My first PC used for Flightsim.

[Greggy_D]

1 hour ago, b1bmsgt said:

My pleasure! How about this:

 

 

 

Man o man....I probably would have teared up seeing that.  So many great memories of a better time in this country.

[paulb]

5 hours ago, b1bmsgt said:

My pleasure! How about this:

 

 

 

That is exactly where I started! Same 64, disk drive and monitor! Amazing to see a picture of it.  From memory I also had Jet by Sublogic. The good old days of seconds per frame and not frames per second! 

[Guest Colin M]

Someone mentioned Stacker software had that too to try get more disk space, just a file compression program really but a very clever one for its time, anyone remember QEMM, that was a great program I'd use to try get as much conventional memory as possible, a lot of games and sims back then had different memory requirements, so we'd end up with different boot disks (floppy disks) until I figured out how to write my own batch files and do a basic DOS menu program, would still require a boot between different memory configs though ... I still have a dedicated 486 Retro PC here that I occasionally fire up for a bit of nostalgia   Even bought an Amiga 500 off the bay a few years ago for same thing, binned it fast though, my trip down memory lane has limits, that and I needed to de-clutter my hobby room.

DOS was my OS of choice back then, Windows 3.0 and then 3.11 were never really game or sim friendly and used even more precious conventional memory, but it was an early look at what was to come, Windows 95 was my first version that made me start using DOS less ... now we have Windows 10, some folk hate it but I love it and its been an amazing journey really! Standout Windows OS's for me were, Win98SE, WinXP, Win 7 and now 10.

Then there were the exciting days of my first PC soundcard and getting away from the bleeps and blips of the PC speaker, my first Amiga was actually way ahead of the PC's back then with its sound. Using a PC soundcard made its inroads to conventional memory usage too in DOS, but that was all part of the challenge back then ... just getting your new sim to run, can you imagine that in this day and age LOL, we still complain about the most mundane of things though

And what about internet access, for years I never had any such thing but read about it in Computer magazines with wonder, eventually one of my friends got a Compuserve account and I'd marvel at it, LOL, years later I got dial up and had to pay by the minute for the honour of using a 3.5k connection and oh the horrendous phone bills then the thrill of my first broadband at 512k that my ISP grudgingly upgraded to 1MB the next year, speeds have crept up over the years here in North Scotland and I now have truly unlimited 78MB down and 20MB up Fibre and as the cabinet is a stones throw from my house pretty much get that speed too that I am more than happy with.

We take a lot for granted these days but in actual fact and for the vast majority of us, we've never had it so good, in fact I'd go so far as to say that 2017 (so far) has been a remarkable year in my computerised Flight Sim usage, what with 64 bit P3D and other great sims to choose from too.

These are good times we live in and long may it continue.

[Maurizio Giorgi]

Even if i had the simulator on the Amiga, on the pc this was my first version. The manual is a cult, very well done, now manuals are only digitals or very essentials, how things change!

 

 

The image with the C 64 is simply fantastic!!!

 

[shermank]

My first was a C64. I bought it along with EasyScript, its word processing program. My motivation was to move from pick and punch to learning to type so I could get in sync with my office, which was sqitching from manual typewriters to computers. (fwiw, I have deliberately left this without corrections so you can see that I have not exactly become 100% perfect...and I did have to look at the keyboard to find the % key....:-)

 

I soon learned about buletting boards and flight simulation games. I think MS4 was my first, and I still have the manual for it, plus a series of Charles Gurlick's books on flight sim trips to make in the stick figure scenery of the day.

There was anothe fligtht sim game whose name I do not recall, but it involved airmail routes between cities and town which I had never heard of, at least most of them.

 

And, finally, to whoever commented that there are a lot of old folks here, yes, the geezer contingent is loud and proud....:-)

 

Sherm

 

oh, btw, I paid about $1000 for the C84, wnet to bed that miight wondering who I could sell it to. I went back to the computer store the next day, explaining my problems and got several hours of instruction. I have been jooked ever since, but as you can see, and as I mentioned above, this is posted without typo corrections....thanks foreading this car. Geez, I just made myself laugh on that last one, car for far.....

