Microsoft Flight Simulator 95 for Windows

 

Microsoft's Motto “Where do you want to go today?” Can Have a Literal Answer Now!

The Microsoft Flight Simulator 95 for Windows

Microsoft Flight Simulator 95 For Windows
Microsoft set the world on fire on August 24, 1995. On that particular day, the software giant in Redmond, Washington released Windows 95. A vast improvement over Windows 3.1, the new environment quickly took computing by storm. It was a very big deal. The Microsoft promotion campaign featured the Rolling Stones song "Start Me Up" as the theme for the Windows launch. A VHS video tape was released as well to promote the new environment. Featuring Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry from Friends, the video was touted as a "cyber sitcom" (yes, the 90's did get very stupid at times). This was the only time in the history of retail that people stood in line outside of stores for a Microsoft product!

Windows 95 quickly took over as the graphical environment of choice. This new version of Windows had no issues running on computers equipped with the 486 processor. By this time though, the Intel Pentium CPU's were the processor of choice for the new GUI. In order to show off the new environment as a gaming platform, the software giant enlisted the help of third party companies. The most notable example was with id Software, where Microsoft got in contact with John Carmack for a version of Doom 2 for the new platform. Microsoft's want and demand for Doom was so great that for a short time, Bill Gates briefly considered buying id Software.  Doom 95 was released for Windows on August 20th, 1996, and it was very well received. Doom 95 helped solidify Windows as a legitimate gaming platform. The transition to Windows gaming wasn't just restricted to Doom though.

The Microsoft developers started to port Flight Simulator 5.1 to Windows as well. For the most part, this game was a straight port of that game to Windows. It retained the same look and feel, and the same feature set. Their were a few differences as well though. The biggest change was that the Flight Simulator was running under Windows now instead of DOS. Frame-rates were improved, along with better cloud and haze effects, plus additional aircraft, like the Extras 300 aerobatic plane. The game textures were enhanced as well. Their were improvements in the 3D detail.  Additional scenery was included in this release, like major airports outside Europe and the US for the first time. Microsoft still wanted this game to be a major release.

As mentioned in the Wikipedia article, this was the first version released after the purchase of BAO (Bruce Artwick Organization) by Microsoft. The BOA developers, staff, and development computers and equipment were relocated to Redmond, Washington.

PC Emulation To Accommodate This Classic
I've attempted to run the game under PCEM. However, I had horrible frame-rate issues. The irony is that 3D accelerated games using the 3DFX Voodoo are much more playable because the Voodoo GPU is emulated on a separate CPU thread. This offloads the graphical load onto the GPU thread instead of leaving it to the CPU thread, which then free's up that CPU thread for other task. With one CPU thread handling the core emulator, plus the CPU emulation; that thread experiences a lot of demand when emulating a computer with a more recent Pentium processor. As a result, I've opted to run the game under VMware Player 12 running Windows 95 OSR2. Their is trade-offs when using VMware Player. Their is 3D acceleration, but it's only available for Windows XP and higher. However, with Flight Sim 95, this is a moot point as that game doesn't use 3D acceleration. Flight Simulator 95 was released on the eve of the 3D acceleration revolution.

The CPU is virtualized. What that means is that instead of emulating the CPU one instruction at a time, VMware uses the host CPU natively. That means that when running Windows 95 under VMware, my computer is emulating(*) a single-core AMD CPU running at 3.8GHz. Not surprisingly, Windows 95 runs great, along with all the software running under it. In fact, Windows 95 had to be patched because their is a bug in the system files that prevent it from running on computers that operate faster than 2.1GHz. After that patch, Windows 95 runs without issue.

The VBE 9x VESA drivers had to be installed as well. Without them, 95 only runs in 640 by 480, 16-color VGA mode. The desktop afterwards was set to 1024 by 768, 16-bit color. Flight Simulator 95 didn't use a 32-bit color palette, so any color depth higher than 16-bit for this game is pointless. Also, my VMware virtual machine has 32MB's of RAM allocated to it. This is period specific to the amount of memory that would have been in most computers at the time. Windows 95 didn't need any more RAM than this in all honesty. I never understood why people who build VM's to run legacy OS's opted to give them insane amounts of memory that wasn't period specific. Like, why does Windows 98 have 1GB of RAM for! Their was no software during that time that required that much memory! I edited the VMX configuration file to have a Creative Labs SoundBlaster audio adapter, which is what Windows 95 is using.

After making the following adjustments, there were still some issues. The cockpit flickered constantly when in that view mode. However, even with this issue, the game is still very much playable. It runs very well. I maxed out the game graphically by have all the dynamic scenery enabled. The game looks as good as it can get. Playing this game almost fools me into believing that this is 1997 again.
(*) I know that the terms emulating and virtualizing have different meaning, but for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to use them interchangeably. The end goals of emulation and virtualization are the same. That goal is to permit one OS to run under another OS.




