For you oldies who remember CGA and EGA

I just remember it was very hard to land on 2 convergent lines at 1-2 fps. But it was still awesome to be using my IIe as a Flightsim. Now I get mad when GSX Pro doesn’t de-ice my A350 correctly at 60-70fps in a raging ice-storm. What’s wrong with me???

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OKEY DOEKY am I turning left of right…nope just black and white. I’m laughing so hard at this, the first mountains every simulated and they look great!!!

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Yes! I’ve been looking for that little battle area in FS4! But I thought maybe I’d gotten it wrong.
It was amazing.

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The EGA graphics screenshot is way too sharp.
It would look like this, 320x240 or 640x480 :wink:

Edelgrafik

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I’m telling you I landed this thing successfully in the 1980s but I can’t do it now :wink:

(Atari 8-bit version of FS2, closely related to MSFS 2.0 for PC)

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Now that you‘ve mentioned it: MSFS 2020 needs a „boss key“. Is ALT + B still free?

:joy:

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[mild rant]
Part of the issue with the “I’m not getting 150fps - this game is JUNK!!!” crowd is likely the lack of historical perspective.  They never had the opportunity to experience 8 and 16 bit games, (both arcade and home based), so they don’t appreciate the technical advancement that MSFS 2020(+) represents.

Today’s gaming computer was yesterday’s supercomputer.  We’re getting detail, resolution, and scope that was absolutely unthinkable five or ten years ago.

In 1975 I remember watching someone loading up a port of Colossal Cave on a CDC 6600/7600 mainframe system at Brookhaven National Laboratory.  The stacks of punch-cards was amazing!

Dream Aero (the attraction), has a reasonably close copy of an A330 Neo in a “full motion simulator” that you can go fly without having to sacrifice limbs or children to afford.  To get reasonably decent detail, they use a customized version of P3D, (I think), because real simulator software wasn’t good enough.

And wasn’t there someone on a thread here somewhere who worked for a “real” simulator company whose bosses were jealous of MSFS because it made their multi-bazillion-dollar software look like a 16-bit retro game?

We have come far and have accomplished much.

Let’s sit back in our “house mortgage” sim-pit

and enjoy what we have instead of complaining about what we don’t.

What say ye?
[/mild rant]

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Part of the issue with the “I’m not getting 150fps - this game is JUNK!!!” crowd is likely the lack of historical perspective.

+1 (FPS :))

(„Unclear body - is is a complete sentence?“ - ■■■■ AI ;))

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What is an FPS?
Where can I buy one?
Whatever it is I bought an expensive computer and I think it comes with a bunch of free ones because when I am climbing in the Cessna 172 it says I have got 500 FPS :smiley_cat:

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I think Half Life 2 was the best FPS.

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My father was a high school teacher and taught computer programing for a little bit when the school had a main frame computer with punch cards.

When they finally replaced the main frame he brought home boxes of unused punch cards. We were using these punch cards to write phone messages for the next 20 years!

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Way back in the 70s, I took a Fortran programming class. Even though the mini-computer we were using supported terminals, we had to create our first assignment using punch cards, just to experience it one time.

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While I was at college, and while working at BNL, (see above), I did printout sorting as a courtesy to the other users when I pulled my jobs off the printer.

(In college we all did.  When you came to get your program run off the line printer, there were usually several other student jobs along with it and, (as a courtesy), we would separate them out onto the printout table.)

All the printouts had several blank pages of 132 column paper attached which were usually tossed into a bin.  I would collect the blank pages and use them, (sideways), to type up drafts of papers I had to write.  Typing paper was expensive, computer paper was free, sounded like a win to me!

There was also a time while at college that they got a whole s-load shipment of punch-cards that were just a smidge too large along one edge and would jam the card punches.  Thousands and thousands - literally cases of unusable punch cards that the college got credit for, but the manufacturer didn’t want to pay for return shipping.

Anyone who wanted them could get a whole wacking big box of un-punched cards for the asking.

It wasn’t long before student messages on the communal bulletin boards were almost universally written on these cards!

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you young fellers with your graphics!

back in my day…

image

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Thankfully, I think, I didn’t have to experience programming with punch cards. The first programs I wrote were saved to a cassette tapes.

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That’s just about as insane.

Spending days, perhaps even weeks, working on a program and, when it’s ready to show your friends, the tape wraps itself around the capstan roller, destroying your carefully crafted and coded efforts.

====================

The darndest things I ever saw with punched cards was once at BNL where a scientist was feeding a box containing thousands of carefully punched cards representing YEARS of irreplaceable research data, into a high-speed punched card reader.  Thousands of cards in less than 30 seconds could fly through that machine.  It was amazing to watch the speed it could gobble up entire boxes of punched cards!

Murphy was hiding behind the high-speed card reader and, instead of the cards lining up in the output bin, they went spraying all over the room!

Years of research was falling like snowflakes all around us while the scientist was having, (totally justified), hysterics right in front of us.

Luckily the operator saw what happened just in time to capture the input and save it to a temporary file so he could re-punch the scientist’s data.

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That reminds me. I must upgrade my sim room with an airlock door system and environmental conditioning. Oh and an automatic Halon fire suppression system.

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College freshman, 1978. My first programming class was Fortran on an IBM 360.
Amazing that my computer running this sim can run circles around a roomful of those minicomputers.

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An average smart phone is much more powerful than that IBM 360.

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I remember reading somewhere a while back that the average flip-phone in 2000 was more powerful than all the computers in the world combined, both military and civilian, in 1969 when we landed a man on the moon.

I suspect that a current model smartphone of today would run rings around many supercomputers from years ago.

I remember helping a friend, (who was a research scientist at SUNY Stony Brook), work on the first gigahertz+ processor for the DOD back in the 90’s when the 486-DX was bleeding edge.

My how time flies when you’re having fun!

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