9 ms·

Flight Simulator 4 from 1989 running on three immersive monitors (2017)

219 points by anyfoo 8y ago

brachi 8y ago
I love this kind of tinkering. It sure is a lot of fun, given enough time. > I decided to try just fuzzing over the memory locations that did change to see which one would have an effect. I've been thinking for a long time to do this in an automated way. But I guess even if you can automate the fuzzy generation + screenshots, a person with a lot of domain knowledge will need to check them.
- matthewaveryusa 8y ago
  There's a program called cheatengine that does this! It is absolutely fantastic imho and you can use it for way more than just 'cheating' at games. https://github.com/cheat-engine/cheat-engine https://github.com/cheat-engine/cheat-engine
  - brachi 8y ago
    Thanks! I just read the page and I didn't know it came with so many tools. I remember some people using it in games to actual 'cheats' like unlimited ammo, life, and so on. Also I was delighted when I saw you could use it to disable certain direct3d api calls that would make a game run very slow on integrated graphics, hence increasing the performance dramatically.
tinktank 8y ago
I am constantly amazed at the clever ways people manage to extend, repurpose and rearchitect software. This is incredibly clever in my opinion.
acqq 8y ago
[2017] Also previously on HN, 70 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14548162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14548162 Still impressive. Also, one of the comments there, from bluedino: "I remember you could do this with DOS Doom using the -left and -right parameters: you just needed three PC's that could run Doom AND a local area network."
1stcity3rdcoast 8y ago
Beautiful stuff. I am so glad people continue to explore and keep alive technology from the years when I was growing up.
yazr 8y ago
What ever happened to FS (and flight simulators in general) ? Is there a current commercial version? Did people just lose interest? Or maybe the current 10 (20?) year old stuff is simply good enough
- shaabanban 8y ago
  Lockheed acquired it and they still put out new releases. Made it run 64 bit as well if I recall correctly. https://www.prepar3d.com https://www.prepar3d.com
- NikolaNovak 8y ago
  - rights to FSX have been acquired by a company which has re-released Steam edition, and made some minor improvements to the engine - Lockheed released its own version called Prepar3d: https://www.prepar3d.com/ https://www.prepar3d.com/ - X-plane 11 is largely understood to be the main competitor. FSX and X-plane have different underlying modelling principles. You can easily start an internet flame-war on which one is "better", but X-plane is actively developed and improved - Aerofly FS2 is also a good "lighter alternative". Still a very solid sim, but easier to get into. Very pretty graphics as well. All three of these support basic and advanced joysticks. I've had Saitek Yoke, Engine cluster, and Thrustmaster MFDs running in Aerofly in seconds. From combat flight sim perspective, DCS suite is widely considered the current best-of-breed, though Falcon 4.0 modded / enhanced variations are still widely played. Tons of other "lighter" contenders as well.
  - exDM69 8y ago
    To further elaborate on this... Flight simulators as a game genre has all but disappeared. There used to be lots of flight simulator games, like F-15 Strike Eagle and Red Baron, etc. Every now and then there's an "arcade flight simulator" game, but it doesn't seem to be popular with gamers and even less so with simmers. Flight simulators have become pretty hard core simulators these days. X-Plane 11 and P3D seem to be the most popular on simmer forums, with MS FSX (and derivatives) still enjoying popularity. Flight sims are a pretty deep rabbit hole and big investment. When you purchase a simulator, it's just a platform for running 1st and 3rd party addon aircraft and scenery. Some of these are fairly expensive (up to $100 or more for a quality aircraft), and the investment in these is why people still fly with FSX. Combat flight sims are still around too, DCS:World is popular, but IL-2 series and Rise of Flight have some players too. Falcon BMS is popular for hard core fans of modern air warfare (with complex weapons systems that need a manual of their own). As much as I'd like to still be enjoying flight sims, it's too deep a rabbit hole for me. It takes investment in hardware, software, education and practice. This explains also why it's not a mainstream activity. It's far beyond what a casual gamer would find entertaining or interesting.
mysterydip 8y ago
This is great, and gives me hope of someday doing the same for my favorite DOS game EarthSiege (where the mech you piloted had four camera views)
Scoundreller 8y ago
> It is amazing how low-res 640x350 is when displayed on a large 1920x1080 display, although you didn't notice it as much on a 14 inch CRT, which is smaller than many laptops these days Yes and No. Screens are measured diagonally, not by square inches. A 14" screen could be 14"x0.1".
- mrunkel 8y ago
  I don't understand what you're trying to say? A 14 inch CRT was also measured diagonally.
  - mrob 8y ago
    The wider the aspect ratio, the smaller the area with the same diagonal measurement. A 14" 4:3 monitor (like the old CRTs) is about 94"^2, but a 14" 16:9 monitor is only about 84"^2.
    - pdpi 8y ago
      Sure, but a 15" 16:9 display is a bit over 96 sq.in. The original didn't say that a 14" CRT has the same area as a 14" laptop — just that it was "smaller than many laptops these days".
perl4ever 8y ago
"In 1989, computers only supported a single small display" Macs supported more than one display at that point, I think.
- jchw 8y ago
  Technically, you could even do dual monitors with IBM PC, by having both a CGA card and a MDA/Hercules card. Obviously, the utility was limited, but apparently people did it.
  - ngcc_hk 8y ago
    Have to if you want a bit graphic those days. The Cga is so low resolution you can’t use it totally on its own. But OP is amazing to do this btw.
