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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

I started on Flight Simulator 4 way back in the day; I think on my 286. I remember when I first moved to Chicago I wanted to check out Meigs Field, the airfield you started on. It's gone now, and has a really crazy story of how it got turned into a park:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meigs_Field

Looking at the previews for the new FS, I wonder if it will require an Internet connection. It seems like way too much content to download/pre-install. Will it download content as you travel?

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Wow, just one look at the airfield was a massive hit of nostalgia. I crash landed a thousand times as a kid there. At 5 frames per second on my 286. Thank's for the link. Mayor Daley did not mess around with closing it down. From your link.

>In a controversial and illegal move on the night of Sunday, March 30, 2003, Mayor Daley ordered city crews to destroy the runway immediately by bulldozing large X-shaped gouges into the runway surface in the middle of the night.[14] The required demolition notice was not given to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) or the owners of airplanes tied down at the field, and as a result sixteen planes were left stranded at the airport with no operating runway, and an inbound flight had to be diverted by Air Traffic Control, because of equipment scattered on the runway.

You can now easily do that in a browser[1], if you need a quick fix. It's the version with aircraft and scenery designer and the audio upgrade. I had to tune the DOSBox clock speed a bit with Ctrl-F12, but it works pretty well (manually go through the start menus!) and I just flew the good old Cessna around Sears Tower :-)

[1] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Microsoft_Flight_Simulator...

I flew around the Bay Area a bunch of times on my Amiga in FA/18 Interceptor, in the late 1980s

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F/A-18_Interceptor

Now that was a classic game. I played it a lot on my old A1200. Walk down memory lane!

Whoa, the number of times I lined up a landing on Meigs field... it's hard to imagine. I didn't realize it was gone, of course, I'm sure I wouldn't have known anyways, but thanks for the reminder :)

I never used the MS versions, but spent a lot of time on the Amiga version of FSII by Sublogic. According to Wikipedia that version was closer to the featureset of MS FlightSim 3.0 than 2.0

I think I can still hear the droning noise of that Cessna engine.

I know flight simulator with the Piper Cherokee Archer from the C64, coded by SubLogic laggy as hell with 3 secs input delays

Totally me too! My first trip to Chicago absolutely required a trip to Meigs Field, and I almost felt like I could navigate the plane around the city as we passed over it on the way out from ORD :)

Wow, this brought back some memories.

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