OT - Where is Eric Parker these days?

[Guest]

I had lunch with Eric a couple of times a few years ago, and he showed us some of his development tools while he was working on Screamin Demons. To this day I still encourage people to give A-10 Cuba a try; I saw a new boxed copy at GameStop the other day for $5. That's got to be the most underrated flight sim ever produced.Any ideas what he's doing these days?Rich

[Guest Allan Jones]

Haven't heard of his whereabouts in a while -- last I heard he was somehow involved with Graphic Simulations, but that's been a while. I believe he did the original Hellcats, and thought I saw his name in an older version of F/A-18 Hornet.You are right about A10 Cuba -- it is one great combat sim. It's the only one for the Mac that turns a damaged computer aircraft into a hair-rasing experience! If you get whacked, the external model shows the missing parts (who needs tail fins anyway?) and forces you to deal with the broken bird or die trying, Fail to get an engine or APU fire extinquished and you blow up :-eek Will check the credits on my latest version of Hornet to see if he's listed. I'd bet that someone as GraphSim (aren't they in Dallas?) knows where to find him.

[Guest]

Well, his name is probably in the credits for Hornet because it's code base was totally based (or so I'm told) on code Eric originally wrote for Hellcats and Missions at Leyte Gulf. I thought they had a falling out, something due to the fact that Hellcats was a huge seller and they (GraphSim) had gained source code and distribution rights for a song and wouldn't renegotiate with him. They then took that code base and independently developed Hornet on their own without Eric. One of his biggest innovations (at the time) was the ability to detect and only redraw the portions of the screen that had changed. On 68030-based Macs, this allowed amazingly smooth frame rate back for a full-screen 3D app, when most other games were simple 2D sprite based games. But, that could be all heresay, I have no idea what actually happened.A-10 Attack, A-10 Cuba, and Screamin Demons were soley done by Eric at his company Parsoft, which used to be located in Plano off of Park near Highway 75. Graphsim used to be located in Addison (north Dallas), though I don't know where they are today. Maybe the same place.I do know the rollout of Demons ended up being pretty brutal and was so overdue I don't think Parsoft ever financially recovered from it. I believe alot of their team literally had to leave the company the week they shipped due to funding being gone. Activision had pumped enough into it, they were not willing to go any further.Rich

[Guest Cessna_Flyer]

Those A-10 sims were great. It was the first sim I ever flew that had an interactive cockpit. It would be great if an updated A-10 series came out for the Mac....Ahhhh...the memories of A-10 Attack!..Chuck Yeager's Air Combat...F/A-18 Hornet 2.0...reminds me of the good old days of my Performa 6300CD and it's blazing 100mhz CPU :-lol

[Guest Allan Jones]

Rich and Cessna Flyer,I checked the credits in the latest patch of Hornet Korea (1.2 just out in beta) and there is no mention of Eric! Must have been a brutal falling out!Re his screen draw routines: all I can say is WOW! I could run A-10 Attack smoothly at max settings on a 75mHz Performa 6200 (world's worst Mac!), and ran Hornet 2 on a Performa 475 with a 68040 25mHz chip for a long time. The added a/c detail in Cuba! gave the 6200 a hard time but was still flyable.Ah!... the good old days when sim mountains looked like 2nd grade origami projects! I'll take Fly! anyday.