Flight Simulator 4 from 1989 running on three immersive monitors (2017)
tinmith.net
tinmith.net
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14548162
Still impressive.
Also, one of the comments there, from bluedino:
"I remember you could do this with DOS Doom using the -left and -right parameters: you just needed three PC's that could run Doom AND a local area network."
This is not true.
One strategy is to use multicast[1].
Another strategy is to use SO_BROADCAST+SO_REUSEADDR[2].
[1]: http://www.jarloo.com/c-udp-multicasting-tutorial/
[2]: http://hacked10bits.blogspot.com/2014/12/udp-binding-and-por...
Is there a current commercial version? Did people just lose interest?
Or maybe the current 10 (20?) year old stuff is simply good enough
- Lockheed released its own version called Prepar3d: https://www.prepar3d.com/
- X-plane 11 is largely understood to be the main competitor. FSX and X-plane have different underlying modelling principles. You can easily start an internet flame-war on which one is "better", but X-plane is actively developed and improved
- Aerofly FS2 is also a good "lighter alternative". Still a very solid sim, but easier to get into. Very pretty graphics as well.
All three of these support basic and advanced joysticks. I've had Saitek Yoke, Engine cluster, and Thrustmaster MFDs running in Aerofly in seconds.
From combat flight sim perspective, DCS suite is widely considered the current best-of-breed, though Falcon 4.0 modded / enhanced variations are still widely played. Tons of other "lighter" contenders as well.
Flight simulators have become pretty hard core simulators these days. X-Plane 11 and P3D seem to be the most popular on simmer forums, with MS FSX (and derivatives) still enjoying popularity.
Flight sims are a pretty deep rabbit hole and big investment. When you purchase a simulator, it's just a platform for running 1st and 3rd party addon aircraft and scenery. Some of these are fairly expensive (up to $100 or more for a quality aircraft), and the investment in these is why people still fly with FSX.
Combat flight sims are still around too, DCS:World is popular, but IL-2 series and Rise of Flight have some players too. Falcon BMS is popular for hard core fans of modern air warfare (with complex weapons systems that need a manual of their own).
As much as I'd like to still be enjoying flight sims, it's too deep a rabbit hole for me. It takes investment in hardware, software, education and practice.
This explains also why it's not a mainstream activity. It's far beyond what a casual gamer would find entertaining or interesting.
Microsoft's IEB, under Don Mattrick at the time (best known for his blunders with the Xbox One launch and lack of success in reviving Zynga's fortunes while CEO), closed ACES studio in 2009, thus ending Flight Simulator development forever.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/112931/Microsoft_Makes_B...
> Is there a current commercial version?
The last commercially released version, Flight Simulator X, is available on Steam from another publisher.
1) The legend around Flight Simulator was always that there was one and only one reason why Microsoft published it: because Bill Gates thought it was cool.
2) Bill Gates stepped down from his day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft in June 2008.
http://home.flightgear.org (free)
> I decided to try just fuzzing over the memory locations that did change to see which one would have an effect.
I've been thinking for a long time to do this in an automated way. But I guess even if you can automate the fuzzy generation + screenshots, a person with a lot of domain knowledge will need to check them.
Ours was great, but theirs was better. I don't remember the details, but theirs did something like implemented HTML tables. This was 1997, and tables were still not supported in things like Lynx.
Anyway, good times, and Wayne is a smart guy.
Maybe it was in the era of ubiquitous printer IO ports? There seems to be some sort of "dark age" of low-level/analog computer output right between printer ports and arduino/raspberri pi.
Macs supported more than one display at that point, I think.
But OP is amazing to do this btw.
For graphics yes. But around that time all Borland (C, Pascal) products supported debugging with to monitors (VGA+Hercules). And I used a little TSR for years that transferred the contents of the main VGA Screen to Hercules via 'PtrScr' key, which was handy too. All text mode of course.
That said, I literally was born after Windows 3.0. So... I never personally dealt with such a setup. Maybe some day, as a matter of exploring older computers, I will get a chance to actually run such a setup and see what it was like.
A lot of graphical software had commandline switches to override the videocard autodetection, "in case it failed", but this could also be used to force the software onto one monitor or another.
I ran dual-head under DesQview for quite a while. The CGA monitor whined like mad so I kept it off most of the time, but when I needed more display real estate, I'd turn it on and put my text sessions over there, leaving the graphical stuff on the VGA.
It's probably worth mentioning that the idea of developing Windows software in Windows was something that only came around until 1990-91 or so. Prior to that, all the tooling (except for things like the message Spy and the resource editor) ran in the command line in text mode, including the debugger.
Visual Basic gets a huge amount of grief, but when it was first released, this was a huge part of the reason why it was so amazing. It took Windows development from a relatively complex and obscure process involving a multi-step build/edit/compile and turned it into 'drag the button where you want it, click, and add an event handler... all in Windows itself.'
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Graphics_Card#Hercule...
In contrast, the Mac II supported multiple displays in the sense that QuickDraw would happily draw graphics across monitors, switching color depths along the way, without applications needing to even be aware of the presence of multiple graphics cards.
