I'm sure this has been posted here before, but I couldn't find it in a search. It's a show produced in San Mateo that covered all sorts of computer topics, and this episode from 1990 is all about flight simulators, "the best selling category of entertainment software for years," as of 1990.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8688029843119861402#

A blast from the past...

Thanks for the post, brilliant stuff, some real FS gold, and quite amusing when they are talking of the specs etc hehe.

I recall how wonderful it was to see the evolution of the technology back then - like the terrain, the cockpits, the framerate - of course I saw most of it through magazines. Stuff was expensive back then.

yeah, someone posted that vid here in the past. Seeing this stuff makes me cry thinking of how much good stuff we have lost! Adults having calm, informed discussions about flight sims on a television show!? unbelievable in this day!

Wow Great Stuff! Thanks for posting. Loved seeing the Flight Sim Software packaged in big boxes with big manuals and maps at the Computer Air Show site. The good ol days.
pescador

OMG! They actually said "realistic graphics"! And 386. Wow! We sure came a long way!

As soon as I saw the title of the thread, I could hear the title music playing in my head.

LOL at the dogfight they had between the female presenter and Gilman Louie

Grunting,going 'oooh' and saying 'take that you dirt bag' made me pmsl.

I used to have that on VHS. lol

That was back when I belonged to a IBM PC Users Group. We used to meet the third Wednesday of the month. Lotus 1,2,3 and OS/2 was Huge then. lol

OMG that was great.

Jason

Terrific stuff. They were so in awe of the whole thing of flight simulators on a computer and 386's and VGA cards and those little sorta joysticks.

I never met Gilman Louie, but I did meet Wild Bill Stealey at an E3 event one year. He skeered me.

Watched the entire video, it was amazing how really 'bad' the graphics were, and we loved it!
Even EAW was much better than what they were showing, and it was my first flight sim.
Ah....actually Pacific Air War was the first one I flew, but I didn't own it. It's the one that got me sucked into Flight Sims.

Great stuff. I still fly FB - Pacific Fighters, one mission a day. Can't shake it. Keeps me around SimHQ's, they still come up with new stuff every time I check in.

Everything is the same, but it changes daily.

Jetfighter was my first flight sim soon followed by Chuck Yeagers Air Combat. Those were really great times.

Wow, I remember watching this show as a kid, especially this episode.

Jetfighter was one of my fav games on my ole Amiga 500, back when the Amiga was cutting edge and had a good market share. Man, that fell apart quickly!

I would watch Top Gun and then play Jetfighter, pretending to be Maverick, who didn't!?

I was at a computer show at the time they were getting ready to release the DX2 66's and saw a demo of Strike Commander on one of the new DX2 66 rigs, man I was hooked on this game.

Getting back to the topic of the thread, does anyone remember "Bits&Bytes" that aired on CBC? It starred Billy Van and Luba Goy. Luba would act as the teacher and Billy was the student, another great computer show that I watched religiously!

cheers,
Don

I found this site to be fun for looking up old flight sim titles!
http://www.gameclassification.com/EN/search/keywords.html?search=flight%20simulator

Strike Commander was my introduction to pc combat/flight simulators. My cousin owned it and had the kind of computer that could play it. I remember being sucked into it and I always wanted him to load that up for me to play when I'd go over to visit.

I played some other flight games on the NES as well. The first combat flight sim I can recall buying myself was U.S. Navy Fighters (after I couldn't get Black Knight to run). That was it after that. I was hooked for good.

Great program thanks for sharing.

Ok, what did you guys do?

I was 4 years old when this video came out, and apparently flight sims were THE thing in the PC world!

How did we loose this!?!?!?

What a coincidence. "Jet Fighter" was the first PC game I ever bought. I bought it at a Radio Shack in 1990.

That was a blast from the past alright, I can't believe I used to play Falcon AT and then run to school to tell everyone how cool it was, how great the graphics were, etc. If I had seen RoF, IL2, or FSX then my head would have exploded, seriously, just popped right off and gone splat.

I believe you meant F/A-18 Interceptor by Bob Dinnerman. Jet Fighter was released later for PC with added ground munitions, F-14 and Los Angeles region in addition to San Francisco and F-16 F/A-18 duo. Nevertheless it was my favorite and one of the first sims on Amiga 500 back in the day among many others like F-19 Stealth Fighter, Fighter Bomber, Birds of Prey, Dog Fight, Gunship 2000, F-117 Nighthawk, F-15 Strike Eagle II, Thunderhawk, B-17 Flying Fortress, Combat Air Patrol, and many others.