  - sllabres 8y ago
    Obviously, the utility was limited, but apparently people did it. For graphics yes. But around that time all Borland (C, Pascal) products supported debugging with to monitors (VGA+Hercules). And I used a little TSR for years that transferred the contents of the main VGA Screen to Hercules via 'PtrScr' key, which was handy too. All text mode of course.
    - jchw 8y ago
      Definitely not saying it was useless, just that the utility was limited because of the usual limitations of MDA; that is, it's definitely not the same as what people would think of as a dual-head setup today. That said, I literally was born after Windows 3.0. So... I never personally dealt with such a setup. Maybe some day, as a matter of exploring older computers, I will get a chance to actually run such a setup and see what it was like.
      - jungler 8y ago
        It was definitely a thing to run multiple screens in a "one-per-task" kind of setup - the real difference is that hardly anything back then networked or multitasked, and so you had to design the workflow you wanted to use specifically around the idea of using all your displays. In the context of any specific application(coding, document editing, CAD etc.) the possibility of a custom tailored solution existed - it just wasn't the highest priority most of the time. You could get a lot of multitasking mileage out of more antiquated technologies like printed documents and pens in tandem with your computer. "Code review" meant literally printing it out and going over it with highlighters like an exam grader. I'm sure it still does in some shops.
nl 8y ago
I had classes with Wayne at Uni. His group was the only one to get better marks than me in this final year assignment for some subject where we had to write our own webbrowser and server in C and TCL. Ours was great, but theirs was better. I don't remember the details, but theirs did something like implemented HTML tables. This was 1997, and tables were still not supported in things like Lynx. Anyway, good times, and Wayne is a smart guy.
digitalmarks 8y ago
This is awesome.
mseidl 8y ago
Flight Sim 4 was the first fight simulator I played. Talk about a blast from the past.
- cortesoft 8y ago
  Yeah, I got a huge rush of nostalgia. It was so cool, I remember learning so much about how planes worked trying to figure that game out.
mhd 8y ago
A long time ago on some German computer show, they showed a flight sim hacker who basically made his own immersive cockpit. He had a camera rigged to his screen, right where the attitude indicator was, and this controlled servo motors who elevated parts of the platform he was sitting on. Mind you, that was way before Arduinos etc.
- kaffeemitsahne 8y ago
  > Mind you, that was way before Arduinos etc. Maybe it was in the era of ubiquitous printer IO ports? There seems to be some sort of "dark age" of low-level/analog computer output right between printer ports and arduino/raspberri pi.
  - mhd 8y ago
    Or the various interfaces of the home computers. The BeBox was an interesting twist on this with its "GeekPort".
paradoxparalax 8y ago
When I remember those softwares from the 90s, I almost (but not) think that software has not improved as much since. Hardware improves much faster. Actually Software could always and can always be done without computers, like the old punch holes in the cards and Ada Lovelace's writings. Still today, of course, Anything that can get done with real physical logic gates can get done with paper and pencil. Just takes longer, Result is the same. Examples of great software that dropped my jaw back in the 90's: - Microsoft Flight Simulator (Instead of becoming better and more famous, is almost forgotten) - Bryce 4 (mind-blowing back then, wonder if still alive) - :at request - Simcity ( I had never play, but my sister was addicted) -:at sister's request - Empire Earth ( not sure that old, it's like Age of Empires) - Myth: The Fallen Lords (best video-game ever made, for me, it is the saddening story you can hear about software death)
- brandonhall 8y ago
  I'd add SimCity in there as well. Groundbreaking when it was made.
  - paradoxparalax 8y ago
    added : ) thanks for sharing.
  - EvilGrin 8y ago
    I lost many hours as a youth playing Lemmings, Populus, Prince of Persia and the numerous Ultima games.
  - egeozcan 8y ago
    If you played SimCity to create the perfect city, there's still nothing with a similar engaging dynamic. BUT, if you played it like a city-painter, I recommend Cities: Skylines as an evolution. You can also mod it and the language of choice is C#. Just look at the mods, the community is (was?) amazing.
    - ascagnel_ 8y ago
robarr 8y ago
sometimes i find myself grumbling over some article where anybody doing a little coding calls himself a hacker and thinking “in my days we use to code our own (insert any now commercially o free available software) ..” but this is hacking at its pure and best: radically transforming something with code.
leowoo91 8y ago
That looks very similar to multiplayer game design. Here, side monitors are acting like spectators and getting dead reckoning after player synchronization.
geocar 8y ago
> it is not possible to have two processes on the same machine listening on the same port number. This is not true. One strategy is to use multicast[1]. Another strategy is to use SO_BROADCAST+SO_REUSEADDR[2]. [1]: http://www.jarloo.com/c-udp-multicasting-tutorial/ http://www.jarloo.com/c-udp-multicasting-tutorial/ [2]: http://hacked10bits.blogspot.com/2014/12/udp-binding-and-port-reuse-in-linux.html http://hacked10bits.blogspot.com/2014/12/udp-binding-and-por...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dfsegoat 8y ago
Thanks for this: MS FS was literally the first PC game I ever tried to play on my grandfathers 386 - and I failed miserably for years.
thewizardofaus 8y ago
Wow a fellow Aussie! Good read.
auslander 8y ago
Descent ! 1995 and there in nothing close to it today in 6 degrees of freedom 6DOF flying.

