Fubar512

Cool video, but I kept expecting Desmond Llewelyn to appear at any moment, and warn Harry to "Please bring it back in one piece"

It had nothing to do with the data.ini, or the 3d model. It was an issue with the 3d "world", and, if I recall correctly, was sort of related to the "bouncing MiG" issue that occurred after an early patch.

It was done by the A-team for a seaplane. At one point, some of the Thirdwire models were actually capable of wheels-up landings, I recall once ditching an F-100 back in the SFP1 days.

One client of mine used to smoke pipe tobacco, and raised Corgis. Despite this, he and his wife used to keep their home as immaculate as an operating room, and I never recall ever catching even the faintest whiff of tobacco whenever I visited. Except for one instance, when he asked me to upgrade the HDD on his PC. As soon as the case was cracked open, the "sweet" smell of pipe tobacco filled the air, and as JediMaster stated, all the expansion cards and motherboard had a somewhat sticky yellowish film on them. When the task was completed, and I had powered up the PC to began formatting the new drive, I again caught a whiff of pipe tobacco, courtesy of the power supply fan.

I have all three major Graphsim releases from that series. Hornet 3.0, F/A-18 Korea, Korea "Gold", and F/A-18 OIF.

The question should be, "Will it fit in my PC's case, and allow me to put the side-panel back on? http://combatace.com/topic/83314-its-time/?p=669645 Did you also pick up a tube of thermal paste, or did the HSF manufacturer provide you with some?

The only case of conductive dust that I experienced first hand, was on a PC that was in an automobile repair shop, sitting a few feet away from a brake lathe and a bench grinder. Despite being under a nylon cover, years of exposure had allowed a fine layer of metallic dust to coat the motherboard and PSU.

Watch the video, and you'll see.

The issue often isn't clock speed, it's physical architecture. Some of the early titles run a bit too fast on processors that sport L1 or L2 cache. Of course, as you've already mentioned, an outfit such GOG makes all this a moot point, with their updated (re) releases, and the various work-arounds that they've applied to them to make those old titles Windows 7 & 8 compliant.

On that same channel, you'll find a build where he uses a K6-III to accomplish the same thing. Many of those older games will not run on modern CPUs. Also, capacitors can be replaced. I have done it myself on a few occasions, it just takes a little bit of skill with a soldering iron to accomplish.

In my experience, that's mostly bullshit. I once managed a team of PC techs that "recycled" PCs from various clients, which we'd often receive by the pallet-load. The previous manager had them spend considerable time brushing away dust. I went out and purchased an electric leaf blower, which did a bang up job of clearing dust from every nook and cranny, even the power supplies. I cannot recall any of them failing because of this, though in all honesty, we only kept the 486 DX/2s and higher, because they were deemed to be the entry-level systems at the time (1998).

Informative video from JayzToCents.

Dragon's Lair was a hoot, and a later, a bust. It did incredibly well for all of about six months, and then fall flat on it's face. I recall modding the cabinet from 50 cents per play, down to 25, as interest in it waned. There was a third laser disc game from that era, the title of which I cannot recall. It was basically a B-52 in an overhead view, superimposed over a photo-realistic terrain that included harbors, cities, missile bases, etc. It wasn't very popular, so we did not buy it...but I do recall spending the better part of an afternoon playing with it in the distributor's show room

With the interest that the 1990-flight sim thread stirred up, I'd thought that I'd share this. It's just one of the retro-build videos on the "Phil's PC Lab" channel on Youtube.

How primitive! Meanwhile, my brothers and I were making money distributing this game "Cobra Command", just over a year later (in 1984). Of course, the cabinet that contained this game weighed almost 300 lbs, and the whole mess cost over $4000, in 1984 dollars. To put that figure in context, back then one could buy an entry-level Toyota (a Starlet) for not much more! The "graphics" were read off a laser disc, and were therefore not rendered. If I recall correctly, it took us over a year to break even on the purchase, as we split the proceeds 50-50 with the owners of the locations that we had the games at. By the time I left my regular job, and started doing this full time in 1989, the two Cobra Command cabinets that we still had were basically trashed, and worthless.

I recall a charter skipper in the Florida Keys who refused to run at much more than an idle after dark, due to physical encounters with airborne houndfish, balao, and other half-beaks. While not capable of "flight" in the manner of a flyingfish, they have a habit of being attracted to lights, and have often lept aboard boats. Because of their beaks, this behavior makes them a hazard, and more than a few people have been impaled by them.

