I no longer have any of the MS flight sims... but man, i remember them from wayyyy back!
i remember that i was SO excited when i got my first copy of MS flight sim number 4. whoa! was that something!
i raced home eagerly to install the game on my 386 Packard Hell (really packard bell, but you would have had to have one of the POS bastards to know where the hell came from) and eagerly booted her up.
gads but it wouldn't run!
like almost everything back then, the game ran in DOS and you had to make a boot disk to get more memory to run almost every game. and I HATED making boot disks! ga!
finally i got the boot disk made and inserted and rebooted into the game... oh man, the MS Flight Sim 4 logo came up and my heart was racing ninety miles an hour...this was so cool. i got into the actual game then and that neato slowly turning plane appeared in the plane selection section---oh man, this was it. THIS WAS IT! i was gonna fly the MOST realistic flight simulator known to man in about five seconds.
and i did. and it was great. i loved it. i loved it even more when after a few days (we were on prodigy back then) i read on one of the forums (it was all text forum boards then, NO pictures or ads at all anywhere!) that some guy at some site had the BAO plane design software that could actually MAKE new aircraft for the game. eventually i found his addy and went to his site and he had dozens of downloads there... yeah, he had a P-51 Mustang, a F-4U Corsair, a P-38 Lightning, and other war and commercial planes! OMG! i was in hog heaven! i must have stayed up all night downloading planes! (at those slow connection speeds, i think my modem was blazing fast at something like 9.2 kbps or some such shyte, it took hours to download even a 150k file) sigh, those were the days.
i downloaded all of those planes and then discovered that his planes were made for FS3---they wouldn't work with FS4! ga!
a month later though and somebody (BAO I think) made a convertor and then---i really was in hog heaven!
by the way, BAO corporation was eventually brain-sucked and bought out by microsoft---from that point on they turned out shyte. figures.
those were mother beautiful sims, even back then though, and i loved them. i kept up with the FS series through FS6 or 7, but after that, i got too involved in pure combat sims and never went back...but i remember them as sort of like a first love...with the rosey glow of good memories everytime i think of them.
Beowolff