219 points by anyfoo 8y ago

I love this kind of tinkering. It sure is a lot of fun, given enough time. > I decided to try just fuzzing over the memory locations that did change to see which one would have an effect. I've been thinking for a long time to do this in an automated way. But I guess even if you can automate the fuzzy generation + screenshots, a person with a lot of domain knowledge will need to check them.

matthewaveryusa 8y ago
There's a program called cheatengine that does this! It is absolutely fantastic imho and you can use it for way more than just 'cheating' at games. https://github.com/cheat-engine/cheat-engine https://github.com/cheat-engine/cheat-engine
- brachi 8y ago
  Thanks! I just read the page and I didn't know it came with so many tools. I remember some people using it in games to actual 'cheats' like unlimited ammo, life, and so on. Also I was delighted when I saw you could use it to disable certain direct3d api calls that would make a game run very slow on integrated graphics, hence increasing the performance dramatically.

tinktank 8y ago

I am constantly amazed at the clever ways people manage to extend, repurpose and rearchitect software. This is incredibly clever in my opinion.

acqq 8y ago

[2017] Also previously on HN, 70 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14548162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14548162 Still impressive. Also, one of the comments there, from bluedino: "I remember you could do this with DOS Doom using the -left and -right parameters: you just needed three PC's that could run Doom AND a local area network."

1stcity3rdcoast 8y ago

Beautiful stuff. I am so glad people continue to explore and keep alive technology from the years when I was growing up.

