For you oldies who remember CGA and EGA

Back in the old days when I went flying with my father… or to be more precise watched him flying together with my other wright-brother because it was just a one-seater.

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This reminds me of an old Bill Cosby skit about “survival”.

He mentioned that if he were in a plane, and it was crashing, to please tell him because he’d be out in the wings flapping his arms.

48615d1e3741b80891cc309f7a34b93ef3c3bcb5~2

“You might think I’m crazy, but if I take off. . .”
:rofl:

When I got to college there were still punch cards, but we were the first class that didn’t have to use them. I remember a professor made a Christmas wreath out of folded cards and spray-painted it green.

I saw a simple flight sim running on an Silicon Graphics scientific computer a few years before consumer 3D cards shipped. Light-reflecting polygons and a smooth frame-rate was amazing. The future! Puts the “I won’t fly this plane because I can tell the sound is digitized, and the paint texture doesn’t feel right to me” complaint I saw in another topic a moment ago in a different perspective.

Anyone remember ASCII printouts of Playboy models? Those would come out of the high school lab’s printers anonymously when the teachers weren’t monitoring the computer lab.

Also, this is the first flight simulation I ever remember seeing, on a Commodore PET as a high school freshman. The Texture Mafia’s brains would explode.

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I didn’t bother playing that one more than once or twice.

One I did play a lot was B-1 Nuclear Bomber, one of a few text-based flight sims from Avalon Hill in the C64 days…

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There was no public Internet yet, so if people raged “There were no Phoenix missiles on the B-1!” only the folks on the their local dial-up BBS would know. Or you could rage on Fidonet and share it worldwide, though your post might take a week to make it back to California.

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Who remembers Kennedy Approach on the Atari?

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It was also a text-based flight “simulator” where the goal was to land an airliner at JFK.

It was entirely text based like the ones above, (and looked a lot like the one above.)

The crash screens were done like “teletype” printouts, complete with impact printer sound effects.

P.S.
I really like this thread.  Why?

  • No whining.
  • No complaining.
  • Nobody getting upset that “such-and-so” doesn’t look like a photograph with actual people you recognize waving at you as you pass by.
  • If I get 30fps, I’m a happy bunny!
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I do not know how powerful the flip phones were but I am sure the moon landings were powered by DEC PDP 11s.

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First computer I ever programmed.

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I cannot say what my first programming was in but it was in machine code as was the PDP 11.

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I strongly doubt that.

Can you cite specific material to back up your assertion that “the moon landings were powered by DEC PDP 11s”?

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And you have all good reasons to do so :wink:

The guidance computer was a custom built computer designed at the MIT, specifically for this first moon landing mission:

There is a great presentation about all this, you‘lll learn everything you need to know in exactly 60 minutes about:

  • Computer architecture
  • Assembly
  • Newtonian space physics
  • How to navigate in space
  • And more…

Here:

This is a great talk (in English), held by two German scientists: 100% pure information tightly packed into a great presentation (so a little knowledge about certain topics helps ;))

And if anyone now complains that „this is all very much off-topic“ now, well: „the moon is out there!“ - Make it on-topic, Asobo/MS :grin::+1:t2:

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FPS can be a measurement of your IMMERSION

Your FPS seems to be Fantasy per Second … 500 FPS when you “CLIMB” into a C172

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Oh did I forget to insert the decimal point? :rofl:

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Right church, wrong pew. . .

I always thought it was the amount of “fun per second” - and back then, it was high!  We were “riding the wave”, most “normal” people had no clue, (and as a consequence, most thought I was “weird” - until they needed something fixed! :wink:), and everyone I knew thought we were at the bleeding-edge.  Adding a 1 meg by 8 DIMM to an Atari 8-bit?  That was BEYOND cool!

Assembler was the ultimate test of skill.  Programming for the 6502, the 8080, 8085, 8086, and the Motorola 68000 in raw assembler was total nerd-speak and people would ask what I was doing - and immediately regret it!

The games, the projects, the tests of skill, it was all fun.  Every second of it.

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Graphics smaphics! I miss the old printed manuals. :wink:

My first Flight Simulator version, FS2 for the Atari 8-bit, came with printed navigation maps for the default scenery areas (Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston/New York) and a nice manual that not only explained how to run the game, but how VOR and ILS navigation worked in the real world, and from there how to use them in the simulator. I learned a lot as a kid from that!

ILS was a bonus feature and required 64 KB of RAM in your system! :smiley:

I’m too lazy to dig it out for a photo but here’s the set from the Atari ST version (which ran a little faster!)

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Ahh the old Manuals for games back in the day,
:grin: :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: :star_struck:

I remember vigorously reading the manual for TFX(Tactical Advanced Fighter?) from: ocean

and from Novalogics Armoured Fist(1) in my youth

I’m 45years old now, so do have quite a bit experience with old forgotten tech :smile: I have seen EGA/VGA in my early youth , also school had Tiki computers :joy: :joy: at max EGA I think… of course 5.25 disks … :joy:

And also Flight Unlimited 3 , which I still read from time to time maaaan I Loved that ole Humble Beechjet 400A from FU3 :grinning: :grinning: Still do!!!

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Speaking of Novalogic - this was my first ‘realistic’ flight sim:

F-22_Lightning_3_cover

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I also use to do that. — the Programming, but not the telling anyone, at that time, that I did it, (apart from on Job Applications)

Now it’s seems Cool to admit it in Puiblic, as its a dying skill set.

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Novalogic had soo much GOOD back in the day!! (The complete Deltaforce military series, which made a great LAN game with friends)
And they had that great Voxel-engine The
Commanche series was also so good! :blush:

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What I said was just a quip but the first launches of rockets was I believe controled by 7 PDP11s. Because some were aborted when one of seven processors disagreed with the others.

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Ha yes the manuals, they were read cover to cover several times.

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I remember Double Dribble pre game video:) If someone remember it?

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