First post, by DosFreak
- Rank
- l33t++
http://www.tinmith.net/wayne/blog/2017/06/imm … light-sim-4.htm
I'm a bit of a fan of emulators, so I used DOSBox on Linux to start up Microsoft Flight Simulator version 4 on a big monitor. 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. DOSBox supports emulating old analog PC joysticks, so I was able to configure FS4 to use my yoke and throttle. I always wanted to have one of those as a kid as well, and it worked great. While there wasn't much for graphics, it worked with a nice smooth frame rate, and it was pretty cool.
But then I started to think about how even better it would be to run FS4 on all three monitors, just like I'm doing with X-Plane now. In 1989, computers only supported a single small display, and definitely not three of them! The concept of using a cluster of machines was done in expensive commercial simulators even back then, but FS4 didn't support anything like that. FS4 supports the ability to do multiplayer over an RS-232 cable. However, there is no way to set the camera viewpoint to the remote aircraft, so that was not going to be a help in building a cluster. There was nothing else built into FS4 that could support what I wanted, and DOS machines back in 1989 didn't support networking or anything else either. All seemed hopeless with this ancient software.