Work Cited:

Doom 95 - http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom95

History of the Microsoft Flight Simulator - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Flight_Simulator#Flight_Simulator_for_Windows_95

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

WeatherStar 4000 Simulator For Windows (Part 1)

Image
  It's time to get the weather forecast, 90's style. A couple of months ago, I reviewed the WeatherStar 4000+ simulator for web-browsers. This simulator, created by Mike Battaglia, is a open-source, on-line simulator of the WeatherStar 4000 hardware used by The Weather Channel during the 1990's. This simulator ran without issue on both Firefox and Chrome on Windows 7 (Home PC) and Firefox on Windows 10 (Dell Optiplex).  It also runs great under Chrome on my Android devices as well. I use the online simulator when I'm on the road.  Now, I'm going to look into the WeatherStar 4000 simulator for Windows offered by Taiganet. This simulator offers a lot of features and can be customized in various ways. When I'm home, I use this program most of the time. Now, there is one notable hardware requirement. First, to run the Windows (and Mac OSX/Linux ports as well) simulator, you will need a computer that supports OpenGL 3.3. My home computer ha...
Read more

Classic Systems Emulated: Windows 95 (Part 1)

Image
  Start Me Up! Windows 95 (Chicago Beta Build 189 released September 1994) running under PCEM What would eventually become Windows 95 was affected by several turn of events that occurred during its development. Windows 95, code-named Chicago, had been several years in the making. Microsoft had already been planning the next version of Windows right after they got 3.1 out the door on March 1992. What would determine the course of the new OS? DOS Compatibility for one as it was still deemed essential at that point. One has to remember that even though Windows 3.0 had been the most successful version of Windows to date, the GUI in general was still a novelty at that point. Most used Windows 3.0 for simple task like typing list, letters, or playing solitaire. Most PC users who needed to work on major projects were still running DOS applications like WordPerfect or Lotus 123. However, the transition to GUI's would begin in earnest.  The 486 processor ...
Read more

Classic Systems Emulated: Windows 3.1 OEMS

Image
  The OEM's Want In On The Action The PC Market of the early 90's was a very competitive one. As such, having a easy-to-use environment was a must for these companies pushing there hardware. Hardware has caught up to software, and as such, it was now time to push the command prompt out of the way for the GUI. Several of these companies spotted opportunities to make  deals with Microsoft to pre-install Windows on there computers. This phenomenon didn't start with 3.1 though. Even in the late 80's, both Compaq and IBM often preinstalled Windows 386 for corporate customers that brought there 386 systems. Windows 3.0 was bundled with a lot of systems too. It was preinstalled on the IBM PS/1 budget PC's and various Tandy models. It came with the Amstrad MegaPC and various other PC's offered by ZDS (Zenith Data Systems) as well.  The number of OEM partners grew with the Windows 3.1 release. Some of them were familiar faces, like Compa...
Read more

Old Hardware Emulated :Psion Model 3a Emulated On DOSBox Windows

Image
  Psion 3a and 3c Psion Series 3c Handheld Computer (Wikipedia) Psion 3a As mentioned in the previous articles, the emulators for the Psion 3 exist only on DOSBox. I decided to take the challenge of setting up a emulated configuration. What must one do. There is already a very good guide on the internet titled "PocketBook II emulation..." which is linked below in the article. Highly recommended. Setting up a emulated Psion 3 takes a little bit of effort, but it's possible and is a good exploration of setting up a DOSBox configuration. I'm making the safe assumption that the fast majority of those reading this are using Windows systems, but DOSBox has been ported to Mac OS X and Linux as well, so this guide might work on those systems.  The first thing I did was created a folder called dosbox_psion3 (Folder naming is based on personal preference). Make the following new folders within dosbox_psion3; psion3, a, b, and m. With the f...
Read more

Classic Systems Emulated: OS/2 Version 2.0 On PCEM

Image
  The Arrival Of 32-Bit Power For The Masses The past couple of these PC articles have been very Windows-centric. This isn't a surprise as Windows 3.0 was a major release that made a very massive impact on the marketplace. Windows 3.1 sold 3 million copies in 6 weeks. 1992 was a very different time. Back then, it was possible to request a PC without an operating system. If one did want an OS, they could choose between OS/2, DOS, or the DOS+Windows combination. I've had not forgotten OS/2 in these articles. The 286 versions of OS/2 had already been covered in my articles about the IBM PS/2 family of computers. The messy IBM-Microsoft "divorce" had been covered in detail as well. To quickly recap: Microsoft didn't like the direction that IBM wanted to take OS/2. Microsoft envisioned OS/2 as being the "next-generation" OS, while IBM simply saw the OS as a tool to sell more hardware. OS/2 did terrible in the marketplace. The ...
Read more

