Avenger A-10

This sim was advertised in 1991 by Spectrum Holobyte but it never saw the light of day.

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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. "



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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.