Jet

The game 'Jet' was developed by Charles Guy using Bruce Artwick's technology. He adapted it for the IBM-PC. I don't recall any version of it for any other platform but that was years ago so it may have slipped my memory. It had the interesting feature of being able to run Scenery Disks developed for Flight Simulator.

I wanted to let you know that Jet was available for the Apple ][e, ][c, etc. computers. I spent many hours enjoying the sub-10fps performance. There was a neat feature where you could get much higher frame rates if you went to the external scenery screen (where you could load scenery for MS flight sim) and then had it load nothing. It would then run the simulator with only the green ground and blue sky. This gave something closer to 20fps. I used this with external view all the time.

Just found your web site and as a long time flight simmer found it to be a terrfic as well as nostalgic place to visit.

There was also a version of JET for the Macintosh. I may have been one of the few people that actually bought this thing for the Mac. I still have the original box, docs and discs and on occasion will pull out the old Mac Plus and give it a go. You couldn't fly this thing for very long without becoming extremely bored.

The graphics might have been ground breaking for the time but it was so choppy and the Atari 2600 type sounds made you grow very weary, very quickly. 10fps? On a Mac Plus with 4 megs of RAM? IF you were lucky.

I remember you had to have two disc drives for it to run and yes, you could use your MS Flight Sim scenery discs with it as well. Most of the time you ended up with something that said it was an airport in Chicago, but you sure couldn't tell by the graphics that you were looking at. Anyway, just thought you might want to add the Macintosh platform to your list for JET.

Jet allowed you to fly an F-16 and an F/A-18 I think, and you could fly off of a carrier. I played it on a Commodore 64 in 1983 or 1984 I think. Man, I was so excited when it was released! It was the be-all and end-all at the time, with some ground-breaking elements, like remote views, guided missiles, air/ground ordnance, et cetera. A very cool game that probably ran at 10 fps at best.

In your writing about the 1984 era Sublogic JET simulation, you stated you thought that there was only a PC version. I personally had a version for the Commodore 64. It was indeed able to use scenery files for Flight Simulator II but (in my opinion) was not nearly as good, interesting or capable as a simulation as the regular FS II.

I had ALL the versions of Sublogic simulator for the Commodore and finally made the jump to the PC in the '286 days, about 1986 or so. I have all the 'Microsoft' versions for the PC since that time except the FS 2000 standard (I bought the 'Professional' version). I have been quite impressed with that.