Old Hardware Emulated - Windows Mobile 5.0

Image
Working title for this post was "But Mama, That's Where The Fun Is!". Appropriate as by the middle 2000's, Windows Mobile was where all the action was at. The sky was only getting brighter for Microsoft as Palm was slowly imploding on itself. With Microsoft's mobile offerings becoming more widespread by the day, the Redmond Giant followed up with the newest version of WM, version 5.0, on May 2005. On the surface, it appears that little changed. However, the biggest change were "under the hood" with the incorporation of the .NET Compact Framework, which is basically the mobile version of .NET. Also, WM 5.0 introduced newer power-saving capabilities which often improved the battery life of devices by as much as 50%. WM backed up everything to flash memory. WinMobile would use a combination of RAM and flash memory to preserve battery life. This wasn't noticeable by the user.  As such, their is no data loss if power is lost.  Windows Media Player was upd...
Read more

Old Hardware Emulated : Pocket PC 2000/2002

Image
  Windows CE On The PDA Pocket PC 2002 starting up. For the remainder of the 90's, Microsoft had a tough time gaining a foothold in the handheld market. Windows CE 2.0 was well received on the palmtop PC's. However, that market-share was small compared to there PDA counterpart that were rocking to the tune of PalmOS. The first incarnation of WinCE on the PDA seemed sparse compared to Palm. At this point, the PDA port of Windows CE was re-branded as Windows Mobile. Around this point, Microsoft's fortunes began to change. For the first time, the Palm platform had that "Oh Crap!" moment when Compaq released the iPAQ in April 2000. The PDA came with the new Windows Pocket PC 2000 operating system. This version of Windows CE was specifically geared towards PDA's in particular. The iPAQ line of PDA's became must own devices for those that wanted the latest and greatest. As how Compaq made IBM look silly in the 80's and 90's...
Read more

Old Hardware Emulated :Einstein emulating the Apple Newton (Part 3)

Image
  NewtonOS Android in Action! Einstein emulating the Newton Messagepad on a Amazon Fire HD7 tablet. Einstein Seriously, did you not expect me to run a OS designed for a classic handheld device on a modern tablet!? It's interesting running Einstein on a PC, but I want to try this platform out on a handheld that was similar in form-factor to the original device. Einstein had been ported to Android as well. It's not as recent as the current builds available for iOS, MacOS, and Ubuntu Linux, but it works well enough. Running the emulator means doing a few things before hand, like loading the Android package, ROM, and other needed files. The apk file that I downloaded was "einstein.05.01.2013.apk", which can be found at a archived version of the code.Google.com page (link posted below). You will also need a ROM file named "717006" that needs to be placed in the "/sdcard/Downloads/Einstein/" directory of your Androi...
Read more

Classic Games Emulated: Revisiting NFS High Stakes Modding

Image
  Modding On The Mind! As anyone who's read my NFS:HS article or watching my uploads on YouTube, one can tell that they're two things that I'm a fan of: NFS:HS and Virtualization. I like contained environments that allow me to run beloved games from the past on far more powerful configurations. It only seemed natural for me to embark on the journey of getting NFS:HS running under VMware Player. I had a original copy of the game on CD-ROM which was installed on my guest setup. The guest configuration had two cores allocated to it, 2GB's of RAM, and 3D acceleration via my Nvidia GTX 950. The guest OS running was Windows 7 32-bit. After installing HS, I copied the patch, and started to burn rubber. After that, I duplicated the game folder so I could have two installations: one stock and another one for mod. Within the NFS:HS folder, their are various directories. The "DATA/CARS" folder has both the racing and traffic cars. The first t...
Read more

OS/2 Warp 4

Image
(Any blogpost where I don't have to cover politics is a win in my books!) OS/2 Warp 4 was a very noble endeavor. It was IBM's statement to the world to demonstrate there commitment to the OS/2 operating system. However, when it arrived in 1996, OS/2 Warp 4 was dead on arrival. A lot had happened between the launch of Warp 3 and Warp 4, with the biggest of them being the arrival of Windows 95. Microsoft, making the most of their OEM connections, started to lock OS/2 out of the OEM markets prior to the launch of Windows 95. With threats of either not receiving the latest Windows or paying much higher license fees, many OEM's relented to Microsoft's pressure. Warp 3 struggled against Windows 3.1 along with the soon-to-be-tidal wave that would be Windows 95. Not only that, Microsoft had a vendetta against Big Blue for previous acts.  Lotus 123 For OS/2 Warp 4 Faced with accusations that Microsoft incorporated OS/2 source code into Windows 3.x which would have violated the j...
Read more