News Archives at MiGMan's Flight Sim Museum





News Archives December 23rd, 2001 Flight Simming on a budget It doesn't have to cost the earth and you don't need a brand new computer with all the bells and whistles to enjoy Flight Sims. I've just played 84 missions - NOT counting replays - in Microsoft Combat Flight Sim. I played the campaigns which come with the sim - there's 48 missions - and then downloaded Mike Eustace and Doug Attrell's fabulous Korean campaigns which gave me another 36 missions of fast jet action and carrier ops. Microsoft Combat Flight Sim will run quite well on a Pentium 233 and a modest graphics card - I used a Banshee 2D/3D Graphics Accelerator Card the first time around. For a controller I used the Top Gun Afterburner II. Check out the Korean Missions: Valley Forge Thunderjets Over Korea Red Star over Korea Hardware 101 - Setting up your sticks Flight sims can be pretty darned confusing for folks. I remember it took me years to be able to land in the things! I manage it now - most of the time anyway And those controllers - what are all the buttons for? What do they do? I was reminded about this dilemma just the other night when watching an air combat "epic" on video. It was the classic jet combat scene. The bad guy gets on the hero's tail. He decides to pull up vertically... the camera zooms in on him pulling back on the throttle!!!! OK - sometimes you do pull back on the throttle but there seems to be a lot of confusion about what those dangles and dongles actually do. Here are my tips on setting up your throttle and joystick for basic combat flying - Basic Controls in Air Combat Sims That Afterburner game Although this was an arcade game rather than a sim it is worth a mention because it had a pretty good moving cockpit in the arcades and it probably got many people interested in flight sims. Well it may have! Anyway the fact remains that if you tell someone that you're into Flight Simulators there is a pretty good chance they'll say "Oh, yeah - like Afterburner!" Afterburner by Sega Air Combat Yugeki-oh II lands Air Combat Yugeki-oh II was developed by SystemSoft for the NEC PC-9801 series of PC's in Japan. Satoshi "Bin" Hiranuma reported on this popular Japanese sim: Air Combat Yugeki-oh II Satoshi's website - Xmas Face lift I gave the Museum title bar a face lift and added a visual display over each year in the 1980s - Civil flight sims 1990s - Civil flight sims 2000s - Civil flight sims 1980s - Combat flight sims 1990s - Combat flight sims 2000s - Combat flight sims Enemy still Engaged Still going strong in 2001, this sim set new standards for detail, smoothness - although it really needs at least a P300 - and the amazing dynamic campaign. Talk about virtual reality! You can add your own face to the pilots in EECvH. Over a year after it's release and this sim is still being modified by ardent chopper fans. There is now an Arctic Campaign and new sets of camouflage for vehicles and aircraft - plus a Russian Speech pack! Sean Tudor has also compiled a comprehensive set of links - Enemy Engaged: Apache vs. Havoc: DX8 debug It seems that in DX8, the debug output switch was left on for DirectSound, and this slows down sound processing and causes problems in some sims. Download this little file and you will be able to turn off the debug functions in DX8. - DX8 debug 25 minutes to load a mission "When we complain about missions taking too long to load in Falcon 4.0, hear this: 25 minutes to load a mission on the tape version of Gunship on the C64. Twenty-five minutes, I kid you not. Anyway, it was worth it. Having the opportunity to shoot down the fearsome, triangular-shaped Mi-24 Hind-D made it worth every second. I played Gunship until I was blue in the face." Recollections of a sim-maniac - Lars Gramkow Nielsen


The contents of this website are copyright © 1998 - 2007 by MiGMan
The contents of this website are copyright © 1998 - 2007 by MiGMan