Historically and realistically, I’ve always tended to be the former and as long as my aircraft have been sufficiently sophisticated, then the view out the window has never been that important to me. Firstly, FS is all about flying and secondly, I’m a committed laptop person and addon scenery just eats up system resource on these little things. So I flew around and did my thing, airport to airport and FS did its job and painted its picture, but it was no Degas, or Van Gogh; it just wasn’t quite, you know, Boss! So it was time for some trimmings and since there is a large repository of excellent freeware scenery available, I added scenery for cities and areas in which I’ve lived over the years. But Ireland was largely neglected (IFSD put out scenery some time ago and quite nice it was too), a pretty barren place, virtually speaking.

In fact, so commited am I to laptops, that until not too long ago, I ran FS2000 and further to that, tried my hand at designing scenery for Cork Airport. I thought it was a good effort for a novice, notwithstanding the fact that it was situated somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean for test purposes; and could I blend it into FS elevations? No! But that’s water under the bridge, so to speak, and no sooner had I finished my mid-Atlantic version of Cork than they went and built a brand new terminal in the real world, so I was back to IFSD, default scenery and not a very satisfactory rendition of my home airport in FS9 – yes, I had moved on!

And then Eiresim came along…

Bill Stack reviewed their Dublin scenery some months back (going into the background of the Eiresim folk) and I bought that: very nice, tidy, well put together, detailed scenery. It suffered a bit from bleeding textures, but they’ve fixed it. And now they’ve released Cork Ultimate.

You can find out all you need to know about Cork on Wikipedia or in the 12 page PDF manual, but there are a number of things it won’t tell you…It was a nice, friendly little place and once had the longest bar I’ve ever seen anywhere, with a great view of the runway. It won’t tell you that in early 1990, a Ryanair flight went tech and people came from miles (and I mean miles) around to cash in on the drinks vouchers that said airline seemed to be issuing hand over fist. I just happened to be seeing someone off on that flight to London and trust me, I had a good day out and so did a 747-load of others; never mind that the passenger manifest was for a BAC 1-11! Thank you Ryanair! Neither will Wikipedia or the manual tell you that a Ryanair 1-11 once landed short and claimed the dubious honour of winning the Cork ploughing championship for that year!

But enough of the fond memories, what about the scenery? Well there’s no way of saying it other than: “It’s good! It’s damned good!”

The download is 182 megabites and installation is straightforward with the auto-installer. Looking at the forums, some people seem to have encountered issues on installation and the recommendation is to copy the serial/password details into Notepad/Wordpad and paste away from there. I did that from the get-go and had no problem.

To say that the O’Reilly brothers have dragged the default Cork kicking and screaming into the 21^st Century is something of an understatement; never mind that some architects and builders have dragged the real airport into the century. Eiresim seem to have gone all out to reflect this.

They say that this is the first 20cm resolution they’ve done and while that doesn’t mean a whole lot to me other than 20cm is a pretty small texture size, looking at the grass suggests that it is something even the aforementioned Ryanair captain would be proud of!

So what about frame rates? Well they’re there, but aren’t they always? And since I’m running this on a laptop, I’m not going to go into too much detail given that most of you will be running a setup with considerably more agility and all-round athleticism than mine. Nonetheless, the installation gives you the option not to install the 3d clutter, if you so desire. You can also remove some of the .bgl’s if you have any further issues (this is covered in the manual). The biggest hit frame rate-wise is obviously going to be in the immediate teminal area, but things smoothen out nicely after the short taxi to the runway and then it’s off to the races!

The general modelling and positioning of objects is, in my opinion, top notch; even the interior of the new terminal has been faithfully reproduced, although I have been unable to find a virtual pint of Guinness! The old terminal has also been faithfully rendered and I’m glad, for that’s where all the fun happened. (The new terminal in real life, for all its 21^st century glitz and operational glibness, is a bit sterile and impersonal, not to mention cavernous.) There’s also a flock of birds flying endless circles over runway 25. It’s a nice touch and perhaps there’s a vast swarm of insects there too to keep the birds’ attention so focused!

So are there issues? Well, yes; there’s one main one. The localiser does not track to the centre-line and as yet, an update has not been released to correct it. (Thinking about this one issue, perhaps it’s an unwitting nod in the direction of the Ryanair ploughing champ!) But if you’re planning on a full ILS approach and autoland, be prepared to kick up some dirt and grass with the right main gear! A secondary issue will present itself if you have IFSD installed, but only at night and only when you try to line up on a runway, so disable it in the scenery library; or don’t and just see what happens…

So, what do I think? Saying it’s an improvement on the default is a bit like saying the earth is an improvement on the moon, assuming, of course that was a valid reference for the majority of us, but you know what I mean. It’s not hard to improve upon the default Cork, but a couple of timber shacks and AI traffic would have done that. The FSX version is also available and has some nice additional features allowed by that particular incarnation of FS…mostly texture blending and neat glass reflections on the main terminal.

I have tried to avoid superlatives while writing this, never mind, God forbid, actual gushing! But consider this: I have purchased a total of three payware scenery titles since first laying my hands on FS on an Apple 2 in 1980 – two of them have been produced by Eiresim.

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…

“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.