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Computer Flight Simulators > Apple simulators

Fajollyroger
Heliman
Location: Framingham, MA USA

I am an avid Mac(apple) computer user. I have had trouble finding a simulator that I can use for Macs does anyone know of one or a few. Thanks for the help.

01-29-2006 Over year old.

z11355
rrMaster
Location: 10000 is enough time wasted.

yes, you will have trouble finding a sim.

http://runryder.com/search.htm?do=s...sortby=lastpost

search for 'sim and mac'

01-29-2006 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

pariah
Senior Heliman
Location: West Valley City, UT - United States of America

First, a warning: I'm typing this from a Mac. I don't want to hear any crap about thinking that the Mac is an inferior product. The only OSes that I think even come close to OS X are also of a Unix-like lineage (such as Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) I develop software for supercomputers, so I know a thing or two about software development.

The bottom line is that there simply isn't a large enough market for a Mac R/C simulator. The sim writers simply cannot turn a profit if they make a Macintosh simulator; the development costs would far outstrip any return they could get through selling it.

You don't have to like it, but you do have to accept this fact of life. One of two things have to happen to see a good commercial Mac sim:

1.) The market for an R/C sim would have to grow enough that an R/C simulator sells as many copies as Unreal Tournament or The Sims.
2.) The Macintosh market share would have to grow by an order of magnitude.

In either case, the problem is that it costs hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of dollars to write a commercial R/C simulator. Almost every R/C simulator out there (including RealFlight and Reflex) are written in Direct3D, which is specific to Windows. Porting OpenGL games (such as Halo, Unreal Tournament, and Doom) from Windows to Mac is costly enough; adding a Direct3D to OpenGL port is even more expensive.

Knife Edge and Reflex are not charities. They have to turn a profit; if they don't, then nobody will make R/C simulators at all. The economics simply aren't favorable to creating a Macintosh version. (Even as a 'break-even' scenerio)

I know of only one R/C Helicopter simulator for Mac:
http://www.alphamacsoftware.com/

I've tried it, and it's no better than the 'FMS' (Free Model Sim) simulator, which is to say, not wonderful.

For a while, one called 'collective' was being developed as an open-source project, called 'Collective.' It's hosted at http://developer.berlios.de/projects/collective/

The problem with Collective is that it appears to have been abandoned; the last code-repository commit was on 27 Apr 2005. This means that nobody has made any kind of changes to the source code in nearly a year. This is generally an indicator that Collective is not even being worked on, and will likely never be finished.

--
Helicopters & Women: The last thing I want is one whose head has a few loose screws.

01-29-2006 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

rayhuang
Senior Heliman
Location: Cleveland, Ohio

For what its worth-I use a mac at home and I was in the same boat. I also wated to run Virtual RC (A RC car racing sim). My only choice was to buy a bargain brand PC for home with lots of bells and whistles. After online rebates, etc. I was able to buy the top of the line e-machine with 1-gig ram, upgradeable express 200ATI card for $399. A price that is less than Office for mac-which I was also contemplating the purchase of.

Its enough to run G3 as is. YES-it could "play" better, sharper look to heli but its good enough for now to get my hover training in. I am sure I'll need faster fps, etc. when I advance to forward flight and 3d on the sim.

01-30-2006 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

cosh
Senior Heliman
Location: Leeds

Where theres a will theres a way !

UK Leeds

02-01-2006 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

Red9301
Senior Heliman
Location: London UK

Quote
First, a warning: I'm typing this from a Mac. I don't want to hear any crap about thinking that the Mac is an inferior product. The only OSes that I think even come close to OS X are also of a Unix-like lineage (such as Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) I develop software for supercomputers, so I know a thing or two about software development.

Well 'aint u the techno superhuman. Come on dont give me that. Yer the OS is great, but the hardware is really bad, in particular when it comes to gfx processing (something yr gona need if u want a decent sim). The application is designed for business mostly, and the proliferation of WinPC's is never gonna tempt decent development from software co's, or driver developers come to think of it.

Its gotta be a PC, unless you use photoshop or emagic logic solely. Forget R/C simulators.

cheers,

Red
PS: I have a pc and a mac, the mac is a great looking and feeling machine, but in terms of softs and hards, forget it. The OS is the only thing going for it, and even thats based on unix...Oh, and I'm typing this from a mac also...

Making crashing an art form...

