FLIGHT SIMULATION
I will be updating this page in the future. Meanwhile there are some links below for you the check out.
I started in flight simulation in 1986 with an ad in the newspaper for someone looking for a engineer/tech to help construct a light plane simulator. The simulator turned out to be a Mooney 201 that was salvaged. The software engineer wrote code to drive instruments as I modified them with small meter movements, hobby servo's, etc. and interfaced them one-by-one into my custom I/O system. We stayed on this method and within about a year we had _all_ of the Mooney's instruments, radios and controls interfaced to the PC. After we had the flight model tweaked, we interfaced one of the first Image Generators (IG) to the PC for out-the-window (OTW) scene generation. I forget off hand what we used, but it was a huge external board with a lot of 74xxLS series IC's on it. We got a total of 30(!) polygons at 30 hz update rate. It gave us just enough for a 'runway', 'hangar', a 'road' and a 'horizon'. I designed and built a visual display system using a EGA monitor, a video projector lens, a mirror and a rear projection screen. The screen was cut so the pilot had a single channel OTW. It was quite exciting at the time! We build the sim in a garage, fighting heat and bugs in the summer here in Florida.
By the way, the first computer we used was a Commodore 64(!) which I made a small back plane that would adapt the C64 to the IBM PC buss (we could not afford a real IBM PC) so I could use some I/O cards that were made for the IBM. We finally got some venture capital money and we bought a real PC motherboard and I upgraded the system.
The flight model was written in FORTRAN...
More to come...