During the time when Amiga was aging, I saw at my friends house Tornado by Digital Integration and later Strike Commander, along with DOOM. My jaw scrapped the floor, and after I returned home I didn't touched my Amiga for two weeks (when at the time I played normally at least once a day).

After some time I finally convinced my folks to buy a new PC, and it was then when the great journey began...

I was in the Navy and actually use to play all those games, I remember when I got ATP, I was in Bahrain fixing H-53 during Desert Storm, I flew the big airliners for days and it had giant charts showing airways and navaids...lot's of great times. Did you notice Egghead Software, that was the store back then. They carried shelf after shelf of software for the PC.
Now days you go into game stop and you are lucky if they have a game for the PC.
Thanks for the memories!

How did we lose this?
I have been flying Commodore 128, Amiga and PC flight sims simce Gunship and F15 on the Commodore. I loved the late 80's and 90's for flight sims. BIG noxes and even BIGGER manuals. Charts, maps, etc, etc...BUT...MY opinion is
1. Flight, sea and land sims got TOO complicated and
2. First person shooters and MMO's killed my great genre. I could be wrong, but how many of us got hooked on all the great FPS's and neglected sims? How about Everquest and Asherons Call and Ultima Online??? They killed it I tell ya.

I remember seeing that episode and taping it and watching it over and over. I would then play the games and have so much fun.
I bought almost every land, sea and flight sim made. I had boxes upon boxes. I gave them away or sold them. My collection was down to nothing in the mid 2000's. I then went on Ebay and bought every land, sea and flight sim I could get my hands on. I spent about $4000-5000.00 to rebuild my collection that I once owned. Now they all sit in boxes in the basement waiting till one day when I can use them again. Knowing that I have them again is all I need to relive the great days of Simming. Reading all the old manuals and looking at the 3.5 and 5.25 inch disks. Seeing the code wheels and registration cards. Holding the big box with Microprose and Spectrum Holobyte written on them is awesome. Looking at maps in SWOTL and Falcon 3 and reading commentary by Wild Bill or the Janes team. AHHHHHHH

DID, Lucasarts, Spectrum Holobyte and Microprose, Origin and Janes, SSI, Microsoft and Oceam, SubLogic and Looking Glass....Just a few....Great names, Great games
Remember Boot disks? EMM? QEMM? VooDoo? CH Flightstick with 2 buttons? DOS???


Please oh please come back...lol

Remember Tsenglab ET3000, creating bat files to launch each game, the two-tone beige analog joystick with suction cups from genius or quickshot that reminded us of an RC flight controller, or the digital Boss or Arcade joystick, the ACM card from TM (never owned it though)?

Wow, I remember that stuff. Realistic terrain and weather, .

Me too!

Funny thing is, Jet Fighter was the first PC sim I bought also. I bought a Laser 386 sx/16 with 5.25 and the vertical 3.5 drive. Turbo button and all. Jet Fighter was the one of the only sims I could not buy when I rebuilt my sim collection. I could never find it available.

Project Stealth Fighter was the first sim I got for the Commodore 128 ( Up Periscope! was 2nd...played that ALL night )
F/A-18 Interceptor was the first sim I bought for the Amiga 500

The TM ACM card. WOW! I had one of those.

One of my best accessories I used was...
My Mother and Father were in the volunteer fire department. They got their uniform and with them came a pair of tight wight cotton gloves for parades. I found them in one of their drawers and wore one on my flightstick hand when I would fly Falcon for the Amiga 500. That was around 1989. I used to wear that glove all the time when I would fly. Wow. If my old lady walked in on me today wearing a white glove...Lets just say I would never hear the end of it. LOL

Consoles killed the PC star...

Hardcore flight sims won't ever be on consoles for both marketing and technical reasons so in the case of hardcore flight sims, the PC as a gaming platform wont be going away any time soon. Plus this year we'll be getting Cliffs of Dover and the full version of DCS A-10 so PC flight simming is far from dead.

I Remember playing Falcon on an Old AT System (MS DosShell was the main "GUI") least thats what I had it booted to, used 5.25 Floppies.

Then Moved to JetFighter II, III, IV, Falcon3 on the 486/586, Then TopGun:FAW on Pentium200MMX, then USNF1.0/MF1.2, THen Fighters ANthology on 400K6-II, then Janes USAF,IAF,F15,F18, Falcon4 on Athlon 1.1Ghz, to Strike Fighters/Strike Fighters 2,.

I sadly havent Tried LoMAC enough to acknowledge that I've owned it (Played it for a few hours when I borrowed a install CD from a friend on base, but elected not to keep it installed when I return the CD.)

