ladies and gents, i think the time as come for all of simmers to give a huge round of applause and a massive thank you to all the developers large or small and to the great amount of people who give up their spare time to help us with this wonderful hobby ( obsession!). without there  help and dedication we would not be in this fantastic place we find ourselves at the moment. the list is too long to name but you all know who you are , and on behalf of all the simmers around the globe we salute you !, long may we all grow together and make this community even better, rgds everyone ( sonny147 15 year simming veteran ) 

Well, I have been very thankful for a long time, often praising developers, both payware and freeware, for outstanding products.  Oh, and I have been using various flight sims since 1988, when I bought my first PC, a Commodore 64. .

haha same here, been flying since Flight simulator on 3.5" disk with 6 disk, when the plane was just a wire, what a change !!

If you want a laugh, my first computer was a Commodore SX-64.  I simmed on a little four inch screen, squinting my eyes to see the wireframe scenery.  I eventually bought scenery add-ons for it, but at 3-4 fps in some places it was very slow,  Other places were better, about 17 fps with filled in runways, seemed to be the limit back then.  I learned to program in binary language and I made a program to run primes, but I quit doing that, because you'll never find the end anyway. 

John

55 minutes ago, Cactus521 said:

If you want a laugh, my first computer was a Commodore SX-64.  I simmed on a little four inch screen, squinting my eyes to see the wireframe scenery. 

What a coincidence! I first 'simmed' on a DX-64 myself. Of course I kept my company's books on it so I could take the depreciation at tax time, but frankly it spent more time with flight simming than it did on business functions.

That tiny 4" color screen was pretty awesome for its day.

My first computer was a thing called an Amiga in the1980s and it also gave me my first experience of (very basic) flight simming which seemed amazing at the time! I think the computer had massive 512KB of RAM and a floppy disc drive but unfortunately I cannot remember what the flight sim program was called. Any comments on how far we have advanced since then would seem so obvious  as to be superfluous!

Bill

37 minutes ago, scianoir said:

I cannot remember what the flight sim program was called.

Do you remember any other details? Type of aircrafts modeled, civil/military, etc.?

51 minutes ago, scianoir said:

My first computer was a thing called an Amiga in the1980s and it also gave me my first experience of (very basic) flight simming which seemed amazing at the time! I think the computer had massive 512KB of RAM and a floppy disc drive but unfortunately I cannot remember what the flight sim program was called. Any comments on how far we have advanced since then would seem so obvious  as to be superfluous!

Bill

I always wanted an Amiga, I settled for it's cousin, the Atari ST.  I always thought the 68000 architecture was better than Intel's, better at moving memory around.  I got better performance on the ST than Intel computers were getting, and I even made my own flightsim program, which I think I uploaded somewhere.  I then ported it over to DOS, using a tool called GFA Basic.  It was basic, like the C64 FS, but it covered scenery from SFO to JFK, and if one wanted you could fly around the world.  I learned about such things as page flips and clipping, and I had one aircraft, a 767, tuned to climb to cruise altitude at 35000 ft.  We used terms called jiffies back then, which determined the framerate.  The fps was limited to 18.7 fps, or something close to that, enough to look fairly fluid with my small database, which included ORD as well as JFK.  It was fun while it lasted, but it would not run under 64 bit.

The Atari ST had a program called Spectrum 512 which could emulate the Amiga's color.  When I purchased it for a PC, I wrote a patch for Packard Bell so it would work with their monitors, which had a slightly different vsync rate.  I did that by running debugger and looking for the initialization code for the screen resolution displayed.  They distributed the patch on subsequent releases of their art program, which was very good since it could do anti aliasing.

Enough fun talking about that old stuff, I have forgotten much of what I know now.

John

Started on an IBM PCJr with Microsoft Flight Simulator (V1).

Using the U of Florida main frame to take a test in 1980, I accidentally found a game menu with an entry "Fly a plane".  Well, I kept flying it until security closed the building and threw me out.  That's when I knew I had an addiction.   

Same here, first C64 with SubLogic Flightsim and then F-19 Stealth Fighter. Then switched to Amiga 500 and fell in love with F16 Falcon and its color printed 200 page manual.

I remember the day i bought a 512kb RAM extension card for my Amiga to double my RAM to 1 MB!! The module had the size of a graphics card and cost me an arm and a leg. Never had an OOM though ;) Good ol' days!

To add something to the topic: In regards to freeware developers, I cant thank them enough for all the time they invested to give us excellent stuff for free. These people keep the community alive. For payware developers, i thanked them with my purse already ;)

you fogies lol we have  come along way right ? countless hours, £ pounds , time , energy, frustration, tweaking, late nights , weekends, weeks, you know what guys a love it and dont regret one minute:), cheers everyone and i wish you all very happy flying , we have a healthy and a  damn fine community, respect to you all ! ps on my way to EHAM ( fly tampa) from EGLL( AS) still abit bloody laggy lol, but heathrow to amsterdam was not possible for me VAS:( , so hey iam not complaining !

When I was in Amsterdam in June I stayed at a Raddison blu right near Schiphol airport.  I was amazed at the size of that airport.  I took a train there into Amsterdam central but had to change trains on the way there.  A very kindly Dutch man saw me off the train and directed me to the transfer track, he even told me to take a more direct train than what the station recommended.  The Dutch are such a wonderful people, open and warm to the core.  A couple of women there really helped me out when I was feeling ill there, they stayed with me until I recovered.

John

19 hours ago, Murmur said:

Do you remember any other details? Type of aircrafts modeled, civil/military, etc.?

No, I think it was just a very generic basic aircraft cockpit with very few instruments other than what was required. If I remember correctly there was a horizontal line in the centreof the screen and the lower half of the screen was the panel and the upper part a representation of a view through the cockpit window. There was no attempt at a spot view to show any aircraft model!

Bill

57 minutes ago, scianoir said:

No, I think it was just a very generic basic aircraft cockpit with very few instruments other than what was required. If I remember correctly there was a horizontal line in the centreof the screen and the lower half of the screen was the panel and the upper part a representation of a view through the cockpit window. There was no attempt at a spot view to show any aircraft model!

Bill

That's what I recall from these basic sims as well.  Amazing from what they pioneered to today.  Way back then I bought a book on 3-d graphics which detailed what the future would hold.  It covered subjects such as clipping, page flipping, flood fills, color wheels and so on.  It heavily used the most modern commercial flight sims of that time, made by Owens and Sutherland, as examples of what could be done.  It was published back in the 80's but I can't recall the title.  I used it for my own basic flight sim that I wrote.  I had to use matrices it showed to render my 3-d wireframe world.

My flightsim was a DOS program, extremely simple, and it used key commands for control, had only elevator and aileron, no rudder, and thrust control.  I even modeled the atmosphere so the aircraft would gain groundspeed as it climbed into the flight levels.  Sad I don't have that one anymore.  My world was modeled strictly by numbers which defined the polygons of the lakes and the lines for the interstate highways in my scenery.  I spent months writing and tweaking the code, first written in C++ then ported to BASIC.

I really think desktop flight simulators have come of age this year, with so many players now.  P3d still has an edge over my Xplane11 install, probably due to my large Carenado aircraft library I have installed, plus my MSE and homespun Colorado scenery.

John