yazr 8y ago

What ever happened to FS (and flight simulators in general) ? Is there a current commercial version? Did people just lose interest? Or maybe the current 10 (20?) year old stuff is simply good enough

shaabanban 8y ago
Lockheed acquired it and they still put out new releases. Made it run 64 bit as well if I recall correctly. https://www.prepar3d.com https://www.prepar3d.com
NikolaNovak 8y ago
- rights to FSX have been acquired by a company which has re-released Steam edition, and made some minor improvements to the engine - Lockheed released its own version called Prepar3d: https://www.prepar3d.com/ https://www.prepar3d.com/ - X-plane 11 is largely understood to be the main competitor. FSX and X-plane have different underlying modelling principles. You can easily start an internet flame-war on which one is "better", but X-plane is actively developed and improved - Aerofly FS2 is also a good "lighter alternative". Still a very solid sim, but easier to get into. Very pretty graphics as well. All three of these support basic and advanced joysticks. I've had Saitek Yoke, Engine cluster, and Thrustmaster MFDs running in Aerofly in seconds. From combat flight sim perspective, DCS suite is widely considered the current best-of-breed, though Falcon 4.0 modded / enhanced variations are still widely played. Tons of other "lighter" contenders as well.
- exDM69 8y ago
  To further elaborate on this... Flight simulators as a game genre has all but disappeared. There used to be lots of flight simulator games, like F-15 Strike Eagle and Red Baron, etc. Every now and then there's an "arcade flight simulator" game, but it doesn't seem to be popular with gamers and even less so with simmers. Flight simulators have become pretty hard core simulators these days. X-Plane 11 and P3D seem to be the most popular on simmer forums, with MS FSX (and derivatives) still enjoying popularity. Flight sims are a pretty deep rabbit hole and big investment. When you purchase a simulator, it's just a platform for running 1st and 3rd party addon aircraft and scenery. Some of these are fairly expensive (up to $100 or more for a quality aircraft), and the investment in these is why people still fly with FSX. Combat flight sims are still around too, DCS:World is popular, but IL-2 series and Rise of Flight have some players too. Falcon BMS is popular for hard core fans of modern air warfare (with complex weapons systems that need a manual of their own). As much as I'd like to still be enjoying flight sims, it's too deep a rabbit hole for me. It takes investment in hardware, software, education and practice. This explains also why it's not a mainstream activity. It's far beyond what a casual gamer would find entertaining or interesting.

mysterydip 8y ago

This is great, and gives me hope of someday doing the same for my favorite DOS game EarthSiege (where the mech you piloted had four camera views)

Scoundreller 8y ago

> It is amazing how low-res 640x350 is when displayed on a large 1920x1080 display, although you didn't notice it as much on a 14 inch CRT, which is smaller than many laptops these days Yes and No. Screens are measured diagonally, not by square inches. A 14" screen could be 14"x0.1".

mrunkel 8y ago
I don't understand what you're trying to say? A 14 inch CRT was also measured diagonally.
- mrob 8y ago
  The wider the aspect ratio, the smaller the area with the same diagonal measurement. A 14" 4:3 monitor (like the old CRTs) is about 94"^2, but a 14" 16:9 monitor is only about 84"^2.
  - pdpi 8y ago
    Sure, but a 15" 16:9 display is a bit over 96 sq.in. The original didn't say that a 14" CRT has the same area as a 14" laptop — just that it was "smaller than many laptops these days".

perl4ever 8y ago

"In 1989, computers only supported a single small display" Macs supported more than one display at that point, I think.

jchw 8y ago
Technically, you could even do dual monitors with IBM PC, by having both a CGA card and a MDA/Hercules card. Obviously, the utility was limited, but apparently people did it.
- ngcc_hk 8y ago
  Have to if you want a bit graphic those days. The Cga is so low resolution you can’t use it totally on its own. But OP is amazing to do this btw.
- sllabres 8y ago
  Obviously, the utility was limited, but apparently people did it. For graphics yes. But around that time all Borland (C, Pascal) products supported debugging with to monitors (VGA+Hercules). And I used a little TSR for years that transferred the contents of the main VGA Screen to Hercules via 'PtrScr' key, which was handy too. All text mode of course.
  - jchw 8y ago
    Definitely not saying it was useless, just that the utility was limited because of the usual limitations of MDA; that is, it's definitely not the same as what people would think of as a dual-head setup today. That said, I literally was born after Windows 3.0. So... I never personally dealt with such a setup. Maybe some day, as a matter of exploring older computers, I will get a chance to actually run such a setup and see what it was like.
    - jungler 8y ago
      It was definitely a thing to run multiple screens in a "one-per-task" kind of setup - the real difference is that hardly anything back then networked or multitasked, and so you had to design the workflow you wanted to use specifically around the idea of using all your displays. In the context of any specific application(coding, document editing, CAD etc.) the possibility of a custom tailored solution existed - it just wasn't the highest priority most of the time. You could get a lot of multitasking mileage out of more antiquated technologies like printed documents and pens in tandem with your computer. "Code review" meant literally printing it out and going over it with highlighters like an exam grader. I'm sure it still does in some shops.