Will Prolly Buy LoMAC and Definately DCS A-10C when I Upgrade my pc this fall.

I used to love computer chronicles.

I used to watch that show all the time.

I remember getting my first flight sim: Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer.

I used to land the F-16 by circling and shedding speed until I would almost stop dead above the airstrip and the plane would gently float to the ground like a leaf. TAKE THAT Cliffs of Dover!

My Dad used to Rent from Egghead and make copies :p

OH Yeah, Forgot Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, Chuck Yeager's Flight Trainer (came in a combo pack w/ the USNavy Blue Angels Simulator), i know i had a few others I abused but I forgot the names.

My memory isn't terrible, but it can be pretty bad at times. Thanks to this thread and the responses for the reminders, I'm recalling sims I had years ago that I hadn't thought about in a long time.

Good times.

Nice. I used to work for Egghead software, so it was nice of him to take money out of my pockets. Plus we realized that too many people were doing that so we had to change our policy. How many places let you return software now? Pretty much zero? Thanks to people like your dad.

Thats what I said....

I personally didnt do anything like that, but Im pretty sure he only copied what was listed as "shareware" he just made backup copies so he wouldnt have to use AOL to download them again. its not like he was renting a game and making 50 copies of each floppy and selling them. from what I remember the egghead here did this $5 / 3 Day rental. you get the floppies in a plastic box and most of the time a manual. I never understood that because back then a 4 Floppy program took a few hours to install, so you'd get maybe a day and half to play then you'd have to take the floppies back. and Im not sure of the licensing back then if you had to uninstall any programs or not. but I never understood why people would rent out software and not expect people to make a copy of the floppies before brining it back to the store.

Stuff like Windows, Office etc etc he purchased from Babbages or Computer stores of the like.

I Usually make a Copy of every peice of software I purchase, and use the copy and leave the original in the case. Prior to MP3 Players i did the same with my Music.

Interesting, I never had the rental thing at my store, so maybe it was a local manager's program or something, or maybe it was implemented after I left - Egghead was around for a few years after I had moved on. I thought you were using "rent" as euphemism, meaning he'd buy it then return it and get his money back, especially with the :p at the end of your statement.

I fully support and recommend that people make copies of any software they own, as well as music. I'm about as anti-DRM as you can get, but it was so frustrating seeing people abusing the return policy, and seeing how that affected the store's bottom line. I had to work a lot of unpaid hours as a manager because we couldn't hire enough hourly staff due to cost cutting, and a lot of that was due to high overhead with the return policy. At first it wasn't so bad because we could re-shrink wrap most returned items and still sell them, but viruses made us have to stop doing that (I'll bet you can figure out how that came up), and the overhead really went up after that. There were other factors too, of course, but that was one of the big ones.

IIRC my first real flight sim was Solo Flight for the Atari XL series. Super Huey was in there as well, and later on I bought a C64 because there was more software for it and had Strike Aces, an F14 sim by Activision (can't remember the name), and an F16 sim that I think was called F16 Combat Pilot. Oh, and F19 Stealth Fighter too.

This was 1990 or so, the next time I flew was after buying my then-state-of-the-art 486SX25 at the PX in Baumholder, Germany in early '93 - 1MB RAM, 80MB HDD, 3.5" and 5.25" floppies, only the PC speaker for sound, and there wasn't even such a thing as a CD-ROM yet. I trained myself to fly with my right hand using a generic 2-button joystick and the Falcon 3.0 training missions. Once I found my right hand wasn't as stupid as I'd thought it would be I went out and bought a Thrustmaster FCS, WCS Mk II, and ACM Card (I didn't get the RCS til later.) With this setup and the DOS 5.0 manual, I spent many late nights modifying autoexec.bat and config.sys to get the most free RAM below 640K as possible - IIRC Falcon 3.0 and F15 Strike Eagle III could get by with 604K free memory, but Tornado took 611K or so. Add in another couple weeks developing profiles for the TM gear, flying practice missions to memorize the functions, and then modifying the profiles to make things more intuitive, after which it was time to fly "simulator" (Tornado) or "Red Flag" (Falcon 3.0) missions to develop my skills and those of my fellow pilots in the squadron (in F3.)

