Why do I do this?

I have been working in the graphic communications field in various capacities for over 25 years along with two associate degrees in fine art and the graphic arts respectively. The later coming just a couple of years ago in order to beef up my self-taught knowledge of computer graphics and the programs designed to create them.

So where does flight simulator come in you ask? Besides the fact that is the world’s greatest hobby, and I love aviation and learning to fly various aircraft and use some procedures and stuff (heck, I’m even up for the occasional flight lesson here and there – see images section), the flight simulator is a great forum for creating beauty. I have been fascinated by the thought of taking screen captures from just about anywhere in the world from any viewpoint from the ground up.

My first experience with the simulator was Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 95. Well, I was immediately hooked. Being able to soar through the skies in virtual planes was a thrill that all of my fellow FS fans can understand. The computer I was using back then (1997 to be exact) was a Sony Vaio Desktop equipped with a 200Mhz Pentium with MMX extensions (remember that?), 32 whopping megs of RAM and a huge 3.8 Gig hard drive. It even had 2 megs of video RAM! Not a bad rig for that year!

I am an impatient simmer. I wasn’t up to the task of going through the complete lessons and learning all of the procedures and stuff. That really limited the flying part (no GPS and not knowing ILS procedures) of the sim to just casual sight seeing. That’s fine of course except for the fact that the graphics were not very good. I immediately thirsted for more.

My next computer (2001) was a Gateway 1000 originally equipped with 1Ghz Pentium III, 256Megs of SD RAM, 32 MEG ATI APG graphics card and a 40 Gig hard drive. Not top of the line for the time but pretty damn good. By this time I was using FS 2000 and zipping around in all kinds of add-on aircraft with some extra scenery as well. Somewhere along the line, and running FS9, I did some upgrading and stuck a second 80gig hard drive in there, and upgraded my ram to 512, and the video card to a max of 64 Megs of video ram. This is where things started getting good in the screen captures department. Some of those captures are on this web site. Good enough? Noooo way dude!

That brings me to the current set-up. A Dell 9100 with a 3000 GHz Pentium 4 with Hyper Threading, 1 gig of RAM and a 256 Meg video card. I even have a 19” LCD monitor that really livens thing up! Is this the top of the line for today? Not even close. Is it right up there as far as FS9 goes? Without question, and I only spent $1,100 bucks US to boot. There are some more bells and whistles on it that I won’t bore with.

Am I worried about FSX? Nah, it will be at least a couple of years before I get it. That is my pattern. As you can see from this site though, with the right stuff some very nice screenshots can be accomplished in FS9.

Please enjoy the web site and feel free to send any comments or suggestions. --Doug