Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000

Flight Journal, Apr 2000 by Lert, Peter

Poor, beleaguered Microsoft. By the time you read this, it may still be business as usual in Redmond-or the Justice Dept. may have insisted that the firm be broken up into a bunch of "Baby Bills." Meanwhile, they still have to work the bugs out of Windows 2000-at last report, slated for release sometime in the future.

If Microsoft is forced to break up, one division that deserves to survive is Microsoft Games-at least, based on the current version of its perennial flight simulation package, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000. True, the program still has its warts; and, frankly, I'm enough of an infracaninophile (one who roots for the underdog) that it sticks in my craw to like something produced by a firm whose motto sometimes seems to be "We are Microsoft. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile." The fact remains that in some areas, size does matter; in the case of FS2000, it's partly Microsoft's size that has resulted in such a good, solid flight simulator at such a reasonable price.

Why do I say this? Because it appears to me that Microsoft's size and depth in the industry have allowed it to pull off some things that are too difficult for its competitors. Unlike many other simulators (and perhaps, unlike Windows 2000), FS2000 shipped more or less on time. This is something you can pull off when you have not only an army of talented programmers and coders (aka "Microserfs") working on your project-but also when that project can be subsidized, if necessary, by the sale of a few million more operating systems before it starts selling on its own.

Similarly, any modern flight simulator program makes very significant demands, not only on the hardware on which it will be run, but also on the underlying operating system. Sure, Microsoft has published various developers' kits that detail all the hardware and software calls and "hooks" by which things such as high-end video cards and their drivers interact with Windows; but, to those outside Redmond, the source code of the Windows kernel remains a secret compared to which the Manhattan Project was an open book. Within Microsoft, I'd assume that a game developer who runs into a Windows problem can almost literally go down the hall to get things straightened out--either by getting the ultimately authoritative inside dope on how to modify the game or even, perhaps, by getting the required patch added to Windows itself.

The result of this is a versatile and wide-ranging flight simulation package that not only offers a good selection of aircraft, plenty of high-res "eye candy" and a whole slew of standard add-ons such as tutorials and .canned" scenarios, but it's also a package that-with a couple of qualifications--"runs properly right out of the box." In a perfect world, this would be taken as a matter of course. A perusal of newsgroups such as rec.aviation..simulators, however, reveals that such performance may unfortunately be the exception rather than the rule.

What are the qualifications I mentioned? They go back to my constant cavil about the current crop of midrange flight sims: here's a software package you can pick up for well under $ 100; to get it to run acceptably, though, you'll need a computer with the latest fast microprocessor, tons of RAM and a high-end 3D accelerator, not to mention the kind of hard-disk capacity formerly reserved for research libraries. I'm well aware that computers are continually getting cheaper in terms of "performance and storage per dollar"-but it still frosts me that my own computer, which was state-of-theart only about three years ago, is now unable to run a recreational program with anything near the performance I want.

To set the record straight, it required over an hour to get the program (the "Professional" edition comprises 3 CDROMs) to install on my Dell Pentium 200MMX, which has 64MB of RAM and an Nvidia TNT 2 3D accelerator with 16MB of video RAM (and for which I downloaded and installed the latest drivers right before I began to install FS2000). In fairness to Microsoft, I must admit that the machine has become increasingly unstable in recent months-"like its owner," I hear you cry-and probably for the same reason: a lot of scar tissue, both emotional and in Windows' program registry, left by the installation and removal of often ill-behaved beta and prerelease versions of other flight simulators.

Make no mistake: this is "bloatware" in the finest Microsoft tradition. Even the "compact" installation (in which scenery and other features reside primarily on the CD) requires 400-odd MB. The "standard" installation requires about twice that; a full-featured custom installation, twice as much again. Assuming that the bottleneck on my computer would be processor performance rather than CD access (and only have about a gigabyte available to both load and run the program), I opted for the compact version, only to find that on the first try, the installation program became hung up when it discovered that it needed to load the DirectX 7 drivers. Having nothing to lose but time, however (I had backed up the whole machine to tape the night before, something I've learned through bitter experience is a good idea before loading any new flight sim), I tried again; and again; and again, with the system getting a bit further each time before either (a) freezing up, (b) requesting permission to reboot, then hanging during the boot process, or (c) suddenly going to a black screen, then performing a cold boot entirely on its own for a very long time. Luckily, I was on an extremely long phone call at the time, so I sat there and watched the creeping tape of "Scandisk" as the machine attempted to recover, or reread the Microsoft license agreement every time the process restarted. Microsoft resorts to more than threats, too-even if you do a full installation and read everything off the CD onto your (apparently limitless) hard disk, the program still requires one of the original CDs to be in the drive to allow it to load. My first attempt actually to run the program also ended in failure: after requesting the second of the three CDs and getting through the usual Microsoft "atmospheric re-entry with ethereal music" intro, it settled down to "building the scenery database," a process in which it was still apparently engaged by the time Dianne and I had cooked dinner, eaten it and done the dishes.