Who has been Simming for 20 years or more ?

[VBF-12_Gosling-71]

I remember my first simulator. It was 1984 and I was in my Final year at University of Kent at Canterbury. I was playing on a Sinclair Z80 and I played Digital Integrtation's "Flighter Pilot". I remember my room in Darwin College well.

 

http://www.retrogamer.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/sixofthebest_fighterpilot_screenshot_spectrum.png

Edited March 24, 2017 by 12.OIAE_Gosling

[RobCarter3]

I started with Red Baron on DOS. I also got WAYYY into Sierra's "Silent Thunder: A-10 Tank Killer 2" (1996). I also remember having Virgin Interactive's "Sabre Ace: Conflict Over Korea" (1997). Microprose's "European Air War" (1998) kicked-off my lifelong WWII interest.

 

Through middle school and high school, I fell out of combat flight simming, but got obsessed with FS2004, X-Plane 8, and later, FSX. I did still own and dabble in Lock On: Modern Air Combat, and Falcon 4.0, though.

 

I came back to simming just about a year ago with ROF (I tried to get into CloD, but I didn't know about the TF patches and it was unplayable). I prefer the WWII setting, though, so I can't believe it took me this long to find BoX.

[RobCarter3]

- snip -

 

  "European Air War" with the large bomber formations was a milestone for me, too.

 

 

- snip -

 

I think EAW's radio chatter will probably be burned into my brain until the day I die

[CanadaOne]

My first sim was Falcon 3 on a 486 with no sound. That would be about the mid 90s. By the late 90s I was hip deep in CFS and Janes WWII Fighters.

 

Janes WWII Fighters is still a glorious memory. Great online community and game.

[OrLoK]

Bit late to the party but i started off with

 

 

Then moved up to Night Flight on me zx spectrum in the early 80s.

 

Fun times.

Edited April 26, 2017 by OrLoK

[SYN_Mike77]

So, no one beats 1972 as their first combat flight video game experience? I win! In the who's really, really old contest.

 

https://www.arcade-history.com/?n=desert-fox&page=detail&id=14071

Edited April 26, 2017 by SYN_Mike77

[OrLoK]

So, no one beats 1972 as their first combat flight video game experience? I win! In the who's really, really old contest.

 

https://www.arcade-history.com/?n=desert-fox&page=detail&id=14071

but did you own that?

[SvAF/F16_Goblin]

1985 C64 Spitfire Ace :D

[OrLoK]

So, no one beats 1972 as their first combat flight video game experience? I win! In the who's really, really old contest.

 

https://www.arcade-history.com/?n=desert-fox&page=detail&id=14071

regardless, I think you win

[SYN_Mike77]

I remember that machine was next to a little pinball arcade next to where my family did their grocery shopping. Every week we would head down and I'd split off and drop my quarter in the game. Their was a feature that if you got enough points you earned extra points. Extra point weeks made me happy for days!

[Lusekofte]

1996 was my first pc and a rubbish P 51 sim, Before that there was some idiotic playstation jetsimulator and coin operated arcade about ww1 Witch I found to be fantastic, the graphic was basicly just lines agains a blue background.

So I would say I have played with simulator for over 20 years, but my interest for WW 2 and planes was born at the age I understood words and understood the concept of aviation. We had dramatic dogfights over Narvik North of Norway , between HE 111, JU 88 and JU 87 R against Hurricanes shipped over by HMS Glorious , wich my father by the age of 7 years old witnessed

[Pict]

Hahahaha...I just bumped into this thread and it brought back some long lost memories, thanks

 

Early 80's for me, on PC, or were they called AT's or XT's...can't remember  ,  there was MS flight simulator which at that time was pretty good but you couldn't shoot anything...

 

But on the BBC micro Acornsoft did a thing called Aviator, where, with a fair bit of imagination you flew a Spitfire, take off, shoot down the, wait for it "alien" , fly under the bridge and land, all on the keys, no views, simple black & white line drawings for everything.

 

I bought a joystick for that, solid metal deal, like some kind of industrial component 

 

Many years later after going through MS FS 2, 3, 4 and getting thoroughly bored shooting down one slow alien MS pulled CFS 1 out of the blue on the back of FS98, and it was jaw dropping for the time, but soon overshadowed by CFS 2, which was their best...CFS 3 being a huge disappointment to many.

 

I never managed to run the much vaunted IL2 demo as I never had a machine fast enough at the time, but junked CFS 3 for IL2 Forgotten Battles the moment I had the RAM

 

These days I keep 3 titles on my hard-drive, Rise of Flight, DCS & BOX, it's a wonderful time to be into this hobby

[56RAF_Roblex]

The first flight sim would probably be 'Spitfire' on the BBC Micro in 1983. 

