One of the most impressive games of the 80s was Sublogic’s Flight Simulator.
I never played this back then, but the Atari 8-bit version was highly regarded. In a recent game lot purchase from Facebook Marketplace one of the games that included was Flight Simulator II, the cartridge for the Atari XE Game System.
Before I take a closer look at that, let’s dive into Flight Simulator itself.
Origin
Flight Simulator (original name: A2-FS1 Flight Simulator) was created by Bruce Artwick and Stu Moment for the Apple II. They formed Sublogic to sell it and it was released in 1980.
It makes sense that it was released for the Apple II first as that was the only computer that had good bitmap graphics when they began developing it in 1977. The Atari 8-bit series was not even released until late 1979 and did not get good developer materials for another year or so.
As you can see looking at this version, the graphics were pretty simple. At the top was a 3D landscape view and the plane controls were at the bottom.
Later in 1980 Flight Simulator was ported to the TRS-80 Model I, which had even worse graphics.
Flight Simulator (I hate to call it a game as it is much more than that) became rather popular and by 1982 has sold 30,000 copies.
Microsoft Relationship
In 1981 Microsoft contacted Sublogic about creating an enhanced version of Flight Simulator to showcase the upcoming IBM PC. In 1982, Sublogic licensed Flight Simulator for the IBM PC to Microsoft and Microsoft Flight Simulator was born.
Flight Simulator used CGA graphics on the PC and in those early days was often used by clone makers as a test of PC compatibility.
Flight Simulator II
Microsoft only had a license to make PC version of Flight Simulator. In 1983, Sublogic released Flight Simulator II which added many of the PC improvements to the simulation.
It first appeared on the Apple II of course, but the Atari 8-bit version came out in 1984 with an Atari ST version in 1987. Other systems got ports too, including: Commodore 64, Amiga and Tandy Color Computer 3.
By this point FS2 was a rather large piece of software. It shipped on floppy and you could purchase additional “scenery disks” that for different parts of the country.
From what I remember, people were really serious about Flight Simulator and it had a tremendous following.
Legacy
Flight Simulator is still around today making it one of the longest-running software titles ever. Sublogic is still around, which is cool, but Microsoft is the one that has kept Flight Simulator going all these years. The most recent version being Flight Simulator 2024, available for Windows and Xbox.
Needless to say, the graphics have improved significantly.
Atari XE Version
Flight Simulator II was the pack-in game that was included with the XE Game System (XEGS). This always seemed like a strange choice to me. FS2 was (and is) a complicated software simulation that requires the keyboard. You won’t just learn how to use it in a few minutes. You’ll likely want to study the manual (which is over 80 pages!!) and from what I’ve seen you’ll spend most of the time crashing your plane. It was also huge software that previously required a floppy drive.
All-in-all it really seems like a poor choice for a pack-in cartridge. It feels like the opposite of what you would want for a title to showcase your new video game console.
Regardless, Atari put the work in and created a 64K, bank-switched cartridge to hold the game and Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle and War Game scenery areas1. Fitting this on a cartridge was quite the technological tour-de-force, but it might also have been case of:
From what I can tell the Flight Simulator II cartridge requires an XL/XE system and will not work on the older 400/800 systems.
From the About the Author page in the Atari XE Filght Simulator II manual:
Bruce Artwick has been designing microcomputer software since 1977. His first Flight Simulator program for the Apple II was released in 1979 at a time when the typical system configuration for that machine consisted of 16K memory, Integer BASIC, 3-color hi-res graphics, and a cassette program loader. Working within these limitations, Flight Simulator was (and remains) a classic in both design and execution, a program that set the standard for all that was to follow.
Some of the 3D animation routines Bruce used in the development of Flight Simulator later found their way into his A2-3D1 Graphics Package, a collection of programs for the creation and manipulation of 3D images. An enhanced A2-3D2 version came out in 1981 to take advantage of the Apple II plus's increased capabilities.
Bruce's reputation as a master of microcomputer simulation grew with the release of Night Mission Pinball in 1982. A programming tour de force that recreates the look and feel of a real pinball table down to the finest detail, Night Mission offers ten different play modes, each completely user-adjustable. The game's theme is based on a WWII night bombing run. Flight Simulator II, Bruce's newest creation, once again sets new standards in sophistication for a new generation of microcomputers.
The program graphically places you in the pilot's seat of a modern single-engine aircraft with complete instrumentation and full color out-the-window view.
You can view the entire manual here:
Since I picked up the cartridge for my collection, I figured I should at least give it a try. I plugged it into my 130XE and turned it on.
However, I had no luck even getting a plane off the ground. The sluggish 2fps probably didn’t help. There is a demo mode that I watched for a while before getting bored. Here’s a video of someone more capable than me doing some flying:
There was also a version for the Atari ST, which looks a lot better:
Were you a Flight Simulator fanatic back in the day? If so, please share your thoughts in the comments.
You could load other scenery disks if you had a floppy drive hooked up.
I didn't have the XL/XE version of FSII, but I had the ST version and one of the great things was that you could connect two STs using MIDI cables and dogfight in biplanes over the pyramids. We had a lot of fun with that.
I was just googling about Sublogic and came across this article. Wow, it really brings back memories. You see, it wasn't Atari that made Flight Simulator II fit on a ROM cartridge.
It was me.
I was a junior programmer at Sublogic at the time. I was tasked with putting Atari Flight Simulator II onto a cartridge so it could be included as one of the pack-in games for the Atari XEGS at launch. To do this, I created what I thought was a fairly clever ROM disk system. Flight Simulator accessed the disk drive as a series of blocks of data. My code responded to those calls for blocks of data by copying the data from the ROM instead of loading it from disk. Other than that, the program was essentially unchanged from the Atari 400/800 disk version.
The only tricky bit was if someone wanted to load an actual scenery disk from the optional floppy drive. So I added a flag that if set would go back to the old disk I/O code and load data blocks in from disk. So you'd put in a scenery disk, press control-E, and you were back to using the disk drive.
Development was pretty fun. I wrote the assembly code on 386 PC clone, and then loaded it onto a ROM emulator that was connected to the PC and plugged into the cartridge slot. Then I'd just hit the reset button on the Atari and I'd be up and running. (Waaay faster than loading off an Atari floppy drive.) When I wanted to try it on a real ROM, I would erase an EPROM under a UV light and put it in a PROM burner and have it copy the image from the ROM emulator onto the EPROM. I think we delivered the master version to Atari as an EPROM, but I might be mistaken.
I'm pretty sure the Atari XE Video Game System was Atari's attempt to respond to the Nintendo NES, which had launched in the US the previous year. I guess the thinking was that they'd repackage essentially an Atari 800 as a video game console, but include a keyboard (which ranked up there with the TI 99/4 and PC jr in the annals of bad keyboards) so they could position it as a video game console that could also do stuff like programming and playing "serious" games like Flight Simulator.
BTW, I'm pretty sure I put my name in the ROM somewhere. Somebody with a cartridge and a reasonable knowledge of electronics could probably find it.