[Jack Sawyer]

3 hours ago, Colin M said:

DOS was my OS of choice back then, Windows 3.0 and then 3.11 were never really game or sim friendly and used even more precious conventional memory,

Wow!  I remember a lot of this.  Remember the early PC's where you had to use MSDEX to configure the memory?  This thread sure does bring back good memories.

[shortspecialbus]

Technically, Windows wasn't really a solo OS on its own at the time. It was just a gui (and set of libraries, etc) on top of DOS. So, you'd run Windows for whatever needed it, but quit out back to the command prompt to play Tie Fighter because you'd spent a couple weeks tweaking your config.sys and autoexec.bat to get those last few K of memory below 640k that you needed. 

 

-stefan 

[ruilaureano]

23 hours ago, Syzygy said:

Great topic Iain.

 

I started out with a 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum in 1982, yes 48k !

The programme was Flight Simulation by Psion and had to be loaded up from a cassette. Took forever to load and, if I remember correctly, I had to use a special cassette player.

The simulator was an advanced piece of software at the time !!

 

Roger

Ditto, although I got my 48K around 85 and stumbled on a pirated tape of the Psion FS around 86! Man I loved that sim because it had no migs and no jets, just 2 or 3 runways, 2 or 3 geometric lakes and lots of room for imagination. 

 

I can still load it up although not the original tape, but now you can get the games in MP3 form. 

[Guest Colin M]

A company called GoG (Good old Games) actually have the license for many of the games and sims we used to love to run under modern OS's.

This is a cheaper way of doing memory lane nostalgia than my dedicated 486 build.

The other thing I meant to mention here was my first attempts into online play, something else most of us take for granted, but it was awesome, flakey as anything on dial up, but awesome.

 

[Mickel]

11 hours ago, shermank said:

There was anothe fligtht sim game whose name I do not recall, but it involved airmail routes between cities and town which I had never heard of, at least most of them.

 

 

Solo Flight is the one, I think.  Great VOR practice.  I remember getting well lost in IMC more than once, with fuel running down, desperately trying to find any airport...

[Maurizio Giorgi]

I played a lot that game!  That was just one of the game where the tape rewinded or forwarded to load the areas. Converted in the floppy, it was just another experience to play it. For sure your own imagination made the rest, at least for me it was so.

 

 

[Christopher Low]

My first ever flight simulator was Psion Flight Simulator for the ZX Spectrum 48k (Christmas 1982), but my first PC flight simulator was Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0b (October 1992), and the PC specification is listed below......

 

25Mhz Intel 386SX CPU

1MB RAM

256k VGA graphics card

Covox SoundMaster sound card

40MB hard disk drive

3.5" Floppy disk drive

DR-DOS 6.0

 

[Guest]

My first ever flight simulator was Psion Flight Simulator for the ZX Spectrum 48k (Christmas 1982), but my first PC flight simulator was Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0b (October 1992), and the PC specification is listed below......

 

25Mhz Intel 386SX CPU

1MB RAM

256k VGA graphics card

Covox SoundMaster sound card

40MB hard disk drive

3.5" Floppy disk drive

DR-DOS 6.0

 

Mine was ZX Spectrum 128K with K7 recorder and my first serious 3D flight sim was Gunship from Microprose

[Jack Sawyer]

3 hours ago, Maurizio Giorgi said:

I played a lot that game!  That was just one of the game where the tape rewinded or forwarded to load the areas. Converted in the floppy, it was just another experience to play it. For sure your own imagination made the rest, at least for me it was so.

 

 

Holy moley!  I spent hundreds of hours of my life with this game on an Atari 800 way back in the early 80's.  Gosh, did I have fun with this!

[Neptune6]

For me i try to go far away from Meigs but nothing more........ i play a lot, with Sopwith Camel

After also i play with Falcon ... "5 disquettes" and the extansion Tiger  "2 disquettes"

 

Patrick

 

 

Edited June 14, 2017 by Neptune6

[shortspecialbus]

The interesting thing about the flight sim community is I think I'm one of the younger people in it at 36.  Usually I'm old for everything else I do, haha.

 

-stefan

 

[paulhand]

I seem to remember enjoying this one:

 

 

[sightseer]

my first PC was a TRS 80.  I just never thought of it as a PC and I didn't play flight sim on it.  I wrote some programs in BASIC and I used a tape drive to load Zaxxon.  that was fun.