 

 

The first online combat flight sim would be Air Warrior with wireframe graphics played over a 14.4 modem around 1988.  It was not even as advanced ad this pic. It was empty wireframe like the first Elite.

 

 

Air Warrior was pretty crap and I played offline games mostly like 1942 Pacific Air War and A-10 Tank Buster.  I did dabble in some online games like CFS & Screaming Demons but they never caught my full attention. 

 

The first good MMO Flight combat sim hat got me addicted to flying it as often as possible was Dawn Of Aces and the squad I was with  led me into the WW2 sister product Warbirds. where I stayed for several years until the pricing plan made it too expensive

 

From Warbirds I moved to Aces High but was not there long before IL2 was released and I moved there instead and joined my current squadron 56 RAF.

 

IL2 led to the squad moving  to  Cliffs Of Dover

 

When it seemed CLoD had started to stagnate and the next fix was a long way away but the P51 had arrived in DCS we started playing that as well.  WIth DCS Normandy we switched permanently.

 

When It became obvious recently  that DCS Normandy was not going to be developed properly into a good MMO but I saw how much better BoK was compared to early versions of BoS & BoM I bought that and convinced the rest of the squad to switch to IL2 BoX. Some of them already had copies of BoS & BoM but had not been impressed enough to switch completely but now with BoK they were ready.  I am not sure we will ever go back to CLoD or DCS now. 

Edited October 1, 2017 by 56RAF_Roblex

[216th_Lucas_From_Hell]

When I looked at the title I thought "long way to go until I make it to 20 years of simming" but simple maths proved me wrong.

 

Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, what a fine piece of software. I loved it as a kid, and 20 years on it's still one of the most exciting and dynamic games I've seen.

[Hoss]

Guilty.................since around 93............... as far back as I can remember................. the Oldtimers kicks in sometimes and I forget shiznit.....................

 

Cheers

 

Hoss

[WWGriphos]

Anyone else remember Chuck Yeager's Air Combat?  That was fun. It was exciting, for its time.  I don't know about dynamic (but Red Baron sure was).  Like FSII, it was mostly solid blue for sky, solid green for ground, and little white pixels for bullets.  

 

I started flying for real when I was 14, and I'm not going to tell you how long ago that was, but it is WAY longer than 20 years ago.  I've flown pretty much every flight sim made since the mid-80s.  What blew me away was when you could first fly with someone else using a dial-up modem.  LOL.  The fact that I could be on my computer flying around and another guy (only one) could be on another computer flying around and we could both see each other on each of our computers!!!  WHOA!!!  

 

Shoot, I belong to an online flight sim community that is not that far from being 20 years old itself.  We started flying together in the old OFF mod of CS2.  

 

I really enjoy BoX.  I don't know what took me so long to finally get it.  Lots and lots of hours in IL-2, even in the more recent CLoD version, but I put of BoX for a while.  Mistake.  Trying to make up for it now.  Between BoX and DCS, poor ol' FSX (or P3D) isn't getting much use anymore (and when I go civvie, I usually fire up XP11 now anyway).  

Edited October 1, 2017 by Griphos

[ZachariasX]

First combat simulation... Camel in the ancient MS Flight Simulator. You could „look down“ with the crosshairs staying cetered all the eay until you looked back. On a WANG laptop with monochrome display (and built in thermo printer!!!) The enemy would line up there and you could pop them one after the other. Then subLOGIC Jet. Was 1985... All versions of MS Flight Simulator, Their Finest Hour, SWOTL, EAW, PAW, ...

[Rjel]

1989 for me. A Packard Bell 386SX and LucasArts BoB: Their Finest Hour. Great game play and at that time, excellent graphics. EAW might be the only other sim that I felt a similar fondness for. I still can't decide if I think more modern sims don't have the same great game play or if it is more to the point that I've done it all before. I really do enjoy BoX but the gee whiz factor while playing isn't that frequent anymore. 

[BlznSaddles]

I had MS Flight Simulator for the IBM PCJR.  I was pretty young and it was pretty boring.  When we upgraded to a 286 (I think), we had "Blue Angels" and I spent quite a bit of time on that one.  Later on we had an F117 Stealth simulator, don't remember exactly which version, and an F22 simulator.  Also played a ton of X-Wing and, my personal favorite, TIE Fighter... not exactly flight sims but maybe worth the mention.  In college I played a little bit of Jane's WWII Fighters but mostly single player.  

 

Other non-flight sims I used to love were 688 Attack Sub and Tank (an M1 Abrams sim).

[Birdman]

Chuck Yeagers Air combat was a first, A10 tank killer 2, then the CFS (#2 especially), then IL2 (the classic ones) nowadays DCS and IL2 BOX

[56RAF_Roblex]

So, no one beats 1972 as their first combat flight video game experience? I win! In the who's really, really old contest.

