FS-1 on the Apple II (1980) Meigs  -  FS2000
 

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On behalf of myself and all of you, FS-friends, who visit my website, I like to thank Miguel Blaufuks, director of simFlight.
He kindly offered to house the FS History website and take the burden of all the needed disk space and traffic.

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The last Dutch FlightsIm Weekend on 5/6 November 2005 in the Dutch Aviation Museum (or Theme Park) Aviodrome at Lelystad  was again a huge success. Not in  the least because of all the work by our great organiser Frans Broekhuijsen.

And yes, like in 2004 FS History was also present with a small booth. For an impression look here:

With more participants and more visitors then ever before in this fantastic venue this probably deserves the title Biggest FS Event in the World".

The next FS-Weekend will take place at the same venuein November 2006, hopefully with FS-X. See you?

For a report by Rob de Vries take a look at the website:

http://www.FSweekend.com

Latest revision: 16-11-07

Downloads ???

When I published the first version of my Flight Simulator History website in October 2001, my mailbox got flooded by a stream of nice replies. Many people wrote me about their nostalgic feelings, about reliving old times, how they used the multiplayer function to fly together in FS-clubs, squadrons and virtual airlines and about the amazing developments that have taken place in FS over time, while at the same time still feeling the old roots connection.

Many credits went to Bruce Artwick and his team of developers that throughout the years moved from subLOGIC to BAO to Microsoft, but were able to create ever better versions while maintaining backwards compatibility. With the reactions came a lot of requests, of which the most frequent were: (3) when will you update your central story and (2) when will you add the missing pages, but the most frequent question asked was: (1) when do you open a download page.

As it seemed, many old flightsimmers would love the opportunity to play once more with that old version they started with and again experience that old feeling. While many young simmers wanted to see the old stuff for themselves and try it hands-on. There were however a few problems to be solved before I could start to create a download service. To name a few: the availability of the versions and suitable emulators, the necessary instruction material to get it up and running, the amount of webserver space needed for the downloads and last but not least the copyright issue.

A screenshot from "The Old FS Vault"

Yes, this is the download site: "The Old Flight Simulator Vault",
 available but still under construction. For more information read below.
 

In the past few years I, with the help of many people and some auctions on eBay and Amazon, have been able to gather a quite complete set of all versions of FS that have ever been released, either by subLOGIC or by Microsoft. The next hurdle was that neither I nor you are in the possession any more of the original target computers for which the versions were written. So I had to find suitable programs to emulate the respective target machines on our modern day high- end Pentiums running under Windows XP that don't even run plain MS-DOS programs correctly any more.

With the help of some of my FS friends, notably Hubert Born, Josef Havlik, Franc Brvar, Matthew Wu, Sergio di Fusco, Dave Rovagnati, Marc-André Handfield, Brian Fillery and others, I have been able to create working environments for almost all versions, based on emulators. Recent developments in some of these emulators, notably MESS and DOSbox have even made it possible to reduce the number of different emulators. And from the manuals of the emulators and the FS versions I have created documents that guide you through installation and handling the old version. It's not all polished yet and also not completely finished because there are still developments with the emulators. But there are now working sets available for most versions.

With respect to the copyright issue I have tried to get in contact with Microsoft, that obtained all rights from Bruce Artwick when they took over in 1996. Assuming that no reply may be understood as "no objection", I have decided to continue on my path and prepare the downloads. In order not to mix up things, they are housed on a separate companion site, called "The Old Flight Simulator Vault". And finally Miguel Blaufuks once more came to the rescue and offered the necessary disk space and download capacity on the simFlight servers.

As I told you above it is not complete yet, but in general you will find all versions from FS1 for the Apple II (1979) to the last pure MS-DOS  version FS 5.0a (1993). I suppose they don't have any commercial value any more nowadays. Please be correct and  use these for your own individual use. I hope you understand that I am not in the position to give any more support than the already created additional documentation. I do appreciate however if you would report problems with broken links, exceptional download times etc.

Be my guest at "The Old Flight Simulator Vault" and have fun! 

Jos Grupping

 
Latest revision: 03-04-05

November 15, 2007

Last week at the AVSIM 2007 Conference I received a Reader's Choice Award.

I would like to thank my friend Frans Broekhuijsen, great organiser of the Dutch Flight Simulator Events in the Aviodrome at Lelystad for his nomination and all the AVSIM visitors for voting on me. I feel very honoured and will most certainly continue with this website. Please come back for a major update before the end of the year.

May 12, 2005

Added nice overview of the web statistics, based on the NEDSTAT counter and statistics.
Go to the Miscellaneous Page or follow  this direct link.

April 25, 2005

Renewed the Introduction page and repaired some broken links. Added a link to Milehigh Productions.

Just as most other leading FS organizations in The Netherlands FS History was present at the recent Dutch National FS Event on  April 16&17 at the Aviodrome. Look here for a small impression.

March 30, 2005

Small facelift, including a new logo, consistent with that of The Old FS Vault. Some small textual corrections and aditions. New FlipAlbum "Manual-covers" at the Gallery page.

February 20, 2005

Correction of the birth year of Flight Simulator. From the old information I was (mis)lead to believe that the first release of FS1 for the Apple II was in October 1979. However all evidence now point to January 1980 for that first release. So untill I receive real proof otherwise I will take 1980 as the birth year of FS. So I feel like I owe you an apology!

February 9, 2005

Update of Wanted List and Reactions Pages. Most wanted: volumes 1 and 2 of MicroWINGS Magazine.

November 25, 2004

This date marks the start of a big upgrade of the total website. The first changes can be found on the introductory page and the news page. Look for the links to some visual additions.

The first is a draft of a new video (in cooperation with Josef Havlik and based on an idea  by Marcus Thompson) about the development of Flight Simulator over the years containing video-clips of all relevant old versions. You will probably need a high speed connection for the 95 Mb download. The second is a copy of the poster-session, created for the Dutch FS weekend in the Aviodrome in October 2004.

Then there is interesting news about the ever so often requested downloads of old FS versions, for which a new companion site has been created:    "The Old FS Vault".

Look out for more changes and updates before the end of the year. For more information and other news see the NEWS page.

December 13, 2003

A complete revision of the Timeline, introducing the concept of "generations" and adding FS2004 (FS9).

The content of the central STORY has also been reworked as  introductory chapter of the "Good Flight Simmer's Guide", release 2002 by Mike Clark, published by PC Aviator.

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This website © Jos Grupping 2001 (joscmg@xs4all.nl)