Flight sim evolution.

    Just look how far we've come!
    Not really Aerofly related, but this shows how sims have evolved and just what mobile devices are now capable of.

    I've been using flight sims for an awful long time, realised today that my first ever was in 1981 or 82ish. It was written by Psion, and ran on the 16k (yep 16 kilobyte) Spectrum ZX81.

    Just for fun on a wet cold Saturday, I decided to get this working again today via an Android Emulator, and thought you guys might be interested to see it in all its glory.
    Even though I'm showing you this as an example of sim evolution, I'm still staggered by how much it actually had despite memory limitations and no colour.
    It had working instruments, VSI, ILS, fuel, selectable VOR beacons, navigation screen, crosswinds and approach lights. It still is to me a miracle the devs crammed all this into the ZX81.

    Well, I got it running, crashed the plane a couple of times, reread the instruction card, and managed to get the plane back down on the ground eventually after some practice.
    Here's a video of me on final approach and landing...

    [video=youtube_share;CfzNiKteG4c]

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    Had a blast reliving this. Hope you enjoy it too.





    Hi Nik, the basic language lines can be edited to change performance, I left the machine code stuff alone. I found it helpful when doing the minimal instrument training at ppl. When I read up on VORs and NDBs I was already primed. My instructor thought I had above average spatial perception!
    I lent him the ZX81 and a cheap tape player- the "storage" system but he couldn't get the volume right for the correct dancing dazzle pattern on the TV set- the monitor, during the 15 minute program loading. I think the data read rate was 300 baud, about a millionth or less of what came later.
    The image in the mind is so much more important than fancy graphics.