 

but my first PC as I see it was a 286 and I remember well using highmem sys and qemm (quarterdeck?) to get as much available lower (lower!) memory available.  device =...

 

I used to play around with fancy prompts as well by putting in different characters and using different colors and date and time.  had one that was a flag like cursor.  I really liked using red green and blue to make three dimensional looking prompts. they looked 3D to me anyways.

 

but the FS maps were great and I remember how happy I was when I discovered I could fly off of one map and onto another - like Chicago to New York or Seatlle down to San fransisco.  I was proud of myself for that.

 

on a side note - anyone have a Vectrex?

[medx421]

Some awesome memories in this thread.  For me, an Atari 800XL running Sublogic FSII.  Remember the add on scenery and the paper maps too.  Haha!  Bounced between that and wonderful Micropose titles like, Solo Flight, F-15 Strike Eagle, and Kennedy Approach.

Edited June 16, 2017 by medx421

[robwhitehead]

Micro prose were great, I've kept some of the manuals. The golden age of combat sims.

I began with the vic 20, wrote my own flight sim for that, it was not too bad for 3.5 kilobytes of useable memory!

I kind of think of a 286 as a "new" PC, they seemed very modern when they came out. Also had a 486, I remember showing my friend Gomez the Red Baron 'flight sim', he was a pretty good coder, his response was that "there's no way a computer should be able to do that!".

Also spent a lot of the time with f-19 by microprose, I remember telling my brother "look at that river down there, this is just like real life". He responded that it just looked like a line on a computer screen to him, i guess you needed better imagination for simming back in those days. [emoji4]


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

[Mickel]

Red Baron was spectacular.  Aces of the Pacific was probably technically better, but didn't feel quite the same.

 

Sorry Iain.  Your thread has rather been hijacked by a bunch of reminiscing.

[Side55]

My first was all so C64,, in fact my first computer programming class in school was on C64 with 5.24 floppy for storage. At home I use a magnetic cassette tape for storage. 

 

[Taph]

Started on computers with a Plessy using octol on punched tape.

First personal computer was a ZX80, upgraded that to a ZX spectrum, then a BBC computer.

Microsoft Flight Sim 1 on an IBM 8088 the Hard drive was 20 mb and the case was the same size as the computer case.

Then went the route most of us did 286, 386 and so forth.

 

I've still got a copy for F19 in its original box on 5 1/2 inch floppy, plus Microsoft Space simulator signs of a mispent youth

[Richard Lincoln]

Geez this is an ancient topic! My first PC was an Amstrad. There was a flight game I had, not sure if it was a Sim however.

[Iain Emms]

Yes i was surprised to see this post turn up again

cheers

Iain

[Scott Harmes]

4 hours ago, Richard Lincoln said:

Geez this is an ancient topic! My first PC was an Amstrad. There was a flight game I had, not sure if it was a Sim however.

 

Ha, same here Richard.  First PC was when I was in Primary school, an Amstrad CPC464, green screen, with the cassette deck.  Never really had another PC of my own after that until a Pentium IV in 2009, which was when I bought FSX too.

[W2DR]

My trusty Apple IIE. The Bell and Howell edition. Also known as Darth Vader because it was all black. My son still has it. Along with both disc drives and an ember-screen monitor. I have no idea what I paid for it back then but I hope he never finds out what it's worth today because he probably won't own it long. Add-in the two original Apple disc drives and the monitor and, unbelievable:

 

https://www.ebay.com/p/8046814097?iid=144091643604

[Condor]

My first computer was an Amstrad in 1989, CGA 14" monitor with 4 magic colours. At the time I thought it was great!! I remember it cost $2600.00 which back in the day was a lot of money.

[flyingfish55]

My first taste of flightsimming was in 1983 when I bought a Sinclair Spectrum 48k, dug out from my attic last night and pictured here with my current setup. It came with a six pack, but not of beer but computer games. I can recall Horace Goes Skiing and Jet Set Willy were two titles along with a very rudimentary flight simulator which I remember as basically a green screen with gridlines and a black runway.  

 

 

Spectrum.jfif