Air Plane Photos 2013: Airplane Simulator

Monday, 8 July 2013

Airplane Simulator

Source(www.google.com.pk)

Airplane Flight Simulator began as a set of articles on computer graphics, written by Bruce Artwick throughout 1976, about flight simulation using 3-D graphics. When the editor of the magazine told Artwick that subscribers were interested in purchasing such a program, Artwick founded subLOGIC Corporation to commercialize his ideas. At first the new company sold flight simulators through mail order, but that changed in January 1980 with the release of Flight Simulator (FS) for the Apple II.[1] They soon followed this up with versions for other systems and from there it evolved into a long-running series of computer flight simulators.

- January 1980 for Apple II

- March 1980 for TRS-80

The original simulator had black and white wireframe graphics, featured a very limited scenery consisting of 36 tiles (in a 6 by 6 pattern, which roughly equals a few hundred square kilometers), and provided a very basic simulation (with only one aircraft simulated). Despite this, it ended up being one of the most popular Apple II applications of the early eighties.

The simulator was later ported to the TRS-80 Model I, which had only rudimentary graphics capability. To squeeze the simulator into the TRS-80 limited memory and display, subLOGIC saw it necessary to drop the instrument panel and reduce the resolution. Flight Simulator for the TRS-80 therefore has the most simplistic graphics of all versions of flight simulator.

Later subLOGIC released updated versions of Flight Simulator for both the Apple II and TRS-80 on 5¼ inch diskettes. The updates included enhanced terrain, help menus and a bomb sight

- 1983 for the Apple II

- 1984 for the Commodore 64 & Atari 800

A screenshot from Flight Simulator II, showing the southern end of Meigs Field in Chicago.

With the release of a superior Flight Simulator for the PC, subLOGIC felt some pressure from their customers to backport these improvements to the original platforms, thus prompting subLOGIC to release a new version called Flight Simulator 2 version 1 for non-IBM compatibles. This version, like the Microsoft release, did away with wireframe graphics for solid colors, and featured real-world scenery (although limited to a few areas in the United States).

It was also this version (FS II) that introduced the whole concept of simulator add-ons, although not in the form it is today, as subLOGIC also included functionality to load additional scenery from floppy disks, thus making it possible for a user to virtually fly in his or her own backyard.

It should be noted that although the versions for the various systems had the same foundation, they differed slightly due to technical limitations of the different hardware in each computer.