All we need to do is bring back the Turbo button, the button on early PC’s that switched it from 8hz to 16 hz. Then we’ll be flying.
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16 Hz wow that would have been exceptionally slow. Valves were faster than that. 
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But the software was far less complex than now.
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probably meant 16Mhz instead of Hz 
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Even our Atari in the 80s was 1.77 MHz… it got about 1 fps in Flight Simulator II, awwww yeahhhhh
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Funny how that was perfectly flyable back then. Now I am disappointed when it dips below 60
At least with 1fps every landing was buttersmooth. One frame you’re up, next frame you’re down. Must have been a perfect landing!
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Yeah nah, not for me. Computer games in the 80s were nearly all awful, programming was much more fun than playing the games. Turns out that was also an excellent way to prepare for a future career so if anything, having terrible games was a blessing.
I always wanted a realistic flight simulator but they were all awful. I waited four decades until MSFS 2020 came along and it hit the level of realism that I needed to make it worthwhile. I’m not demanding at all! 
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Same here. I have never had the slightest interest in video games, back in the day creating Prestel/Teletext apps in 6510 Assembler was much more fun and flight sims were nowhere close enough to the experience of flying a real plane until MSFS 2020. All I lack now is a motion rig to complete my setup
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“The simulators of the 1980s ran on the most powerful graphics chip of all – THE HUMAN IMAGINATION” 
I had Flight Simulator II for the Atari and yes – it was so slow with terrible graphics – but the charts and manual were amazing! I learned how VOR and ILS worked and a lot of basics about flight and navigation. It was an educational experience as well as entertainment…
Picked up a physical copy off ebay last year and I have to admit while it’s fun to pull up the old software for a few minutes, I get more out of flipping through the paper materials that came with it.
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The difference between gamers, (and simmers), of the 80s and today is a lack of the “attitude of gratitude”.
In the 80s, we felt we were at the cutting edge, and we’re incredibly proud and grateful to be a part of it.
In 2020/23, everyone seems so entitled and there is so very little gratitude for the technology we’ve been blessed with.
Back then, everything was hand-crafted, carefully coded and optimized for the best game experience. Much was hand-coded in assembly language for the target system to achieve reasonable game update rates.
Games were done like Pi-Fox (a clone of the SNES game, Star Fox) - 100% bare-metal assembly language.
They accomplished wonderful things on systems that weren’t much more powerful than an electronic calculator.
Maybe it’s that those of us who saw the sweat, grit, effort and joy that went into a program like this, are the ones who really appreciate the efforts that have gone into making something like MSFS 2020.
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And many became interested in aviation because of this 80’s movie
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“Surely you didn’t fly at such low frame rates?”
“We did, and stop calling me Shirley!”
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The crazy stuff we would do to get an extra frame, over clock a CPU even if it was locked by grinding off a resistor. Tweaking memory and such. If a guy could get 2 extra frames when everybody wasn’t, it was big news and everybody wanted know how you did it. Brings back so cool memories. Thanks
PACO572
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I like how the mountains look so real…
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The clouds! What about the clouds?
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We had an early version of DLSS Frame Generation, it was codenamed ‘Imagination’.
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While y’all were lamenting the 16 colors of EGA, I was playing SubLogic Flight Simulator and SubLogic Jet on the Amiga. 32 colors from a palette of 4096 (albiet still 320x200 resolution), but wow, that frame rate! The 8-bit computers were about 4 to 5 fps… The Amiga version felt silky smooth.
Until the 386 era nothing matched it. The Atari ST version was also better than the PC release in many ways, but the ST didn’t have the Amiga’s dedicated graphics processor so it was a bit chunkier in its screen updates.
Of course, we really have to raise a toast to the Apple ][ users who funded the earliest development with A2-FS1. Now that required imagination.
I wonder how much of that codebase has survived into MSFS.
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Although quite a bit newer, the original Sierra games gave me hundreds of hours of play time. Until I discovered FS4 that is…
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They have kept the horizon line visible as a tribute! 
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