I sold that PC before I left Germany in June '95, and it was about another year before I bought another one - this time a P133 w/16MB RAM, 1.6GB HD, CD-ROM (finally), 3.5" floppy, sound card (!), and enough video RAM to get 800x600x256 (!!!) I also bought an F16 FLCS & TQS, RCS, and another ACM card, and in addition to Falcon 3.0 and Tornado I also flew Back to Baghdad, Su-27, Longbow, and Jane's F15. However, I was beginning to lose interest because there were all kinds of things to do at & around Ft Sill that weren't possible in Germany - 4-wheelin', shooting, etc. Plus, there was this new thing called The Internet, and for $20/month you got 20 (IIRC) hours of web access on Prodigy & AOL, with additional hours being a mere $2.50 each (again, IIRC.) Who wanted to bother with flight sims when you had such an awesomely EASY way to get hookups? So my flight sims and other games kinda fell by the wayside. I kept telling myself I was going to get back into them, bought a used HOTAS Cougar, Falcon 4.0 and Falcon 4: Allied Force, and even put together a 2nd PC with Win98 in an attempt to fly stuff that either wasn't compatible with XP or that just required more tinkering than I felt like doing. It didn't last, I haven't flown in close to 10 years, but I still think of hooking up the Cougar, installing F4:AF, and giving it a try (assuming I have the patience to read the Cougar manual and can comprehend it, and that my gimbals and speed brake switch aren't frakked.) I may just decide to give civil aviation a try as well, in which case I'll need a yoke, throttle, and new pedals. The last thing I need is more reasons to sit on my ass, though!

I apologize, it was F/A 18 Interceptor!! Great game and man it was very smooth on the Amiga. I think I still have it kicking around the house.

Absolutely loved Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain. One of my fondest gaming memories.

That video was probably the biggest flashback I had in years.

Some of my old sims on a garage shelf:



Not pictured is one of my all time favorites: 1942 Pacific Air War. The first flight sim where I could dogfight or co-op mission via modem with a friend.

First sim/game: Red Baron. Bought it and realized that its 3.5" disks did not fit exactly in my 8088 5.25" floppy disk drive.Then exchanged it with the 5.25 floppy disk version just to realize that I could not run it on my 8088. Bought a 286 (meanwhile,1 month, ate with the manual, slept with the manual, drove with the manual,s...t with the manual) took it from the store at 7 PM , installed it, then the game and played with keyboard and PC sound all night long till 4 am.

Sierra A-10 Tank Killer FTW!!!
The game where you could just yaw all over the place (I didn't have a joystick at first, so since rolling with the keyboard was too imprecise I just used rudder and pitch control alone) because the FM was so REAL.



The Jedi Master

LOL, good times...

oops, I Left MicroPose's Knights of the Sky off my list of games I ran on my 486DX2 Packard Bell that my dad paid $3000 for and another $300 for a Sound Blaster/CDRom Combo.

Thanks for the cool stories guys and gals. Keep them coming.
pescador

Great collection Dogsbd! Talk about Flight Sim heaven.
pescador

For whatever reason the video doesn`t work for me, but I guess it`s like this website:

http://www.volny.cz/havlikjosef/historyenglish.htm

I don`t really recall what my first Flight-Sim was, but I think it was FS 5.1

My first game was, and I really had to save for my shiny powerful 486 DX/2 50, X-Wing.I still have the box somewhere, and the Addons.

thx for posting this!

my first computer game was the Falcon3.0 game in late 1995/early 1996. My friend had the one of the earlier Falcon games (2.0?) and I was not impressed since iirc the game only featured "you against the world". After reading the back of the Falcon3.0 box about the multiplane raids and dynamic campaigns I was sold!
great game!

My first PC game purchase ever was the original "Jet Fighter" back in 1989.

Wish I'd kept my boxes especially Janes and my USNF box. That box I remember being a little different from the norm because it was packaged in a more rigid box about half the size of what boxes were normally like then. And it had gold trim around it.

I'm not sure I remember my first home-computer game purchase. It might have been a Battle of Midway game written in PET BASIC for the Commodore. My first computer was a Commodore 64, but that was right when it came out, and there was no software for it, so the only stuff you could buy that would work on it was stuff written in BASIC for other Commodore computers. My first binary game was Pakacuda, a Pac-Man rip-off written for the C64.

After a few months of not finding any software for it, I sold it and bought an Atari 800, and bought a ton of games for that, including all the arcade conversions, plus Star Raiders and of course SubLogic's Flight Simulator II and Microprose's F-15 Strike Eagle. I know the C64 became big, but it was almost a year after I bought it before that happened, and I liked the Atari a lot better anyway.

Got a Roku box this Christmas and found that I could add private channels from various sources. One such channel I found was for InternetArchive.org, which has all or most of the episodes of Computer Chronicles.