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I don't know how true this is, but FlightSim was kept alive way longer than economically feasible because Bill Gates personally kept it alive.
by atonse 10y ago
I don't know how true this is, but FlightSim was kept alive way longer than economically feasible because Bill Gates personally kept it alive.
- astrodust 10y agoIt's one of the oldest Microsoft products that's not Office or OS-based. Truly amazing how much time they've invested in it over the decades. I wonder how much code from the 1980s is still shipping.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> It's one of the oldest Microsoft products that's not Office or OS-based. It's older than any of the Office components, too.
- astrodust 10y agoYeah, looks like the core code dates from 1977 (!) and Microsoft acquired it in 1981. That's a heck of a legacy.
- hermitdev 10y agoDefinitely is quite a legacy. I didn't realize it went back that far, but I do recall it running on DOS. Only had one brief go at it on a friend's computer in the late 80s. Don't recall being very good at it. As I recall, it wasn't very friendly to mistakes, especially on landing. I remember crashing a lot.
- mcguire 10y agoI had a version for C-64 in high school. Taking off and landing was about all you could do, given the graphics.
- veli_joza 10y agoYeah, I played Atari ST version and it was a blast. Gorgeous filled polygons, up to 4 simultaneous 3D views, weather conditions, stunt flying... However this is off-topic as only PC versions were made by Microsoft.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 10y agoIt even lives inside Office as an easter egg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gYb5GUs0dM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gYb5GUs0dM
- nommm-nommm 10y agoNot anymore. Around the turn of the century Microsoft adopted a strict no Easter eggs policy as part of their trustworthy computing initiative.
- jsmthrowaway 10y agoThen they sold it, and the new owner is now pulling a Train Simulator and going for thousands of dollars of DLC on Steam, which will likely kill the entire modding community that kept FSX alive once they realize they can sell it on Steam. Kind of sad to watch such a historical product be squeezed for the last dollars in slow motion. X-Plane 11 looks absolutely fantastic, thankfully. Might be about time to pay FSX a final salute, and nice to support X-Plane as a reward for standing up to patent trolls.
- chrisper 10y agoCan confirm. XP11 is amazing. Though be prepared to pay a lot for addons.
- Macha 10y agoThere's actually two living forks. One is Dovetail Games' FSX: Steam Edition which you're talking about. The other is Prepar3d, sold by Lockheed. The license stipulates that it is "not for entertainment purposes", but otherwise it's basically just a port of FSX that works better in modern systems.
- tmearnest 10y ago> "not for entertainment purposes" That's kind of a weird stipulation: fun is prohibited.
- Macha 10y agoThe general consensus among the flight sim community is that their license from Microsoft forbade them selling it as a video game, to avoid them competing with first Microsoft and later Dovetail.
- archon 10y agoLicensing is weird sometimes.
- ThrowawayFS 10y agoThere's actually a reason for that: Microsoft had a separate product called ESP [1] that was based on the Flight Simulator codebase that was marketed as a platform for doing industrial training simulations. Development stopped with the dissolution of ACES, the Flight Simulator team, but Lockheed acquired rights to continue to develop MS ESP, which eventually became Lockheed's Prepare3d [2]. [1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc526948.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc526948.aspx [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator#Closure_of_the_ACES_Game_Studio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator#Clo...