Before Aces High

[Bixby]

 I was trying to remember the early sims that Dale Addink made before the first Aces High.

 Can anyone remember those titles? 

[oboe]

Check Six?

I'm sure he worked on WarBirds also, and left to start Aces High after the company was sold and the new guy moved the operation to North Carolina.

[SIK1]

iirc he did a gun camera, or something along those lines for Air Warrior. I'm sure someone with a better memory will chime in.

 
Sik

[The Fugitive]

HItech post this once......

1. I played Air Warrior (was a +100 hrs a month junky)
2. I started playing with flight model physics and graphic programing (HTSIM).
3. I created in Confirmed Kill at night in 94 early 95. Had 2 partners in the business Killer (John  McQueen) and Gunjam (Robert Salinas)
4. We went live with Confirmed kill in May 95.
5. August 95 renamed CK to Warbirds.
6 3 years later we merged with iMagic (I.E. Wild Bill) and I lost control of WB.
7. By late 98 Bill was totally messing up the long term viability of the old company for many reasons (stock went from $14 to less then 1 cent).
8. I left and began work at home on AH.

HiTech

[Nefarious]

HItech post this once......

1. I played Air Warrior (was a +100 hrs a month junky)
2. I started playing with flight model physics and graphic programing (HTSIM).
3. I created in Confirmed Kill at night in 94 early 95. Had 2 partners in the business Killer (John  McQueen) and Gunjam (Robert Salinas)
4. We went live with Confirmed kill in May 95.
5. August 95 renamed CK to Warbirds.
6 3 years later we merged with iMagic (I.E. Wild Bill) and I lost control of WB.
7. By late 98 Bill was totally messing up the long term viability of the old company for many reasons (stock went from $14 to less then 1 cent).
8. I left and began work at home on AH.

HiTech

Sometime in the area of 94/95 - There was pc game magazine I found in a local grocery store that spotlighted confirmed kill and I was super interested.

At the time, we didn't have internet - my dad refused to get it lol - so I stuck to single player games like Jetfighter II, Falcon, FOTI, and others. It wasn't until 2000 I discovered Aces High and had the internet to play it. lol.

[Hajo]

Air Warrior my first online MMOG.  Up until that time there was nothing like it!  A lot of us Boomers were deeply interested in WWII Combat especially in the air.  Since I was eight years old I was reading about WWII Aircraft and building models of the same.  When the late 70s and 80s came it was possible to emulate that one your early PC.  At that time I was already in my 30s' (1980)  and games like Aces of the Pacific, Jane's Fighters, and an earlier version of the WWII Genre I played on an old 8088, no hard drives, 512K memory and had to make a boot disk to free up memory so that I could play Their Finest Hour.  Can't do that today..........it was easier then in DOS 2.1 to get into the autoexe.bat file and remark lines that would not be needed that would take up memory prohibiting you from playing the game.  So I simply made (first of all before booting I had to insert the DOS disk into the disk drive.  Then I designed my own boot file to directly start up Their Finest Hour.

DOS was great at that time.  It was truly an operating system as opposed to application systems.  I miss it.

Then Air Warrior on a 486 with a paradise vid card........and on to Aces High.  Geez.........that's 40 years 

I miss true operating systems that one could change to suit your needs.

[Vulcan]

CK Beta was my first online sim, a had a nice guy called Ripsnort show me the ropes

[Wildin]

Hooked on Warbirds late 90s till Katrina ate my gear 2005. 

[Eagler]

Battlehawks 1942 back around 93 on a 286 and a monochrome video card started this addiction

SWOTL and other box sims followed

Fighter Ace was the first online sim

Been AH fan for around 20 years

Best distraction going!

Eagler

[oboe]

I found this in a WIRED review of the book, "Warbirds: The Story So Far"

"Territorial scuffles that arose between WarBirds' original creators and the company that bought out the game, iEntertainment, were the cause of an angry walkout earlier this year.

"[Game creator] John MacQueen walked out of a meeting with the vice president of iEN and announced to his staff that he was leaving the company," Williams said. "Every single person picked up and followed him to his new company."

WarBirds' original creators, John "Killer" MacQueen, Dale "HiTech" Addink, and Robert "GunJam" Salinas have since formed their own companies. Within the Warbirds community, people feel that groups will split off and coalesce around the new sims that emerge from these companies."

HiTech went on to create Aces High, and I think WWII Online was another spinoff startup from WarBirds, but I don't know if it was Killer or Gunjam, or both.

My own involvement dates back to WarBirds in late '98.   I was home from work recovering from pneumonia, and out of boredom I checked out a WarBirds demo CD that a woman I worked with had given me.  She had been on a cruise, and had met and been chatted up by none other than Wild Bill Stealey, who gave her some demo CDs.  I don't know how she knew I had an interest in WWII aviation, but once I installed WarBirds and tried it I was hooked, hard.    Even though I was still sick, I went out to my local CompUSA and bought a full Thrustmaster "Top Gun" HOTAS package.  I think it took me much longer to recover because I spent so much time playing and not enough sleeping.   This was back when WarBirds was $2/hr for online play.

I also had played BattleHawks 1942 and SWOTL, but online play with voice comms between players changed everything for me.

[AAIK]

[Frodo]

Warbirds in 95 and then A/H when it went live. AAIK those pics bring back some memories. 

[Vulcan]

Well if you want first flight sims....

[iaqmya]

First flight sim was a CD F-15 Strike Eagle on an 8088 IBM with two floppy drives and a 4.7  or 4.8 mghz CPU with green monitor.  Used an Office computer at Luke AFB in 1986/87.  Played for ten minutes and decided that I probably should not us Govt system.  Went to the Base Exchange the next day and bought my own, a Commador PC 10-2 with two floppy drives and a 4.8 mghz CPU.  No internet of course.  A few weeks later I updated it by replacing one of the floppy drives with a few megabyte Hard Drive.
Played other CD flight sims, Red Barron, Aces over Europe and Aces of the Pacific and a few others.  First on line was Warbirds, then went to Aces (2006)high along with the 475th when they moved from Warbirds.  Dawger then got itchy feet and took the squadron to War Thunder in 2017 and now has moved it to DCS this year.
Even at my age, I still enjoy flying and still make a great target.  Once had the call sigh ibdead .    Current call sign, since 2006 is icke1.

[Maverick]

My first flight game was Battle Of Britain. I played it on my brand new hi tech IBM style 286 PC. Previously I had an apple 2c with a second floppy drive. Wore that sucker out playing all kinds of apple games. I switched to IBM when I saw all the games that were out for that profile vs apple stuff. Never went back to apple and that includes their overpriced phones even today.

My first flight sim was the venerable Flight Simulator. Hated it and went back to BoB.