[aplc0r]

I recently went down a rabbit hole of playing early home flight simulators. One that stuck with me was Tomcat F-14 for the Atari 2600. A combat flight simulator on a system with one button seemed impossible.

I tried playing it without any information at first, but couldn't figure out the controls. So I looked up the manual and found that it used the Game Select and Difficulty switches for additional controls. Having the left and right difficulty switches for the arresting hook and landing gear felt surprisingly cool. I didn't have a lot of games for the 2600 growing up, so I'm sure there are lot of examples of clever controls, but this would have blown my mind as a kid.

https://archive.org/details/Tomcat_The_F-14_Flight_Simulator...

[dharmab]

For a point of comparison, here's what F-14 simulators are like today: https://youtu.be/8N0rRTvHGBY?si=tINfIqzwQ6fHk7p8