So I’ve read how to use GPS coordinates, how to use decimal long and lat, but nowhere do I see how to translate the old MSFS coordinates in so many older books (like A Flight Simulator Odyssey) into 2020.
Those coordinates were always things like: N17423, E5056. That’s how you entered them into the sim and I always assumed they were long and lat but they don’t seem to translate using things like this: GPS coordinate converter (that location I gave was supposed to be San Fran, but using the website gives me the Antarctica).
Any clues? I have about a dozen of these older sim books with lots of great adventures but you need to have the exact coordinates to start and often a local itself isn’t given (that’s part of the fun).
I don’t think you can convert them. The original Flight Simulator didn’t use a 3D global coordinate system (in fact the scenery wasn’t even on a globe - just a 2D plane). The coordinates from the early days were just a grid overlaid on a 2D map. From memory the coordinates ranged from -32767 to +32767 in both the X and Y grid.
They used “North” and “East” as a general term in the simulator, but I don’t think it really equated to hemispheres. From the Commodore 64 manual, it reads that each unit is approximately 256 metres so there is no convergence if you go further north - it is a fixed distance.
It was just a limitation of the technology and memory requirements of the day when the early versions of Flight Simulator came out. We finally moved to a 3D globe with Lat and Long with FS5 in 1993.
Yeah, I kind of thought that was the case. I just thought maybe somebody might have figured out how to convert those to “real” coordinates.
It’s a shame because some of those early adventures are REALLY fun translating into the current sim (some of them I can do because they mention airports).
I was now also trying to find a way to convert these coordinates.
The Maps for the Sublogic Flight Simulator 2 state:
“North and east coordinates align with orthogonal coordinate grid overlaid on Lambert conformal conic projection”.
Lambert CC (LCC) is described here:
To convert the coordinates between the LCC used ingame and standard WGS84, you can use the Proj tool (PROJ — PROJ 9.5.0 documentation).
The command to convert WGS84 to LCC (in Linux) would be:
It took me a while to find/determine the parameters for LCC.
According to the official manual for subLogic FS II, the center of the map is at 40° North, 88°30’ West, about 30 miles southwest of Champaign.
With the game coordinates around Chicago being around 16500, it can be determined that they used some special kind of signed 15bit values. 0-16383 are the negative values (to the South and West of the map center), while 16384-32767 are the positive values (North and East of the center). Therefore we need to set the offset here with +x_0 and +y_0 parameters.
LCC also needs a standard parallel (the axis around which the map was tilted from the cone form to get orthogonal). I assume this to be latitude 40° in the center, set with +lat_1.
And the lat and lon originals, being also the center coordinates of the in game map, set with +lat_0 and +lon_0.
Last is +k, which is the scaling factor.
For this, one more FS II manual statement is interesting, that is, 1 unit represents 256m in the real world.
So I checked the distance of one degree in WGS84 with World distance calculator | World Air Sports Federation
First between N40W88 and N40W89, which is 85.4km
Then between N40W88 and N41W88, which is 111km
From this I calculate a scaling factor of 0.003906154
To give a practical example, I checked coordinates for the Empire State Building, which according to Google Earth is at N 40.7484405, E -73.9856644.
If put in the above command, the result is:
I believe it is still degrees, minutes, and seconds, but in a different notation. e.g. N123456, E654321 would be 12 degrees, 34 minutes, 56 seconds North and 65 degrees, 43 minutes, 21 seconds East.
Coordinates in MSFS have been always decimal and that´s the way they are configured in addons (NAVAIDs, airports, etc). However game can translate the format so you can click at game map, note down the displayed DMS coordinates and use the website you posted for the conversion from DMS to decimal. You can also directly click on that website map to get both formats in one go. And they can be also obtained from Google Maps or Bing Maps with mouse clicks quickly and then pasted directly into game world search box.
San Francisco is 37.77029733160334, -122.41749183824811. Entering that in world search box will target to San Francisco and will display the converted coordinates as well (rounding may be applied): N37° 46’ 13.07’‘, W122° 25’ 2.97’'.
Some GPS addons support both formats, so you can enter the coordinates using the format you want. For conversion purposes in that case remember that positive values in decimal are North/East and negative values are South/West.
One of the easiest ways to get coordinates is to use Little Navmap, in case you already use that tool for planning. Simply do “Right mouse click on map → More” and you could copy the decimal coordinates from anything (a location, a waypoint, etc). The “Information box” from any asset (VORs, airports, etc) will also display decimal coordinates when you simply left click on it. You can configure the tool to display the coordinates format you want in the “Options → Units” menu.
Note: the format for game shall still use “comma” as separator for coordinates and “point” as separator for decimal digits (so as written at the top of my post). You may need to manually change this if you want to enter coordinates from Little Navmap into world box.
I think there is some misunderstanding about what “old style MSFS coordinates” we are talking about.
These are the maps which were provided with Sublogic Flight Simulator 2 back in the 80s:
On the bottom of the chart you can see the coordinates which were used in the game to position the aircraft.
These coordinates range from 0 to 32767, one for latitude, one for longitude.
And these coordinates were used in various manuals and books of the time, to give the position to setup, where the flight begins.
This coordinate system was used from Flight Simulator 1 til FS4.
FS5 introduced a new coordinate system.
Kelleytoons was asking for a way to convert them to GPS coordinates.
This conversion is what my post was about.
It doesnt matter if the result is in decimal degress (DD) or so called sexagesimal degrees (hours, minutes, seconds), as MSFS takes both formates, and converting between them is trivial.
Unfortunately, the conversion as I described above is not very accurate.
So to get the exact positions, I currently load the FS2 on a Commodore C64 Vice emulator, start the flight with the given coordinates, and cross check between the in game map and MSFS map, where the correct start position is for the flight adventure.
If someone has any idea how to refine the formula or its parameters, in order to get more accurate conversion, I would be interested.
I don’t know if something generic exists because I normally use decimal to DMS converters. The most frequent Northing Easting converter types I have seen so far are just based on UTM or NATO coordinates formats, for example:
This one accepts UTM using decimals, so it should avoid the precision problems, but is working in meters only. Is it possible that book was using feet instead?
If that´s the case maybe there are other similar converters, like the following which is aparently supporting the american units, but to be honest I never used it and I just found it after a quick google search:
No idea on a converter.
I use BING MAPS. Right click on the map where you need the coordinates. At the bottom will be the coordinates ( to copy ) in the manner you need to enter in the Search Bar on the World Map.