nl 8y ago

I had classes with Wayne at Uni. His group was the only one to get better marks than me in this final year assignment for some subject where we had to write our own webbrowser and server in C and TCL. Ours was great, but theirs was better. I don't remember the details, but theirs did something like implemented HTML tables. This was 1997, and tables were still not supported in things like Lynx. Anyway, good times, and Wayne is a smart guy.

digitalmarks 8y ago

This is awesome.

mseidl 8y ago

Flight Sim 4 was the first fight simulator I played. Talk about a blast from the past.

cortesoft 8y ago
Yeah, I got a huge rush of nostalgia. It was so cool, I remember learning so much about how planes worked trying to figure that game out.

mhd 8y ago

A long time ago on some German computer show, they showed a flight sim hacker who basically made his own immersive cockpit. He had a camera rigged to his screen, right where the attitude indicator was, and this controlled servo motors who elevated parts of the platform he was sitting on. Mind you, that was way before Arduinos etc.

kaffeemitsahne 8y ago
> Mind you, that was way before Arduinos etc. Maybe it was in the era of ubiquitous printer IO ports? There seems to be some sort of "dark age" of low-level/analog computer output right between printer ports and arduino/raspberri pi.
- mhd 8y ago
  Or the various interfaces of the home computers. The BeBox was an interesting twist on this with its "GeekPort".

paradoxparalax 8y ago

When I remember those softwares from the 90s, I almost (but not) think that software has not improved as much since. Hardware improves much faster. Actually Software could always and can always be done without computers, like the old punch holes in the cards and Ada Lovelace's writings. Still today, of course, Anything that can get done with real physical logic gates can get done with paper and pencil. Just takes longer, Result is the same. Examples of great software that dropped my jaw back in the 90's: - Microsoft Flight Simulator (Instead of becoming better and more famous, is almost forgotten) - Bryce 4 (mind-blowing back then, wonder if still alive) - :at request - Simcity ( I had never play, but my sister was addicted) -:at sister's request - Empire Earth ( not sure that old, it's like Age of Empires) - Myth: The Fallen Lords (best video-game ever made, for me, it is the saddening story you can hear about software death)

brandonhall 8y ago
I'd add SimCity in there as well. Groundbreaking when it was made.
- paradoxparalax 8y ago
  added : ) thanks for sharing.
- EvilGrin 8y ago
  I lost many hours as a youth playing Lemmings, Populus, Prince of Persia and the numerous Ultima games.
- egeozcan 8y ago
  If you played SimCity to create the perfect city, there's still nothing with a similar engaging dynamic. BUT, if you played it like a city-painter, I recommend Cities: Skylines as an evolution. You can also mod it and the language of choice is C#. Just look at the mods, the community is (was?) amazing.
  - ascagnel_ 8y ago

robarr 8y ago

sometimes i find myself grumbling over some article where anybody doing a little coding calls himself a hacker and thinking “in my days we use to code our own (insert any now commercially o free available software) ..” but this is hacking at its pure and best: radically transforming something with code.

leowoo91 8y ago

That looks very similar to multiplayer game design. Here, side monitors are acting like spectators and getting dead reckoning after player synchronization.

geocar 8y ago

> it is not possible to have two processes on the same machine listening on the same port number. This is not true. One strategy is to use multicast[1]. Another strategy is to use SO_BROADCAST+SO_REUSEADDR[2]. [1]: http://www.jarloo.com/c-udp-multicasting-tutorial/ http://www.jarloo.com/c-udp-multicasting-tutorial/ [2]: http://hacked10bits.blogspot.com/2014/12/udp-binding-and-port-reuse-in-linux.html http://hacked10bits.blogspot.com/2014/12/udp-binding-and-por...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

dfsegoat 8y ago

Thanks for this: MS FS was literally the first PC game I ever tried to play on my grandfathers 386 - and I failed miserably for years.

thewizardofaus 8y ago

Wow a fellow Aussie! Good read.

auslander 8y ago

Descent ! 1995 and there in nothing close to it today in 6 degrees of freedom 6DOF flying.