We've come a long way...

[regis9 4,005]

1 hour ago, Bobsk8 said:

Where are the "trees"?

The tree scaling and draw distance are really screwed up in that sim lol

Edited October 6, 2021 by regis9

[yellowjack 28]

18 hours ago, David Mills said:

I first saw MS Flight Sim displayed on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer. I read an article about the sim in Rainbow Magazine. I wanted to make the purchase, but the sim back then required 32K system RAM, and my computer only had 16K. (That's not 32 megs or 32 gigs. That's 32K: 32,768 bytes. 

Odd, I had a TRS-80 (or Trash 80 as it became know) from Radio Shack and it you can be sure that it wasn't capable of color, it came with it's own black and white monitor. Programs and data were saved onto a voice tape recorder, Programs were written with an inbuilt basic interpreter and read in from the recorder if not already loaded.   The Commodore 64 had color but that was built well after the TRS80 hay day.

Edited October 6, 2021 by yellowjack
clarification

[Sigwolf 222]

52 minutes ago, yellowjack said:

Odd, I had a TRS-80 (or Trash 80 as it became know) from Radio Shack and it you can be sure that it wasn't capable of color, it came with it's own black and white monitor. Programs and data were saved onto a voice tape recorder, Programs were written with an inbuilt basic interpreter and read in from the recorder if not already loaded.   The Commodore 64 had color but that was built well after the TRS80 hay day.

There were a whole lot of TRS-80 computers over the years.  Models I, II, III, and 4 all had black and white built in monitors, but the Color Computer was the actual model name of a computer with no monitor meant to be connected to a color TV.  It came out in 1980, around the same time as the Model III, and only three years after the Model 1, and were made all the through the early 90's in various iterations.  Programs came on cartridges, or could be stored on an external tape drive or later an external floppy.  They also later went on to make a lot of different IBM PC clones for many years.  My start in computing was on a variety TRS-80's, so I definitely have some fond memories.

[David Mills 4,744]

2 hours ago, yellowjack said:

Odd, I had a TRS-80 (or Trash 80 as it became know) from Radio Shack and it you can be sure that it wasn't capable of color, it came with it's own black and white monitor. Programs and data were saved onto a voice tape recorder, Programs were written with an inbuilt basic interpreter and read in from the recorder if not already loaded.   The Commodore 64 had color but that was built well after the TRS80 hay day.

Radio Shack marketed a TRS-80, which was (more or less) IBM compatible. That was the machine you owned. Additionally, Radio Shack marketed a much-less-expensive TRS-80 Color Computer. The "Color Computer" was part of the name of the brand: "TRS-80 Color Computer." It was marketed at roughly the same time as the Commodore 64 and, like the Commodore 64, was originally designed to be connected to a TV set, thus providing a (low res) color display. I bought my first Color Computer in 1985. There were three incarnations of the Color Computer: the original, the Color Computer 2 (often called CoCo 2), and finally the CoCo 3, which had a maximum internal RAM of 512K. The TRS-80 Color Computer also used a cassette recorder to store programs, but later offered an option for an external 5.25" floppy disk. The Color Computer also had a built-in MS BASIC interpreter.

Here's a very good Wikipedia article detailing the history of the TRS-80 Color Computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer

The point of my post was that this little machine ran a very early version of MS Flight Simulator. It looked nothing like today's version, of course. But it was exciting for its time.

Edited October 6, 2021 by David Mills

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

5 hours ago, yellowjack said:

Odd, I had a TRS-80 (or Trash 80 as it became know) from Radio Shack and it you can be sure that it wasn't capable of color, it came with it's own black and white monitor. Programs and data were saved onto a voice tape recorder, Programs were written with an inbuilt basic interpreter and read in from the recorder if not already loaded.   The Commodore 64 had color but that was built well after the TRS80 hay day.

The Commodore PET was the contemporary of the TRS-80.  That was my very first computer and I was ecstatic that it had 32k.  Programs were also stored on a tape drive and it could take 15-20 min to load anything. I would often start the tape drive loading something then go outside and mess around in the backyard for a bit until the program loaded.  It couldn’t do actual raster graphics - you made images by creative use of text and a preset list of graphic shapes (lines, circles, triangles) all that would fit in the space of a single ASCII character.
 

 Funny thing is that despite the slowness and limitations I loved it at the time!

 

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,798]

12 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

I watched the video and when it got to the part on FSX in 2006, that video looks comparable to vanilla X-Plane and vanilla P3D without any mods, lol.

But what about XPlane 12 ?