 

https://www.arcade-history.com/?n=desert-fox&page=detail&id=14071

 

OK if that counts,   how about I win 'Who Has Been Flying In VR The Longest?'   

 

Virtuality 'Flying Aces' - 1991    An Arcade VR machine where you fought in biplanes in 3D.  Despite this screenshot you sat in a VR cockpit and could turn your head and see your gunner sitting behind.

 

 

Edited October 2, 2017 by 56RAF_Roblex

[OrLoK]

<snip>

Oh i played the Mech game on those. Never knew there was a flight sim. It was great!

 

Edited October 2, 2017 by OrLoK

[Monostripezebra]

Oh i played the Mech game on those. Never knew there was a flight sim. It was great!

 

 

Oh I remember seeing one of these superexpensive arcades in London as a kid.. back then I could not afford one try, but just watching it felt like the future was beginning now.

[Jade_Monkey]

A bit younger than some of the folks above, my first sim was technically CFS3. I say technically because i bought it but never really got to play it. The joystick drivers were horrendous, my pc was garbage, and this whole simulator thing turned out to be a lot more complex than the arcade game i expected (in my mind this was before 2002 but I'll have to trust google regarding its release date). With the exception of some failed attempts, I dont think i ever played at all.

 

I could say that my next sim was F22 lightning 3. I could play that with the keyboard, it was fun to play with the flyby camera and the misile tracking cameras.

 

After that i missed the whole IL2 phenomenon. I was always curious when i saw it on the shelves but never picked it up (huge regrets here!!!).

 

I kind of played Birds of prey long after it was launched. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit and spiked my interest for sims again.

 

Then BOS was my first real sim.

[Crockett]

I tried to start with Wings of Glory but could never get it to run -- so -- I actually started with the original Red Baron. Then went to Red Baron 3D, Mig Alley, Microsoaft Combat Flight Simulator, European Air War, Pacific Fighters, Jane's AH-64 Longbow, Jane's WW II Fighters, Gunship, IL-2 Sturmovik 1946 and Forgotton Battles and Cliffs of Dover, except for the jet sims -- you name it -- I bought the big ones -- and I probably forgot some of them!

[56RAF_Roblex]

I found this photo on my drive today 

 

[216th_Lucas_From_Hell]

Just a phone call away

[Royal_Flight]

 

Not quite 20 years but my first taste of flight was on Fighter Ace, which must have been 1998 or so. My dad downloaded it for me because even then (at seven or eight years old) I was obsessed with aviation and WWII history.

I used to wind up my mum in particular by playing Fighter Ace online in the days of dial-up internet, as she couldn't understand why the phone didn't work.

 

I was irredeemably terrible at Fighter Ace, incidentally.

 

Then picked up my first helo sim with a game called Team Apache, which I was also not brilliant at but played so extensively I can still probably recite most of the in-game dialogue.

 

CFS2 was my home for a long time after, I still have the several-hundred-page-thick flight manual. That and Jane's Fighters Anthology, which hasn't aged well at all but was awesome at the time. And I can still remember a lot of the soundtrack and radio chatter as well.

 

Picked up the first Il-2 in 2002, played through that until Pacific Fighters in about 2005 and dabbled on and off for a while but took a break from simming for a bit. War Thunder got me back in actually, in 2013 as it seemed an easy one to pick up and jumped in it made me realise how much I missed proper sims. I'd heard enough bad things about CloD to avoid it and the state of BoX at the time didn't appeal so I stuck with the sim side of WT and then got Il-2 1946 on steam, so I now have three separate copies of it in various forms. Then DCS, got RoF too but by the time I got into it everyone seems to have moved off it and the servers were empty.

So I migrated my way over here and that brings us to the present day.

[Sandinourcoffee6]

Does anyone remember luffewaffe commander,you could fly Spanish civil war?

[Cybermat47]

You guys have been playing sims longer than I've been breathing

[-NW-FourSpeed]

Since 1980 for me with SubLogic Flight Simulator for the TRS-80 (loaded from 500 baud cassette tape - Egads!) which was the forerunner to the MS Flight Simulator family.  (YouTube)

 

I've played pretty much every version of MS Flight Simulator from the 1981 IBM PC days all the way up to current day FSX.

 

I also enjoyed a bunch of others in-between:  F15 Strike Eagle, Yeager's Combat Flight Sim, Red Baron, Stealth Fighter, A10 Tank Killer, Gunship 2000, several of the Star Wars series (XW, TF, XvT, XWA), Mig Alley, MS CFS1, and a bunch more I can't recall off the top of my head, culminating of course in the current crop:  RoF, WoFF, DCS, Falcon BMS, and at least a couple times, BoS. 

 

So, 37 years ... and counting...  

 

Cheers,

4 <S!>