About ten years ago I published a series of articles in Computer Pilot magazine covering simulation history. Of course, the printed version was shorter and lacked many of the images I gathered.. some scanned from boxes I still owned, or screen shots I had saved for years.

Just hit me.. I should make the articles available here.

SO .. I have formatted in PDF. Part 1 & 2

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B3FK8UXN-znUMWQyNDk5NjEtNjZjNC00NDAxLTk2OGUtMDU5YmZkM2Y2Zjlh

Part 3& 4
http://tinyurl.com/6p577fv

Peace out

Viking1

Yep Digital Integrations Fighter Pilot was my first taste of simulators. A lot of fun for a game/sim so basic compared to DCS A-10.

My god, I loved that game!

I really enjoyed the article. Those game screenshots really brought back good memories for me!

The DI sim was my first combat game. Before that it was Flight Simulator on the zx81.

Great stuff. Definitely would like to see the rest. brings back great memories from the years past. I started my career with MICROPROSE and so worked on many of these in various different roles.

Enjoying the latest F4 BMS release at the moment and would love more articles on that too.

and to be able to download in pdf.

Brilliant!

Please do! I'd love to host it on SimHQ if you're willing.

MicroProse's '1942 Pacific Air War'! What a game!

The only game I can say I enjoyed more back then was 'Aces of the Pacific' and the expansion '1946'.

There still is something about those games immersion factor that I have yet to capture in today's sims.

As good as Il2 and CoD may be, they lack something that those titles had.

'Wings of Prey' comes close, even if not as realistic in the flight sim department. The visuals though are awesome.

I remember cutting my teeth on SWOTL, MS Flight Sim 4, and finally Falcon 3.0, with all of the expansions. I remember my grandfather and I spending HOURS tweaking and modifying the autoexec.bat and config.sys settings to make the perfect boot disk...

For me it was SWOTL, Tie-Fighter, Red Baron 1, Eurofighter 2000, Flight Unlimited 1, ATF/Figthers Anthology

Then it was XWA, I-War, EAW & Janes's WWII Fighters, IAF & USAF, Red Baron II, Flanker 2.0... then Il-2...
then Flaming Cliffs & Rise of Flight

Very first flight sim I ever bought was "Jet Fighter" in 1989 and my most recent flight sim purchase was DCS: A-10 a couple months ago.

Great read, am awaiting the second half. Jane's F-15 and F-18! Great trip down memory lane. Please post the second half. Thanks.

I still can remember the mentioned atmosphere in Fleet Defender. I loved that sim. Could be possible I still have the box anywhere.

@ Combat:

Great article, please do the rest. If it`s hosted here on SimHQ it has finally found a great resting place.

TIA

Karsten

My first game was Flying Fortress by Micro Prose. But at the time I really liked Aces over the Pacific and the Aces over Europe.

My first sim was Gunship 2000 on the Amiga 500. Then I went to EF2000, which is in my opinien one of the best Sims ever, next to Janes Longbow Apache and Janes F15.

First sim was red baron, saw it, bought it and realiezd that I had to exchange it at the store because of wrong model of floppy disks ( before realizing that, I tried several times to insert the red baron 3.5 ' floppy disk in the 5.25 " disk drive of the only poor PC I owned, at work, a 8086). And when I came back with the relevant version, my frustration grew once more because my PC couldn't handle RB1...had to wait another month before i could have cash enough to buy me a wonderful 286 (just under 2000 bucks !!) I can say that the manual coming with it, with its great colour profiles, helped me to wait till the opening sequence with the bullets holes in the canvas...

Brings back a lot of memories and a OMG I've spent a fortune on flight sims over the years.

Some definite history there. I remember playing most of these games.

One correction I do have to mention however is with Falcon 3.0 and it's Hi-Fi flying model. This option was available to any machine with a co-processor. So while technically correct it did work with a 486 DX (not an SX) it would also work on a 286 or 386 system if you had a 80287 or 80387 co-processor. I played the game on my 16MHz 286 with a 287 co-pro, and my Adlib Sound Card. Ahh the days...

Thanks for that trip down memory lane Len! Great stuff! :-)

Great article! Sure bring back some memories too!

First flight sim I ever played, IIRC, it was Fighter Bomber on my old Atari. Then Knights of the Sky, F-19, F-29 Retaliator, B-17 Flying Fortress and Flight of the Intruder! Then on the first PC, the one that will forever hold a special place in my heart, European Air War. This sim was really great. HUGE air battles, a special ambiance about the whole game, lots of planes, and so on. I'm still waiting for another true simulator who proposes a Typhoon as stock airplane!

My first I owned was Sublogic's FS 2 for my Atari 800. It had the WWI combat option which was unbelievably simple. It wasn't the first I played, though, that was F-15 Strike Eagle on my friend's Commodore 64.
My first PC sim was MPS' Gunship that played a little bit of Ride of the Valkyries when you started it. Made F-19's graphics the next year look like DCS!

Since then it's easier to count the sims I did NOT get than those I did.



The Jedi Master

Yes, you jogged my memory. I remember buying a co-processor so I could play the HIFI model of Falcon

Yeh I did a rough calc and with taxes I estimate I spent about $2000 over 22 years!

My first pc was a 486SX-20 so no high fidelity flight model for me in Falcon 3.0 in the beginning.

Anyone remember Packard Bell? LOL

That's DIRT cheap compared to pretty much any other hobby.

I'll try to get part 3 and 4 done for the weekend.. I notice formatting errors in the first one so I will probably replace it also..

Glad you are enjoying the tour through memory lane

Falcon3.0 was the game that got me into PC gaming! I did not know F3 was out in 1991. I did not get teh game until ~1993/1994 - and I played the game for 5+ years - talk about longevity!

That means you were still playing Falcon 3 when Falcon 4 came out!

But only because I didn't include hardware costs

I think I quit playing F3 well before Win95 came out. There were many DOS-only sims I was flying long after 95's release, of course, and that's why I had modified my 95 to be able to boot into DOS 7.



The Jedi Master

So many good flight sims and great gaming experiences down through the years. It's hard to believe that flight simulators have become the red headed step child of the game publishing industry.

Great reading.


Wheels

The beat goes on.. Part 3 & 4

http://tinyurl.com/6p577fv