This sim was advertised in 1991 by
Spectrum Holobyte
but it never saw the light of day.
Read a presss preview
Lars Gramkow Nielsen
reported :
" From what I've been able to make out, it was supposed to be released after
Falcon 3.0,
as the second of the Electronic Battlefield Series sims - of which
Falcon 3.0
was the first. "
MiGMan's
industry sources reported that the main problem was the low altitude rendering of terrain by the
graphics engine.
" In it's day
Falcon 3.0
created new standards for flight sim terrain. It actually had contours and hills seamlessly
joined - quite an advance on the billiard-table flatness we had seen in other sims.
However an A-10 sim by definition means you will spend a lot of time flying down low -
really low! Probably 200 feet.
The slight "warping" - movement and the sudden appearance of terrain features
which was quite acceptable in an F-16 sim was to prove a fatal stumbling block in the
A-10 operating environment.
Bear in mind that the average machine of the day was a
386 running at 25 MHz with 4 MEG of RAM and you can see there were serious limits
to what was possible.
The programmers tried lots of tricks, but the frame-rate was just
never high enough to for it to be a viable flight sim. The box art
was already created (it's a copper-color box in slight contrast
with the
Falcon 3.0
silver box). Eventually the whole project was
dropped in favor of releasing additional jets for
Falcon 3.0
instead,
like F/A-18, MiG-29, and such.
"
Click for a larger image
Bear in mind that the average machine of the day was a 386 running at 25 MHz with 4 MEG of RAM and you can see there were serious limits to what was possible.