PSION Flight Simulator

Psion flight simulator from the Psion company is the same one still going now, they moved out of software in 1984 and went into hardware and produced the PSION organiser series of handhelds.

The game itself... well it cost me 4.99 pounds thats about 12 pound now maybe more it came on a cassette that was about 4 minutes long and the manual was printed on the inside of the cassette insert.

The game started with you 5 miles from the airfield, the screen was split in two the upper part your view window and the lower your instrument panel. The view of the outside was black and white only grey sky, black ground and the only 'scenery' was the airfield runway made up of white dots about 5 pixels by 5.

The instrument panel included Airspeed, Altitude, Artificial Horizon, and a sort of ADF, I played it for weeks and weeks and here I am 15 years later still playing sims.

Mike Blackmore. (1999)

From my memory as a 12 year old lad I was slightly disappointed with this game as It made itself out to be a realistic simulation of flight. It isn't any more than a moving horizon backed by numbers. You can on landing see a very basic impression of the runway. However it was 1981 and the machine only had 16K, I'll let it off this time.

Ian Marshall from The Retro Computer Gallery

Thanks for jogging my memory about the Psion flight sim.

I can remember playing that for hours using a very old and very big colour television to look at what was actually a black and white sim. This is probably what caused my bad eyesight!

I also remember a Spectrum game called "Night Gunner" (or something like that, could not find it in the old Speccie box in the attic). Night gunner had you in the tail gunner position of a Lancaster shooting little white pixels at extremely chunky and blockish ME-110's. Every 2 minutes things would get exciting because you could drop two horribly overscaled bombs on even chunkier tanks.

In a list of ghastly Sims this one would be a close runner for the first prize. For some weird reason the game was accompanied by one of those ridiculous code protection cards. This is where it all started, looking at three dials and flying at night on a crummy TV!!!

Julian "Gremlin" Sallows

Just for the record, the Psion Flight Simulator was also available for the Sinclair ZX81 with 16k RAM! I have the tape sitting in front of me - copyright 1982, advertising its 'outstanding graphic display'.

Certainly I remember it as being very wonderful at the time, run through a little b&w television. I seem to remember it took about 30 minutes to load off the tape, with a 60% failure rate.

Nick Daisley from Oxford, UK

Psion Flight Simulator actually came out twice - once for the ZX81 in 1982 or 1983, which basically dumped you on final approach and that was that, and another version a year or two later (83/84) for the Spectrum (16k and 48K, IIRC that had some landmarks and two airstrips.

The landmarks were lakes called "long lake" and "oval lake", and I bet you can't guess what shape they were!

Spectrum FS had a take-off-and-wander mode as well as the final approach one, too.

Howard Jones.