LOL.. I still have F-15 Strike Eagle III but it doesnt seem to work on my Windows XP. I would also need a new serial joystick, and all I have now is USB stuff.

Do some googling - you'd be amazed at what people have been able to come up with!

I remember paying $200 extra to have a math co-processor added to my first PC just because F3 said it utilized it.

The PC (DOS) was a 386DX with 4 megs of ram (I can’t remember how much hard drive space it had) and I financed it at a cost of $2,000. The sales people tried to talk me out of the add-on, but I stuck to my guns. I was able to edit the autoexec.bat and config.sys to boot with Extended Memory Management. I then tweaked the load sequence to max out the upper and lower memory ranges. After serious tweaking and reboot, I was able to play F3 with the enhanced graphics! I thought they were incredible at the time, but all it amounted to was a little faster load times and some minor detail enhancements.

Man, I spent hours and days planning that sim (including the add-ons)! I still feel that the level of detail that was designed into that game has never been matched when you take into account the software and hardware it was designed for. They even modeled tank crews bailing out of burning tanks! Now THAT is some serious attention to details.

The Falcon 3.0 timeline is missing a lot of fan development. However, it was fun checking that out.

RB

Yes, I have it all on CD. I listen to it sometimes on the way to work!

hehehe

Gophering and FTPing a couple patches for F3.

That seems so long ago....

I also remember thinking about the Mirage in F3, "Wow - that's so realistic, I bet I could identify that plane in real life!"

Yeah, LOADHIGH was the mantra of the day! All so you could get windows on the B-52's and a few other things. Looking for the smallest mouse driver you could find, making separate boots without CDROM drivers loaded, etc...
Remember DR DOS? That was popular for F3 because it was able to load so much in to extended memory.


The Jedi Master

I forget how much I paid for a daughterboard to increase my Mac SE/30 to 50 MHz, just for Falcon 1 goodness. Later I installed a faster crystal oscillator to overclock my PPC6100 for FalconMC. Just two of the many steps in my eternal and cursed search for the holy grail of the perfect hardware for the perfect flight sim.

Now consider all that tweaking we’ve both mentioned and trying to figure all this stuff out on the “internet” before there was Netscape or IE browsers to surf on! You would have to dial in to a local phone number at 4400 BITS PER SECOND, "search" for a BBS, and if you found one pay a subscription price for access to each one of interest. Only then could you find the info you needed. Also, how about having to call MicroProse directly (long distance in most cases) and ask them to MAIL you a floppy disk with the latest patch!

These young kids have no clue how good they have it with video games and the internet today.

My highest phone bill, while flying on the Prodigy Falcon 3 ladder, was around $800. A friend of mine had a phone bill of over $1600 (mostly from calling to fly against me).

Now people complain about paying $15 a month for MMORPG's.

RB

Hang on and get ready for a lot of flashbacks!!!

http://www.geocities.co.jp/Playtown-Denei/1720/sim-list-e.html

WOW! a non-simmer looking at that list might think there are alot of quality flight sims regulary released! They'd be wrong....but that's what they'd think!

I owned about 90% of those.

RB

Yeah, like RB I was on Prodigy (or P*) back then, so that's where I got all my info about things like patches. In fact, F3 was the first game I'd ever even HEARD of the concept of patches.
The game was released on 3.5" and 5.25" floppies. I had both drives, but got the 5.25" one. MISTAKE. There was a bug in the installer and it didn't work. The entire run! I didn't know that until days later, when I think No. 19 posted on P* about it. Instead, I tried 2 copies from EB before trading it for the 3.25" version which then installed fine.


The Jedi Master

HOly cow! How many 5.25 disks was that? I remember the 3.5 install had 5 or 6.

Oh my.... thanks T Rex for such a "amarcord" . I've just remembered the beautiful, for that era, video "art of the kill" by pete bonanni. somewhere I've also the book! Oh my... I'll give it a look after so many years....if I'll find it .

hehehe

No problem.

With all the new Falconeers, it is good to pause and look at the "big picture" sometimes.

I can't speak about the 5.25" floppies, but I know that with all the add-ons, patches, and user mods that were issued, a person’s typical Falcon 3 suite was at least three dozen disks.

Every time a patch was issued (every few months) the third party mods had to issue you a new floppy as well. There were no download sites back then.

The “Falcon Dance” may refer to F4, but the “Falcon Waltz” was a typical install for F3. It wasn’t hard to do, but boy did it take forever.

I remember one mod that simulated a rescue mission to recover your MIA pilots. It also let you manage the logistics, including bribing the Quarter Master for more bombs and missiles. Man, to be young again...

Wow!! Looking over that list sure brought back many memories. LOL

I had every version of Falcon from 1.0 (which was B&W until a later version made is CGA color).

Falcon has been a loooong journey for me. I have loved every minute of it. From using QEMM to get everything loaded into high memory so I could have 604k of the available 640k to run F3 to doing the voodoo chicken dance to get F3 to connect via a modem using Stinger's util, to founding the P* F3, MiG, Hornet, and FTP ladders to the Inter-TFW Falcon Head-to-Head Competitions to... now. Falcon has truly been the seminal combat flight simulation for the PC, since the inception of the PC... At least it has been for me.

Good memories.

-Skater