Dam busters on ColecoVision Adam. That played off cassette.
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I spent countless hours in Gunship 2000 and Falcon 3.0 … and reading the manuals. Great memories.
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I the thing I miss the most these days are large well written manuals, and software only stores at the mall where you could pick up and hold the big box in your hand.
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Sublogic Flight Simulator II on an Apple IIe with I believe 128k RAM way back in 1984. I was in love with it. It is funny to think way back on those days and how the graphics were absolutely amazing 
Good ol’ Meig’s Field!
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Love this shelf man. I wish I kept all my old boxes, but too many moves for me between then and now.
My fondest memory now was of begging my dad to spend god knows how much money on like 4 MB of ram or whatever it was, so I could get barely noticeable performances increased out of the 386 we had. He said no. I don’t blame him now, but definitely did back then lol
In fact I just talked about that very time over Christmas when he asked me about my newest build and I told him I put in 128 Gb of RAM because the prices were good. We both had a good chuckle.
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I remember trying to play Falcon 4.0, but that was way over my head as a kid. About all I was good at was the refueling practice missions. Lol
Apparently it was recently re-released and available on Steam, but most reviews say it’s only worth getting so you can run a certain mod version of it.
Even though by no means my first flight sim, Falcon 4.0 was amazing, especially with it’s 600 ish page manual. Also European Air War was another outstanding complete start to shut down mission sim. Had to set up in the mission room, saddle up, take off, get in formation and find the bad guys, then get her back. Run out of ammo, dive low to escape fighters and get back a lot of the time, especially good when they would stay on your tail after you and eventually give up.
I don’t think they’ve ever really had anything to match EAW, ever.
Yea that was epic!
Also, while far from my first PC flight sim game, I think my favourite was AV8B Harrier. I played through that campaign countless times. Why I think it was the best — it was the first time I used an analogue joystick (on my very first PC with a 386) and the frame rate FELT like, at the time, 60fps. I’d like to know now what it REALLY was. Probably it was 30 though. So fluid compared to any game before, it felt like really flowing through the air.
The game itself was awesome with a dynamic campaign where you’d pick targets and push against a defending force over a huge island and had to try to take it over but it played out differently (a bit) every time so you felt you had a real big picture progress to drive you forward.
They don’t make ‘em like that any more!
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Olivetti M24 (8086)
640kb RAM
2 x 360KB floppy drives… later upgraded to 10MB Shugart HD
640x400 (monochrome Hercules/ CGA graphics adapter)
MS-DOS 2.11
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2.0
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PC AT 286/12MHz (with turbo on), 2MB RAM, 40 MB HDD, Hercules monitor. MS Flight Simulator 4.0 and F-15 Strike Eagle II from Microprose.
Great times 
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It may predate electronics as such, but as a child I had a half railway sleeper for a fuselage, an old plank for a wing, a cardboard box for a cockpit and a steering wheel from a scrapped childrens pedal car. For the six week school holiday, it was pretty certain where I would be and may also explain an early purchase in MSFS of the Britten Norman Islander.
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It also also classifies as an early VR setup. I know the Britten Norman Islander very well. I was working on North Sea Oil platforms 1978/79 and we flew from Sumburgh Airport to Baltasound Airfield on Unst for crew changes. From there we helicoptered out to the platform.
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Can’t recall PC details but…
Under my own ownership / purchased on my own: a PC with Combat Flight Simulator 2 and FS2002.
Prior to that, a Mac with F/A-18 Hornet 2.0 or 3.0.
Same here! I bought FS2002 Pro in 2002 or 2003 and played in on the first computer I bought for my wife and I, a Gateway. I don’t remember all the specs on that PC now but I do know it had an NVidia graphics card with 32MB of ram. Fun times!
I messed around with flight sim on a friend’s father’s Sinclair back when I was a wee lad. Never had contact with it again until I got my first PC in the early 90s.
First PC was an AMD 386DX/40 with 8MB RAM. I brought it home along with Falcon 3.0 and a Gravis Analog Pro flight stick.
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I was lucky to have access to one of the school’s apple 2cs during the summer months and got to play sub logic’s fs1. Fun game but I was too young to appreciate the flying aspects, but the dogfight mode was awesome.
Before I had access to the apple 2c it was Space Shuttle for Atari2600, 1983.
Before that it was a 2 speed metal box fan sitting on the floor.
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Same. It’s interesting to see that in these old iterations familiar elements were there, things I knew nothing about back then.
My first was either Microprose Flight Simulator on the Commodore 64 or MSFS 4.0 on a 286. I don’t remember much about the other 286 specs except it had a math co-processor to speed it up. I bought the former and my parents bought the latter for me, but I still don’t recall which came first.
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Flight Unlimited II on PC.
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