day two and beyond

So where am I headed with this?

Well it’s easy…there’s a wealth of information on the web about this hobby and one of the easy things to do is to trawl around the internet finding site after site, forum after forum and review after review in order to find exactly what you’re looking for, bookmark them and keep coming back to them. Which is all well and good if you know where to look.

So this is not to say that I am setting about condensing the be all and end all of the flightsim world into a blog page – I’m not; but from time to time, I would like to go about laying some quick and dirty guidelines about getting the best out of the experience and getting the most out of addon products which may not have the exacting detail average Joes either require or don’t require to get their latest virtual acquisition into the air.

So, onwards we go: check back often and check the blogroll as it expands into a repository of useful information…

Day One

It all started quite some time ago. Jeez, it’s going on 30 years now and I was there; I’ve been with Flight Simulator since the beginning.

“A dinosaur!” you may say…”Someone who remembers monitors before colour!”

Well, no on the first and yes on the second. My first acquaintance with Flight Simulator was on an Apple II Europlus which had a monochromatic (grey) monitor about the size of a matchbox. It had two floppy disc drives – remember them?! – and not the cutsey 3.5 inch jobbies; full-on, 5 inch floppy discs which needed a turntable to use them. (Remember vinyl records? You get my drift)

And FS didn’t really do a lot back then in 1981: you pushed a button or two, a few bits of wireframe scenery moved around a bit, a couple of needles moved up and down and you didn’t really know you were ‘flying’ until the big “CRASH” message appeared on the screen. You didn’t really fly it, it flew you ! 

And I was hooked!

And I have experienced every incarnation of Flight Simulator since then. Now, it has to be said, I didn’t actually own a copy of FS until version 5 and I didn’t own a computer (486DX/2 66mHz processor and about a thimbleful of RAM -  a high speed idiot in other words!) until version 5.1! But yeah, I’ve seen ‘em all; hell, I’ve ‘flown’ ‘em all!

I’m not going to bore you with the product history, move your mouse over to the right and find a history page on the blogroll; I was still zipping around in FS2000 until about a year ago until I decided to wedge some extra RAM into my laptop and head for the skies of FS 2004.

And for now…that’s where I’m staying.