; one version for "normal" users, and one "pro" version with additional aircraft. This version also introduced 3D elevation, making it possible to adjust the elevation for the scenery grids, thus making most of the previous scenery obsolete (as it didn't support this feature). A GPS was also added, enabling an even more realistic operation of the simulator. New aircraft in FS2000 included the supersonic Aerospatiale-BAC Concorde (prominently featured on both editions' box covers) and the Boeing 777, which had recently entered service at the time. FS2000 added many new airports and navigational aids.
The growing community of MSFS related web sites offered many free add on aircraft and such. Additionaly, there were a number of reasonallby priced payware addons. Two in particual really kept me interested. First was a really nice R4D (DC-3) model and pannel, created by the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum to support their real life R4D. At the time this model and panel were very realistic and the sounds for the old pistion driven engines were really good. What was also cool was it took a little work to get the engines started. The process used to start the real aircraft was simulated. This type of realism was furthered in the Dreamfleet 737-400 model and panel. This package had a photo realistic panel that included many sub panels for the overhead, FMC, throttle quadrant, radio stack, and so on.
The Dreamfleet 737 was a lot of fun because you really had to follow checklists to get the thing to run. A couple of years later, when FS2002 came out, I upgraded my PC to an AMD XP1800 with 512 MB of RAM, and a new NVidia video card with 64MB of RAM. At the time this was a pretty hot setup that allowed me to run FS2002 which had improved graphics, introduced ATC and AI aircraft, and had weather that was driven by real world weather conditions at the time. The R4D and Dreamfleet 737 had upgrades for FS2002 that made those already good packages even better, wtth the 737 package now allowing you to repaint the 737 however you like. Thus was born Castaway Airlines.
I also added a couple of payware scenery packages for KMCO (Orlando International Airport) and KATL (Altanta Hartsfield International Airport). Prior to meeting my current current wife I spent a lot of time tooling around in my custom painted 737-400 between KATL to KMCO and from KLAL to KEYW (Key West International). After I met my wife my time for flight simulation pretty much deminished. The Christmas of 2004 she bought me the new FS2004, but i knew my PC couldn't run it very well so I never installed it. To make matters worse the XP 1800 system blew up and I had to revert to my old hardware, which meant I couldn't even run FS2002 any more.
Things pretty much stayed like this until just recently when I temporarly inhereted a PC with enough guts to run FS2004. I recaught the bug so I went out to e-bay and got myself a cheap platform that would run FS2004 ok. I now have an HP DC7600 SFF with a 3.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 CPU, 2GB of RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS video card with 512MB of RAM. It seems to run FS2004 pretty well. The Dreemfleet 737 was never ported to FS2004 so I had to go looking for something to replace it. What I found was in some ways even better. The Tinmouse II project started of as a payware addon. At some point that died and the authors released it to opensource. Several people picked it up and continued to develope it from there. It's a 737-200 model and panel. Most of the systems are simulated, so getting it running and keeping it running is about as much fun as the Dreamfleet 737. Also, since the 737-200 model simulated only has the Sperry SP-77 autopilot, this simulation is much more work (and fun) to fly.
A lot of freeware tools for scenery design were developed for FS2004. As a result there is also a lot of really good freeware scenery packages to add on to FS2004. Robert-Jan Oosterloo maintains a nice list of freeware scenery packages for FS2004 here.
Another great resource is AirNav.com. The easiest way for a flight-simmer to download official U.S. approach plates for free is to go there and enter the ICAO code for the airport of interest (like KBOS for Boston Logan International). Then scroll down the airport page where you will find individual links for each approach plate and departure procedure for that airport. Another great source for this is the US Gov. They are now making available all of their U.S. Terminal Procedure Publications online, in PDF Format, found here.
Links: