X-Plane is much more accurate. It's frame rate is much higher as well. Check out the X-Plane demo: http://www.x-plane.com/demo.html

There's also an iPhone version: http://www.x-plane.com/iPhone/iPhone.html

It's pretty interesting that Microsoft's Flight Simulator has its roots in subLOGIC's flight simulator for the Apple II.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Flight_Sim...

The wikipedia article also mentions that the software began life as a set of articles on computer graphics, written by Bruce Artwick throughout 1976. Does anyone know if those articles are available online?

I don't know about the articles, but Artwick wrote a book "Applied Concepts in Microcomputer Graphics" in the late 70s/early 80s. I recall it had some Apple II code in the back.

That's sad to hear. When I was a kid, I bought Flight Shop (3rd party product to create airplanes for FS 98) and made a whole bunch of aircraft, most of them from my own imagination or from sci-fi. I even made a Yehat Terminator from Star Control that had VTOL capability. I used to want to become an aerospace engineer and design planes, but somewhere along the way I noticed I spent way too much time on the computer and got interested in programming instead.

Sad to see the legacy of a childhood memory pass on.

And suddenly, with a certain Proustian rush in vivid 8-bit color, I recall long hours spent repeatedly pushing my little teal Cessna off Meigs Field only to crash into the Sears Tower whilst attempting to land on top of it. The point of such a feat, you ask? To savor the pleasure of taking off again, of course.

As one who used to play FS, what does that leave in terms of graphically rich FS games? Anything besides X-Plane?

Flight Gear is a pretty nice simulator that's released under the GPL:

http://www.flightgear.org/

so, windows is next ?

Maybe not:

Visual Basic, the great-great-great grandchild of Microsoft Basic for the Altair, the company’s first product, is the oldest.

/crosses fingers

They did kill it. VB.NET is nothing like VB 3-6, their popular offering through the 90's. VB.NET is just C# with VB-like syntax, with the addition of a couple of VB-specific retardations. I truly believe it's entire purpose was to entice VB 3-6 developers to transition to the .NET platform instead of Java, a more open and cross-platform language than Microsoft's .NET offering at the time, as VB would no longer be updated and developers had to find another language.

The other reason is they likely wanted to have lots of developers use their language, so by killing VB off, the most popular language in the world at the time, they thought they would be able to claim a lot of .NET users very quickly. And of course, Java was being used as an alternative to Microsoft's stuff and C++. Both of these show stupid standards.

Python and Ruby, for example, were created with the idea of having a beautiful and useful language, and not by Microsoft for enterprise use, nor become popular as a big company enterprise alternative to Microsoft's offerings. Learning an open-source, beautiful language that isn't run by a big corporation for enterprise use is just refreshing.

See Java's Cover: http://paulgraham.com/javacover.html

Point taken. VB.NET has come a long way from Altair BASIC.

Still, I'd be happy if they killed off VB so that I wouldn't have to deal with its syntax and retardations. Working in an MS environment I can only ask for so much, but at least with C# my loops get braces.

it wasn't an MS product originally, it was a SubLogic application, and I had a copy on my Commodore 64.

X-Plane is, in my opinion, a more accurate flight simulator than MSFS is, but I enjoy the training modules MSFS X offers, even though in those training modules oftentimes the program takes over the flying part to some extent. X-Plane is a very accurate and enjoyable sim, less a game.

The other sad part of this layoff is, that the same team was also developing MS Train Simulator 2, which was scheduled for release sometime this year.