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In the mid-1980s, Flight Simulator was ane of the biggest PC titles in the business concern — and Microsoft is gearing up to launch the beta for Flight Simulator 2020, a game that surprised pretty much everyone by existing when Microsoft first announced information technology a twelvemonth ago.

The new beta version of the game is scheduled to driblet on July thirty. Current blastoff testers will exist granted automated admission, while the company is likewise preparing a new wave of beta invites. Access to the beta is handled through the Xbox Insider program, which you can sign up for here.

If you haven't seen what the next version of Flight Simulator is going to look like, or you can't effigy out why anyone would pay to wing commercial and hobbyist planes from A to B, check out the launch video below.

The last flight simulator I seriously played was Falcon iii.0 in 1991, so I tin can't exactly phone call myself a giant fan of the genre, but the cockpits and visuals of Flight Simulator are near enough to make me reconsider.

Flying Simulator is actually the oldest franchise Microsoft owns, predating fifty-fifty Microsoft Windows. Originally created by Bruce Atwick in 1977, it was licensed by Microsoft for the IBM PC with CGA graphics in 1982. This version of the program became known as Flight Simulator 1.0, and became role of the standard test suite for evaluating whether PCs were truly "IBM Compatible."

As some of our older readers may retrieve, in the early days of the clone PC market the degree of compatibility with software written specifically for IBM'due south PC products could exist… dicey. There were a number of applications that didn't run properly on some of the early on IBM clones, due to what Atwick described as a "bug in one of Intel'south chips." Of the early clone manufacturers, Compaq was virtually the only one who could deliver true compatibility. Unlike other manufacturers, Compaq reverse-engineered IBM'southward BIOS and wrote a clean-room design to be compatible with it.

Customers plain had a vested interest in ensuring the IBM software they'd previously purchased would run on a so-called "IBM Compatible," and the manufacture adult two unofficial tests for verifying backward compatibility: Lotus one-2-three and Flying Simulator. If your computer could run both of these applications well, it could handle anything else (at least, that was the thinking).

Flying Simulator 2020 is the beginning new version of the game since 2006, so the visuals are definitely getting something of an upgrade. The game is currently slated for a late 2020 release, with no firmer date available.

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