Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!bobmon
From: bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: RE  The IBM PC...
Summary: Flight Simulator nostalgia
Message-ID: <49350@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 30 Jun 90 14:39:10 GMT
References: <8@<2682a36b-1efd> <8000073@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Organization: malkaryotic
Lines: 61

<443@newave.UUCP> john@newave.mn.org (John A. Weeks III) :
> [ ... ] but when you got all done, they claimed that you could run
> Flight Simulator

wcs@cbnewsh.UUCP :
>One of the early reasons for clock-speed switches on PCs was that,
>if you run in high-speed mode, the SPACE INVADERS will come and
>squash you before you get 3 shots off, and your flight simulator
>will be simulating Piper Cub controls with a Lear-Jet engine.

carroll@m.cs.uiuc.edu <8000073@m.cs.uiuc.edu> :
| Not to rain on your parade, but one of the strengths of Flight Simulator is
| that is is real-time driven, so you don't need a clock switch for it. If you
| run on a faster CPU, you get more updates per second, but things still run
| in "real time".
| 
| P.S. So, to port it to the Cray, you'd just have to rig up a joystick, a
| CGA, and port the _assembler_ source to Cray assembler. Yes, folks, Flight
| Simulator is written in assembler. I know, I've seen it - I worked for
| SubLogic for a summer.


Nope, sorry youngster...  john and wcs are talking *early* versions of
Flight Simulator, far removed from what you see these days.  I still
have a copy of FS 2.  To run it, I put the floppy in and reboot.  It
starts up.  If I reach around to the back of my machine and press the
speed-change switch, it visibly slows down (in the ratio 4.77/8 :-),
then if I push the switch again it speeds back up.  When I tire of the
game, I end it by... turning off the computer!  CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn't
work on my not-totally-compatible machine.

And it was the standard for testing IBM hardware compatibility just for
the reasons that I had to boot it off its own floppy and stop it with the
power switch.  It went right to the hardware, made no use of the BIOS to
say nothing of DOS.  No kidding it was in assembler, it stretched those
64K PC's to the breaking point.  A quote:

	System Requirements

	To use the MS-Flight Simulator program, you must have an IBM
	Personal Computer with at least 64K bytes of memory, a monitor 
	attached to the IBM Color/Graphics Monitor Adapter, and at least
	one disk drive.

	Although MS-Flight Simulator will work with any monitor type, a
	color composite monitor will yield the best results.  If you use an
	RGB monitor, you will get black and white or shaded tones only.
	...

The manual includes a blurb about SubLogic and Bruce Artwick, probably
because everybody knew that Microsoft didn't really write FS anyway.

Aside from the fact that some of the PC's around me couldn't meet those
stringent :-) system requirements, I was impressed with even the 4.77MHz
speed.  The original 6502 versions were *real* slow, and my C-64, serial-
disk-drive version was *REAL REAL* slow.  There were articles about Artwick's
innovative display techniques to get any sort of image drawn fast enough.

--
"Well, when *I* was a kid, we had to lick the road clean every morning
with our tongues..."