What is your earliest PC and Flight Simulator pairing

Either Flight Sim II, or Gunship (if you can call it a simulator) on the Commodore 64. I had both, but don’t know which was first.

Atari 800 and Sublogic Flight Simulator II, circa 1985-ish:

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I was a little late to the game. My first was FS2002 Pro on a Gateway desktop - yes, it came in cow boxes.

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Commodore 64 and Sublogic FS II for me as well.

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On the PC: the first were Flight Unlimited, Red Baron, Comanche and Eurofighter 2000 on a Pentium 100 with a whopping 100MHz and 16MB RAM!

Only later Flight Simulator 98 (for a very short time, because the graphics simply weren’t there yet to make civilian flying interesting to me) and even later FS 2004 (finally the graphics and aircraft fidelity were good enough), FSX, P3D …

Not to mention Jane’s Longbow 1 and 2 and DCS World. I haven’t really gotten into the latter … not enough time to learn all the weapons systems and different keyboard layouts. :wink: I’m sure there were more sims I played on the PC, but those popped into my head right away.

And before getting my first PC in 1994, before the dark times, before the Empire:

Commodore 64: subLogic Flight Simulator II

Amiga 500: F117 Nighthawk, Combat Air Patrol, Dogfight (the first sim with freelook, as far as I know), F-18 Interceptor, Knights of the Sky, A320 Airbus (pretty much the only civilian sim that I used back then, also not for very long) …

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Yes, that was my first as well. And I was addicted ever since and even moved to the US in part so I could actually learn to fly :smiley::smiley:

If I look at all the different PCs, and partial upgrades and all the different simulators, most of them the premium version, I have spent money on over all these years.
Maybe I could have purchased a bigger airplane :joy:

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I had that one also, then I got the Arari 128 which had 128kb.

First PC was Commodore Vic20 but the first PC with flight simulator was the Apple IIc with Flight Simulator II (SubLogic) back in 1984.

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Amiga 2000 and Sublogic FS II.
The year was 1987, if I remember correctly…

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A whopping IBM PC Jr! Only because I was working for IBM at the time and we got a discounted price, along with the first-generation Flight Simulator.

First computer: sinclair ZX81 (1982)
First flightsim: MSFS 2 or 3 (cannot remember) on a 8086 or 8088 (also cannot remember) PC, ca. 1988. i do remember my computer had 640 kb of RAM, and an amazing 20 Mb hard disk. Pirated copy of MSFS. If I remember well my first legal version was the one from 1995.

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That’s exactly what I get now sometimes. Just try landing near 4+ other H160’s :stuck_out_tongue:

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Was it Jet Fighter II: Advanced Tactical Fighter?
JetFighter II (PC/DOS) 1990, Velocity (youtube.com)

That was one of my favorites as a kid.

Here’s the original version, but I never played this one.
JetFighter: The Adventure - Wikipedia

There was an actual JSF, but it came out in the late 90s during the JSF test program:
Joint Strike Fighter (video game) - Wikipedia

I remember playing some flight “sim” on Commodore 64 when I was really young. I don’t remember the name, but you flew from the cockpit and could do some aerial refueling with a drogue

Jet Fighter II (above) must have been my first sim I did a lot with. it got me hooked!

Some others I remember really fondly:

Their Finest Hour (the old Lucasarts game)
Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (the old Lucasarts game)
Aces over Europe
Aces over the Pacific
Strike Commander
Hero’s of the 352nd
Flight of the Intruder
Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat
Flight Unlimited I and III
Red Baron II
MSFS 5.0, 5.1, 5.1a, plus the rest
Pro Pilot

Man, I miss those great manuals that came in all the old sims.

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Built my own PC with an intel 80286 and flight simulator 1.0 . Those were the days :slight_smile:

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Mine was on a TRS-80 Model I running Flight Simulator from Sublogic. It had 128x48 block black/white graphics. The CPU was a Z80 running at 1.78 mHz.

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Oh yes, thank you. I have been wracking my brains out.
Now I can sleep at night.
Luckily it ran in CGA. I never played the original either.
I did play Aces over the Pacific and particularly liked the way tracer bounced off ships when you attacked them. That was very realistic.

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My experiences have been the same as many others. It all started for me in 1983, using Sublogic’s Flight Simulator II, on a Commodore 64. After that I moved on to some version of the sim on my Amiga 2000, probably around 1987. Didn’t get the sim on a PC till I got my first PC (80386) in 1991.

Now running with an Nvidia 3080Ti. I hope I’m still around to see what it’s like in another 10 years. Whatever it is, I’ll buy it.

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Earliest: 1987 PS/2 Model 25. An 8086, 12" monochrome CGA with an upgraded 20mb hard drive, running FS3. Also ran Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer in those days.

Having trouble remembering which computer I used for FS4.0 and then Flight Assignment: ATP. It might have been a monochrome VGA IBM laptop, early 90s, FS4.0 would have been paired with the Aircraft and Scenery Designer. The combination of FS4 running that, and ATP was awesome, a complete gateway drug to my eventual understanding the national airspace system and later certification as a pilot.

Our first color computer probably wasn’t until 1993 or so, close to the time FS 5 was released. I remember spending more time getting the dang thing to run, then going over to friends houses that had beefier, but not always reliable rigs to run it. That was only the beginning of me staying up way too late and spending way too much $ on computers to play Flight Simulator; here we are 30-some-odd years later…

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1984 Flight simulator II Commodore 64 was my first combo.
But with a PC, that was in 1988 on a Olivetto M240 8086, already obsolete for it’s time, but a great very sturdy computer, with MSFS III on it
Terrible FPS, more like a slideshow, but glorious in EGA. :grinning:

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I was pretty young, so I do not know the model, but it was most likely the IBM 8086 or 8088 with two black floppy drives and CGA graphics. Also was barely able to run Chuck Yeagers Advanced flight trainer, if I rememer right Chuck Yeager didnt work at first so I went back to Babbages and the guys said our 256K of RAM was too low to run. It wasn’t until High School when we had a 386 and I could run flight assignment ATP and MSFS 5.0 with a VGA card.

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