The Mac also supported having multiple identical graphics cards plugged in. In contrast, a Hercules card could coexist with a VGA card, but not with a second Hercules card, for example.
I don't know anything about Macs but I have no trouble believing it was superior.
The PC was incredibly primitive in this area. But that's also why there was essentially nothing to configure when you inserted a VGA and Hercules card into a machine. Their physical configuration is defined by their respective standards, and the standard didn't consider multi-monitor support. It's just fortuitous that Hercules/MDA and VGA standards didn't collide.
My solution was to write little C programs which addressed the Hercules screen directly. Fun times! :)
It was dog slow, even slower than in DOS.
This was 1987. so at the time PC's were way behind in terms of the architecture needed to do this. Apple had a 24/32-bit [1] address space and an OS abstraction layer sitting in front of the graphics hardware. The closest in the PC space at the time was Windows 2.x, which ran in a 20-bit segmented real mode address space or OS/2, which nobody had. PC Video cards of the time were also hardwired to certain physical addresses, so installing two in one machine would run the risk of physically damaging hardware when the two boards both attempted to respond to a memory operation in that shared space. (The MDA was a unique case since it had its own memory window, separate from the rest.)
1] The original Mac II marked the first use of the fully 32-bit 68020 in the Macintosh. The earlier 68000 did operate internally on 32-bit addresses, but only exposed 24-bits on the package. (The 68000 was introduced in 1979, so >16MB was a fantasy.)
The net result of this is that programmers would often pack flags into the top 8 bits of a 32-bit address, with the knowledge that the hardware would just mask them off and ignore them. Since the Mac II had a fully 32-bit bus, that wouldn't work and Apple added external hardware to the CPU that would mask down to 24-bit addresses. Even the early Mac II ROM wasn't '32-bit clean' enough to run without this masking.
(PC's had a similar problem on a smaller scale. The (seg<<4)+ofs addressing scheme used in real-mode allowed 64K-16 addresses to be generated past the 1MB bound. On a chip with a 20-bit address bus (8088, etc.), these would wrap around. On a 286, they would address new memory locations. So AT class machines had masking of the A20 bit to allow them to wrap around addresses too. This masking also made its way into CPU packages, since there are implications for caching if you mask A20 and wrap the address space at 1MB.)
Hardware improves much faster. Actually Software could always and can always be done without computers, like the old punch holes in the cards and Ada Lovelace's writings.
Still today, of course, Anything that can get done with real physical logic gates can get done with paper and pencil. Just takes longer, Result is the same.
Examples of great software that dropped my jaw back in the 90's:
- Microsoft Flight Simulator (Instead of becoming better and more famous, is almost forgotten)
- Bryce 4 (mind-blowing back then, wonder if still alive)
- :at request - Simcity ( I had never play, but my sister was addicted)
-:at sister's request - Empire Earth ( not sure that old, it's like Age of Empires)
- Myth: The Fallen Lords (best video-game ever made, for me, it is the saddening story you can hear about software death)
BUT, if you played it like a city-painter, I recommend Cities: Skylines as an evolution. You can also mod it and the language of choice is C#. Just look at the mods, the community is (was?) amazing.
I'm sad that Microsoft chose to discontinue Flight Simulator and Midtown madness, but I can hope for a return much like age of empires.
Is too late too edit my comment now, but I stand corrected.
Microsoft Flight Simulator will never be forgotten.
Myth: T.F.L. the same. Not on Steam , tried to get killed by his own parents, but we never let it die, even going a little off. And some heroes reversed-engineered the server and there is a Multiplayer server still running today.(will never forget you guys from Project Magma)
Not only did they have the imagination but you needed to really concern yourself with the limitations of the systems. My first "flight simulator" experiences are all C64 base. Looking back we can see that titles that originated in the eighties and nineties are still with us in new forms.
maybe like other things, for example, inks for painting and marble for sculpting were very expensive in times of Fidia , DaVinci, etc... so they didn't waste it, and made the best Art,
What I wanted to say, then diverged and started telling a completely unnecessary story, is: AoE2 is a really timeless piece of software. Look at the still kicking community for this 20-year-old game!
It's lost some ground to other software, though, I think, such as UE4 plugins for that ecosystem.
It was one of my favorites too!
I think there is a need for more players; more then a need for more servers, hehe. I think(not sure) the only fully legal way to get the Game is buying the old original CD from eBay or taobao. I didn't say anything about downloads and I didn't say anything about other ways. Enjoy!
GLA!!! (good luck all! people used to shout it in the starting of the game by the chat tool, wishing luck for enemies and allies)
Ahhhh! How could I forget about Fallout 2 , the second best game ever made, after Myth, hehe.
First 32-bit PC game, perhaps. Acorn users were playing 32 bit games well before 1992 (e.g, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch in 1987)
Yes and No. Screens are measured diagonally, not by square inches. A 14" screen could be 14"x0.1".
A 14 inch CRT was also measured diagonally.
The original didn't say that a 14" CRT has the same area as a 14" laptop — just that it was "smaller than many laptops these days".