[wkat4242]

> Microprose had 3D flight simulators going back to 1984 on Atari 400/800, Commodore 64, and IBM PC. That's really impressive.

They weren't the only one though. Sublogic also had Flight Simulator II for those platforms. Which wasn't really combat focused (except for the sopwith camel minigame with the checkerboard and the cardboard mountains - lol). But it was also really impressive on such constrained platforms. Ok, it did about 1 frame per second and only rendered in wireframe on the Atari, but you could tune VOR and ADF radios, set weather etc. It was really impressive for an 8bit machine with 64kbyte.

Sublogic later licensed their product to Microsoft to port it to PC which became Microsoft Flight Simulator. And the rest is history :)

It was a bit weird because on the much more capable Amiga there was a flightsim game that wasn't even able to draw a tilted horizon if the gradient function was turned on. I forget which game it was, I think it might have been F-29 retaliator.

[cardinalfang]

The gradient might have been created using copper palette switching, which would cost no CPU time but only work with horizontal lines.