From: Emlyn (onetel) (emlyn@one.net.au)
Date: Fri Jul 21 2000 - 19:03:33 MDT
>
> It was one of the last "games" I spent a LOT of time with and was, without
a
> doubt, the best over-all space simulator I ever encountered. It had some
odd
> characteristics that indicated that developing it had not been a high
> priority in MS. It was a DOS-based game and was never happy in Windows.
In
> fact, I tried to run it in Win98 and it was a no-starter (probably good
for
> me). Even when it was new the graphics component wasn't that good -- not
up
> to then-current state of the art.
>
> The basic ballistics algorithms were great, though, and I had a lot of fun
> tweaking orbits. I can recall spending a frighteningly large amount of
time
> playing at lowering the perfectly circular orbit of a spacecraft around
Luna
> to the absolute LOWEST possible altitude. Unfortunately, the graphics
engine
> wasn't great, so you didn't get the images of craters and mountains
zipping
> past that would have been nice. Also, the aerodynamics simulation when
you
> were in the Earth's atmosphere was piss-poor, especially considering the
> state of MS's Flight Sim in those days. Something that seems like it
would
> have been a natural to do would have been to marry the two with a good
> interface, so you could shift back and forth between the two with the same
> vehicles. No such luck: MS let Space Simulator die, with no upgrades.
>
> Finally, there was no good ballistics analysis tool to help generate
> rendezvous calculations -- you had to "cheat" or spend unreasonable
amounts
> of fuel guestimating to do a rendezvous.
>
> I suspect that the market for a REALLY accurate space simulator must be
> small, or someone would have done it . . .
>
> Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Very small indeed. Sadly.
There are some really dynamite old games around, which wont work in current
OSes. I keep "Tie Fighter" around, because I just loved that game - I know
the flight model is naughty, but the game itself is fantastic. Doom (I) is
another big one (maybe that will work under windows?).
I've given up trying to get those games to run under win 9x (actually I use
NT, which makes possibilities really remote).
What I'm intending to do is get a really hot little 486 together, or maybe a
low end pentium, with heaps of memory & HD space, totally over specced. You
know, like 16 meg of ram and maybe even a 1 gig hd. Wow! Then pop DOS 6 on,
config it to do all kinds of tricks so that there's upwards of 700K of base
memory available, and away we go! There are a whole bunch of excellent games
from the era when that was state of the art, which I could never play
properly because my machine wasn't top of the line; I always wanted to come
back to them in the future and give it a real go. I guess I'm in the future
now (Year 2000!), so it's time.
Is anyone actually doing this? Is it as fun as I suspect?
Emlyn
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