Harried by dolphin below, and by frigate birds from above, flying fish lead a tough existence. Watch this amazing footage, and judge for yourselves:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit#1980s 1990s[edit] Tseng Labs ET4000/W32p S3 Graphics ViRGE Voodoo3 2000 AGP card In 1991, S3 Graphics introduced the S3 86C911, which its designers named after the Porsche 911 as an implication of the performance increase it promised.[24] The 86C911 spawned a host of imitators: by 1995, all major PC graphics chip makers had added 2D acceleration support to their chips.[25][26] By this time, fixed-function Windows accelerators had surpassed expensive general-purpose graphics coprocessors in Windows performance, and these coprocessors faded away from the PC market. Throughout the 1990s, 2D GUI acceleration continued to evolve. As manufacturing capabilities improved, so did the level of integration of graphics chips. Additional application programming interfaces (APIs) arrived for a variety of tasks, such as Microsoft's WinG graphics library for Windows 3.x, and their later DirectDraw interface for hardware acceleration of 2D games within Windows 95 and later. In the early- and mid-1990s, real-time 3D graphics were becoming increasingly common in arcade, computer and console games, which led to an increasing public demand for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. Early examples of mass-market 3D graphics hardware can be found in arcade system boards such as the Sega Model 1, Namco System 22, and Sega Model 2, and the fifth-generation video game consoles such as the Saturn, PlayStation and Nintendo 64. Arcade systems such as the Sega Model 2 and Namco Magic Edge Hornet Simulator in 1993 were capable of hardware T&L (transform, clipping, and lighting) years before appearing in consumer graphics cards.[27][28] Some systems used DSPs to accelerate transformations. Fujitsu, which worked on the Sega Model 2 arcade system,[29] began working on integrating T&L into a single LSI solution for use in home computers in 1995;[30][31] the Fujitsu Pinolite, the first 3D geometry processor for personal computers, released in 1997.[32] The first hardware T&L GPU on home video game consoles was the Nintendo 64's Reality Coprocessor, released in 1996.[33] In 1997, Mitsubishi released the 3Dpro/2MP, a fully featured GPU capable of transformation and lighting, forworkstations and Windows NT desktops;[34] ATi utilized it for their FireGL 4000 graphics card, released in 1997.[35] In the PC world, notable failed first tries for low-cost 3D graphics chips were the S3 ViRGE, ATI Rage, and Matrox Mystique. These chips were essentially previous-generation 2D accelerators with 3D features bolted on. Many were even pin-compatiblewith the earlier-generation chips for ease of implementation and minimal cost. Initially, performance 3D graphics were possible only with discrete boards dedicated to accelerating 3D functions (and lacking 2D GUI acceleration entirely) such as thePowerVR and the 3dfx Voodoo. However, as manufacturing technology continued to progress, video, 2D GUI acceleration and 3D functionality were all integrated into one chip. Rendition's Verite chipsets were among the first to do this well enough to be worthy of note. In 1997, Rendition went a step further by collaborating with Hercules and Fujitsu on a "Thriller Conspiracy" project which combined a Fujitsu FXG-1 Pinolite geometry processor with a Vérité V2200 core to create a graphics card with a full T&L engine years before Nvidia's GeForce 256. This card, designed to reduce the load placed upon the system's CPU, never made it to market. OpenGL appeared in the early '90s as a professional graphics API, but originally suffered from performance issues which allowed the Glide API to step in and become a dominant force on the PC in the late '90s.[36] However, these issues were quickly overcome and the Glide API fell by the wayside. Software implementations of OpenGL were common during this time, although the influence of OpenGL eventually led to widespread hardware support. Over time, a parity emerged between features offered in hardware and those offered in OpenGL. DirectX became popular among Windows game developers during the late 90s. Unlike OpenGL, Microsoft insisted on providing strict one-to-one support of hardware. The approach made DirectX less popular as a standalone graphics API initially, since many GPUs provided their own specific features, which existing OpenGL applications were already able to benefit from, leaving DirectX often one generation behind. (See: Comparison of OpenGL and Direct3D.) Over time, Microsoft began to work more closely with hardware developers, and started to target the releases of DirectX to coincide with those of the supporting graphics hardware. Direct3D 5.0 was the first version of the burgeoning API to gain widespread adoption in the gaming market, and it competed directly with many more-hardware-specific, often proprietary graphics libraries, while OpenGL maintained a strong following. Direct3D 7.0 introduced support for hardware-acceleratedtransform and lighting (T&L) for Direct3D, while OpenGL had this capability already exposed from its inception. 3D accelerator cards moved beyond being just simplerasterizers to add another significant hardware stage to the 3D rendering pipeline. The Nvidia GeForce 256 (also known as NV10) was the first consumer-level card released on the market with hardware-accelerated T&L, while professional 3D cards already had this capability. Hardware transform and lighting, both already existing features of OpenGL, came to consumer-level hardware in the '90s and set the precedent for later pixel shader and vertex shader units which were far more flexible and programmable.

Say so, and I can make you disappear forever, and no one would be the wiser

Sorry to disagree, but those are all 2D titles, as they were software-rendered. True 3D -gaming did not exist until hardware accelerators came along, starting with the voodoo 1 in '96. I've been messing with PCs since I built my first system in 1985, and even had a few of those titles. They were all 2D. For example, Falcon 3.0 is 2D, as is the later Hornet 3.0, which came out in 1997. However, Falcon 4.0 is true 3D, as is Hornet Korea.

Well, keep in mind that for the most part, 3D graphics really did not exist on PCs until 1996, with the advent of the Voodoo 1. That opened the flood gates, and within a year's time, we had Jane's F-15, Red Baron 3D, etc.

Here's an episode of "the Computer Chronicles", a television series that ran from 1981 through the early 2000s, on public TV (PBS) here in the US. You may find this particular episode quite interesting, if not quaint.

The ferris wheel is under the Cessna's RH horizontal stab. In fact, if you look closely, you can see a part of it.

Your video is not viewable from this end. It's hard to say for sure, but it sounds as if you're experiencing "texture popping", which is a sign that your video hardware is not up to the task. Is your 9800 GT a 512, or a 1024 MB frame buffer card? If it's a 512 MB, then you're short on memory for anything other than titles or DLCs released prior to mid/late 2009. If you're running a full install at the 2012 level, you'll need at least 2048 MB (2 GB) of VRAM to handle most of the scenarios. With a bunch of third party add-ons, and you'd be much better off with 4 GB. I had a GTS 250, which was essentially a 1024 MB GTX 9800 recycled into the "200" series. When I upgraded to a GTX 750ti with 2048 MB, my lowest frame rates more than doubled, even with all the eye candy turned on. I recently upgraded to a GTX 1070 (8 GB), and the lowest frame rates doubled, yet again. Try lowering your horizon distance to "normal", and see what happens.

I've had it up to here with this damned LA Traffic!