The First 747 Simulator

[Roddez]

Prompted by a previous discussion about ATP simulator, I thought of the first ever flight simulator I played.

It was in the 1980s, was written in Basic and was called 747 FLIGHT SIMULATOR (JETSET).  The file was 747.BAS and you needed GW Basic to use it.  Being written in Basic, it was pretty basic as you can see from the screenshot below:



I eventually found a manual and there were a list of procedures about how to fly from one location to another.  As a young kid, this presented hours of fun for me.

It's amazing what Google can do for you - I found the application and as a quick exercise on a Friday afternoon I managed get it working again.  Sadly I don't have the time to go for a fly today, maybe on another rainy day...

Rodney
www.simulatorsolutions.com.au

[falconeye]

Nice graphics.
So it seems not very much has changed since the 80's. 

Cheers and have fun with you new sim.

[mikeindevon]

The first MS Flight Simulator had 4 colours (black, red, blue and green) because that was all that was available on early PC graphics adapter.  Then along came the EGA with a whole SIXTEEN colours (wow) and I got angry with MS because for a long time after that MSFS still retained only the four basic colours.  No doubt this was due to commercial disputes.  Anyhow, that promted me to see if I could program something better, but that was a hard but very instructive task.  There was absolutely no support for the graphics other than the ability to put one coloured dot on the screen.  This meant just to draw a straight line involved some quite clever stuff (thanks to Mr Bressingham) in assembler and you had to clip and render your own polygons.  These days its a breeze - you just get DirectX or similar to do it for you.

When you think of the scenery that today's sims can draw and the cockpit detail too it is just staggering how far we have come in 25 years.  It's been a good hobby and kept one at the forefront of programming technology.

Mike

[Markus Vitzethum]

Anyone remembers that nice little simulator? "Boeing 727 simulator" for Commodore 64, approx. from 1982.

No graphics. ASCII art only.


http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=925

It was my first flight simulator and as a 8- or 9-year old boy, I was neither able to understand the systems nor to fly it.    15 years later, I flew a perfect traffic pattern on a windows based C-64 emulator, though. 

Markus

[evaamo]

I remember spending hours and hours in Flight Simulator 2 and Solo Flight in the Apple IIe. My grandfather then gave me his old, tape-drive ZX-80 which had a Flight Simulator in it, however compared to what I had on my Apple back then, resulted in a really boring experience. I wish I'd kept it tho'.

Two years ago I managed to buy a second copy of a book I had bought as a teen, for nostalgic reasons mostly:



Believe it or not, late last year I set up a FreeDOS running on Virtual Box, installed Borland Turbo C++ and started building the samples on the book. It was interesting to program in assembly and mode 13h after so many years.

I agree, DirectX and more recent Frameworks such as Monogame (XNA successor, so to say), not to mention engines such as Unity, make it all too easy for newbie developers to start making games.

Then again... here comes Mr. Hardy H. and programs an entire 747-400 simulation using plain ol' Java 2D and makes it run at 72fps on 5 year old Hardware... how's that for old school?!. My respects Monsieur! :-D

Cheers,
-E