02-01-2006 Over year old.

pariah
Senior Heliman
Location: West Valley City, UT - United States of America

Quote
Yer the OS is great, but the hardware is really bad, in particular when it comes to gfx processing (something yr gona need if u want a decent sim).

Both Apple and generic PC's use identical silicon to handle 3D graphics. Reguardless of the make of the video card, they are almost without exception a clone of ATI or nVidia's reference design. There might be a different color to the PCboard's silkscreen or a slightly different heatsink/fan, but they have the same layout and traces. It's like saying that one Ferarri will go faster than another of the same make/model because the first one is red.

Quote
The application is designed for business mostly, and the proliferation of WinPC's is never gonna tempt decent development from software co's, or driver developers come to think of it.

Considering I know this statement to be patently false, I was considering ignoring it entirely. It's not hard to get excellent drivers on a non-windows platform. Trivially easy, in fact. I work with quite a few of the best driver developers in the world. (Yes, this includes video drivers: 3D visualization is a big deal in the supercomputer business).

The GPU venders are quite interested in having their drivers perform well on any platform. Had you cared to do any level of research, you would have found that 90+% of the driver's source code is the same; this means 90% of the Mac driver's code is identical to that in the Linux and Windows drivers. Unsuprisingly, the performance is nearly identical as well. (Each OS can claim top marks for particular operations; nobody really outshines the others).

Having good 3D performance means that engineers and scientists will use that company's hardware for their work. Professional-grade graphics hardware is considerably more profitable than the consumer market. It's a big deal when you can sell a single video card for $4k. Then sell several hundred of them at once. Executives take notice.

There isn't a computer out there that doesn't have serious warts. I routinely see horridly buggy motherboards, buggy CPU's, terrible chipsets. When every manufacturer's highest quality products have significant and unfixable hardware bugs, you tend to get cynical about the whole 'quality computer' deal. Apple's machines are ahead of the curve in this reguard. They are not without issues-- but they have, on the whole, fewer of them than 'pc' hardware. Apple's gear tends to have a fairly low failure rate, as well as fewer hardware bugs.

The only thing keeping a Macintosh R/C simulator of equal quality and speed as those found on Windows boxes is money. The people making these things have to make a living, and there aren't enough Mac customers for that to be possible.

This does not mean that there aren't high-performance 3D graphics applications in which Mac and Linux dominate.

But if I had to select a computer based on the quality of its hardware, I would not pick a PC.

Not that it will matter much after Apple has moved its entire lineup to Intel CPU's.

--
Helicopters & Women: The last thing I want is one whose head has a few loose screws.

02-02-2006 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

Fajollyroger
Heliman
Location: Framingham, MA USA

woot another MAC lover! Just a few things to say concerning that subject.

If you took the time, you would see 90% of all the programs designed for PCs were designed by Apple then sold to that company. One example everyone is familiar with is the beloved program AIM.

Second: Saying PCs are better then macs is like comparing the technology of japan to the technology of the world. They have better tech just a smaller amount of people that use it. They can do anything we can with their stuff but not the other way around like MACs and PCs. MACs now have the capability with programs called virtual PCs to run any windows opperation and program. (this is a wonderfull tool). So therefore The apple computers are superior because they can operate anything the windows computer has and more.

Third: Now i am pro MAC but just a quick fact. More than 90% (I think the curent # is 97% but im not sure) of the world that uses computers, uses a windows platform. Therefore would it benefit the attackers to create viruses that attack MACs pr PCs. Obviosly PCs. So the viruses are designed to attack PCs. U say but if their coding is only 10% different then what makes them so immune shouldnt it be so easy to mkae it atttack both? No. THink of this: 99.9% of all the DNA in every person on this earth is exactly the same. That 0.1 precent makes everyone different. More over; 99.2% of all the DNA in all vertebrates is the same, and I garnatee you, im not a whale-monkey.

Fourth: The reason you all own pcs and the rest of us own apple computers is because this. Way back when when computers were being made. there were 2 companies. ONe (MACS) built a wonderful OS but spent so much time on their OS they barely made ay programs at all. THe other Built a not so good OS but many many programs. Now the people go to buy the computers. They dont even know what OS stands for, but they have computer over here that can do lots of stuff. NOw monkey see monkey do. Kids see mommy and daddy come home with a PC so when they get older thats what they buy and so it spreads. until now when the Apple computer recently made a come back using the popular Ipod and mini-mac.

So yah woot for MAcs. and thanks to all those who helped with

02-03-2006 Over year old.

nheather
Veteran
Location: Horsham, West Sussex, UK

Quote
MACs now have the capability with programs called virtual PCs to run any windows opperation and program. (this is a wonderfull tool).

Don't see what all the fuss is about then!

Just run XTR, G3 or AFP on your Macs and we can close this thread off.

Cheers,

Nigel

02-03-2006 Over year old.

Joe Ubaldo
Veteran
Location: Grand Rapids, MI USA

I'm an Apple Reseller/Specialist/Consultant. The new Intel processor based Macs will probably be able to run Microsoft's new OS. We Macintosh owners may be able to run Windows based simulators soon.

02-03-2006 Over year old.

pilotError
Key Veteran
Location: Long Island, NY

Mac...

Give it time, some enterprising hacker will build the bootstrap code for Windoze on Mac.

Most people don't think you can boot current versions of window on a Mac because the Macs don't use BIOS, the use something called the extensible firmware interface (EFI). What most people don't know is that Gateway used to sell a Media Center (maybe they still do) that booted using EFI. They believed it was the future, as Microsoft was pushing the hardware vendors to go that direction. So it has already been done. Windows Vista does it out of the box, so anyone will be able to install it.

None of this stuff is new. It may seem new and miraculous (Virtual PC), but its rehashed crap that others have done before. If you look at the old Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) when they switched their proprietary chips to Alpha chips, they had a binary translator that would run programs written for the old chip (sound familiar). What was unique about it, was that if you wanted to, the machine would translate a bit of the code at a time during run-time, and store the new binary code on the hard drive. After a while, the entire binary was actually native to the Alpha chip without any work from anyone.

You probably won't see any Sims unless the freeware guys get the project rolling again, since as someone said before, there's no money in it yet. The biggest problem is the Sim guys are all using the Microsoft API's. I don't think Microsoft is licensing that technology out anytime soon, and if they did, I wouldn't trust them.

Why do I say this??? Again, the old DEC/Compaq licensed the Microsoft API's for use in the server world (everything sans the visual stuff). After 5+ years of DEC building an entire multi-billion dollar strategy, marketing and sales effort, Microsoft pulled the licenses without warning from them and essentially stranded all the customers that bought into it.

I hope Mac takes over the desktop or at least puts a big dent in the M$ enterprise. I would love to see Macs in the larger corporate world.

Mike...

Good Judgement comes from Experience. Great Judgement comes from Bad Experience.

02-03-2006 Over year old.

z11355
rrMaster
Location: 10000 is enough time wasted.

Well, the new Apple 'Rosetta' is similar to the DEC JIT binary
translator that allows PPC binaries to run on the Intel chips.
From what I hear, Rosetta is a major RAM hog.

I also wish Apple would give us a way to strip out the new
Universal binaries so they dont consume 2x the disk.

In any case, VPC isn't fast enough for any simulator.

Until they figure out how to boot Windo$e on the new Mac's
(and there is a bounty on this!), it's all just speculation.

02-03-2006 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

hondaboy945
Senior Heliman
Location: Orlando, FL

give it time and it will happen. With the new intel(AMD?) conversion, and the fact that you can get a Quatro FX 512 Mb video card for the mac. Wont the sim look amazing on dual or quad 30-inch apple displays. Programmers unite and write the OS X windows link, PLEASE>

02-11-2006 Over year old.

Squirrlybird
Veteran
Location: Suffolk, Va US

Well im blue in the face now

02-11-2006 Over year old.

Hoverdown3K
Key Veteran
Location: Rochester, New York

Simply put it is a PC world out there. the MAC has never caught on and this late in the game I doubt it will.

All you have to do is walk into any store selling computers stuff, then look in the very back of the store for one shelf, that is the mac stuff.

-= I know there is Money in RC helicopters. I put it there=-

02-13-2006 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

Handel
Heliman
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Now that XP can be run on Intel macs, I’d like to hear when someone tries to run Reflex or G3 on one.
Meanwhile, the best sim for macs is still x-plane. (x-plane.com)

03-20-2006 Over year old.

pariah
Senior Heliman
Location: West Valley City, UT - United States of America

Quote
Meanwhile, the best sim for macs is still x-plane. (x-plane.com)

Well, it's probably the best sim for PC's too, but it's not as ideal for R/C use as Reflex, RealFlight, and AeroFly.

That being said, it's one heckuva point... That, and you can try flying an R/C plane on Mars, with real martian gravity, and real martian atmospheric density.

Or an R/C X-15. Don't blink.

RealFlight's 'mars' field could almost as easily be southern Utah.

--
Helicopters & Women: The last thing I want is one whose head has a few loose screws.

03-21-2006 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

nonpareil_one
Senior Heliman
Location: Dallas, TX

Quote
But if I had to select a computer based on the quality of its hardware, I would not pick a PC

I'm lost in this statement. For starters, it's the same hardware, or will be anyway in the next couple of years for all models. And on top of that, the ones that are the same models operate 4-5 times faster then their PPC powered predecessors. I think it's funny the new sub 2k Imac is faster then the monster G5 tower myself, and just wait until the optimized apps for it come out.

And you really think Apple makes their own hardware? You think there's a bunch of guys in Cupertino with soldering irons making your mac? The hardware is made at the same outsourced asian assembly plants as PC components for manufacturers like Compaq, Dell, Gateway, etc for the lowest bid price. The only time you actually KNOW what you're getting is when you buy top shelf hardware from top shelf asian hardware manufacturers like Abit, Asus, Tyan, Gigabyte, etc. The ones who have a track record for high quality and cutting edge products.

Unfortunately Steve Jobs ripped that wonderful option from all you Mac users when he made it 'unlicensable' to run MacOS on Non-Mac hardware thus nearly putting Umax out of business back in the late 90's. I'm still mad at him about that...

You know how he can make good on it though? And make a $#@%load of money? Sell MacOS X for x86 64 bit CPUs for PC users to run. It is the ONLY operating system on the market with any chance of making a serious dent in the windows market for it brings with it known and commercially available software, a standards based interface and program structure (not a billion distributions) and ease of use.

I'm a PC user, Windows XP sp2, No firewall, no Antivirus, No anti-spyware, hosting a website on IIS as the DMZ host wide open. Never had a virus, spyware, or a successful hack attempt get into my machine. Updated, and secured by someone who understands it (IT pro, MCSE, MCSA, CCNA, CCNP), XP is a great OS and I can run just about any software I want, including my sims. But Don't Think I'm a mac hater, I recently had a version 1 Imac for a couple months over the summer to tinker with and now that the Intel ones are out I'll probably get another one, and of course dual boot it. And just because I'm a PC user, doesn't mean I don't have hopes that Apple can ACTUALLY compete, and now is the time, now they have the opportunity with an OS that performs, is robust, and is NOW capable of running on Intel/x86 hardware. If they'd just open it up...

ATTN STEVE JOBS:

Steve, quit being an idiot and SELL YOUR OS to PC users! I mean really, you did a great job marketing an average to below average mp3 player when far better ones were available for less money. But everyone is still buying yours. They might just do the same with your OS if you gave it a try. And it may actually turn out to be better...

Whew, ok, I'm done.

NPO

03-21-2006 Over year old.

miked37945
Heliman
Location: Riverdale, IL

Apple Vs. Mac

Squash all the competitive BS about which is better. The best one for anyone is the one they choose and are comfortable with! I started with PC and now have a Mac. I "Prefer" my Mac but still use my PC for programs which aren't made for Mac yet. If you like PC then it's the best for you, who cares what's best for someone who didn't pay for the one "you" use? In addition, if they have nothing better to do than to convince you which is better, they need a life! If G3 or Reflex don't come to Mac, then I'll keep flying my G3 on my PC!

03-21-2006 Over year old.

pariah
Senior Heliman
Location: West Valley City, UT - United States of America

Quote
Squash all the competitive BS about which is better

Definately; it's rather immature to try to claim one is better than the other. Most arguments of this kind are of the 'Chevy/Ford/Dodge' sort; people will rabidly claim that 'their' purchase is, of course, the better system.

Those few who use multiple architectures and multiple operating systems daily tend to have a less polarized view. There aren't many who use PowerPC, SPARC, x86, and x86_64/em64t systems daily. Similarly, there aren't many who use Mac, Windows, Linux, and a gamut of Unixen within a week's time. And if you ask those who do have such experience which is the 'best,' their response will almost always be "that depends on what you're using it for."

This is still one of the best statements I've seen for what kind of computer is better -- it depends on what you're using it for.

--
Helicopters & Women: The last thing I want is one whose head has a few loose screws.

03-24-2006 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

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Computer Flight Simulators > Apple simulators

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