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The "Aviator" flight sim for Sun GX hardware (e.g. SPARCstations)

@tokenalt BTW, did 1.5 have a way to switch to a third-person view, so that you could see the plane in-flight? Or was it limited to just the view from the cockpit?
 
@tokenalt BTW, did 1.5 have a way to switch to a third-person view, so that you could see the plane in-flight? Or was it limited to just the view from the cockpit?
It does have a third person view. I'll try to make another video in a few days on slower hardware that shows off some more features as well as some limitations.
 
It does have a third person view. I'll try to make another video in a few days on slower hardware that shows off some more features as well as some limitations.
Thanks - this is something I'm definitely looking forward to seeing.
 
(Cross-posting this from another thread I opened. Mods... if that's not OK and you want to delete one of the duplicates, please leave this one intact and delete the other one. Though if I can keep both up, that would be cool.)

These are some responses I've received on Reddit. I'm not familiar with Sun hardware myself (which is why I'm asking for help from you clever people!) So I'd like to ask for some more information once you've read the below Reddit quote. To whit:
Here we go:

leadedsolder 0 points 15 hours ago*

Calling “version” on my SS1+ (which refuses to boot anything) reports Version 1.3 Release 4, according to my notes. It’s a little under a pile right now but I can dig it up. Do you know what kind of ROM IC it uses? I have a TL866 ROM programmer that can do a dump.

I honestly would like a 2.x ROM so I could run a TurboGX card…
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leliel 1 point 12 hours ago

I think you're out of luck cause the 1+ is the only machine I can't find a 2.x rom for. But that machine should run sunos 4.0.3c fine.

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leadedsolder 1 point 12 hours ago

Yeah, I found a reference to a service kit to upgrade to 2.x but I never found a dump of the ROM.

I’ll try to fish the SS1+ out this week and dump the rom to see if it’s of any use for this flight simulator quest.
 
A recent post on forums DOT sgi DOT sh claims that PROM 1.X isn't actually needed for Sun OS 4.1 or earlier - apparently there's some kind of 1.X compatibility mode the 2.X PROM can be put into. The exact quote:

actually, you don't strictly need a version 1 .X OBP to run SunOS 4.0. There is some documented OBP magic you can use to enable 1.X compatibility on a 2.X OBP version. It is pretty much just an environment variable (that I currently forgot...).

(I don't know what OBP stands for. On-Board PROM perhaps?)

I know nothing about this "magic ... environment variable" beyond this quote, but will post a new thread enquiring about it.

Does anyone know the answer to leadedsolder's question - which ROM IC "it" uses? I don't know if the "it" they're asking about is their SS1+ or about @tokenalt's Sun 4C,
leadedsolder has posted confirmation that it's the SS1+.
 
An update of sorts about the second video. One of the features I wanted to show was the networked game play which was complicated by the fact I only have one hdd for sunos so I had to set up a netboot server. Unfortunately for reasons I don't understand both of my ss10 will panic a few minutes after netbooting sunos so things are stalled on that end for now. In other news I tried running aviator 1.2 on my 3/80 which does not have a cgsix and it worked well enough to tell me I needed a cgsix which I suppose is a good sign. So does anyone know where I can get p4 framebuffers for a reasonable price?
 
An update of sorts about the second video. One of the features I wanted to show was the networked game play which was complicated by the fact I only have one hdd for sunos so I had to set up a netboot server. Unfortunately for reasons I don't understand both of my ss10 will panic a few minutes after netbooting sunos so things are stalled on that end for now. In other news I tried running aviator 1.2 on my 3/80 which does not have a cgsix and it worked well enough to tell me I needed a cgsix which I suppose is a good sign. So does anyone know where I can get p4 framebuffers for a reasonable price?

Even sun3/80's are hard to find. I haven't seen a pre-sparc sun for sale in a long time.
 
Even sun3/80's are hard to find. I haven't seen a pre-sparc sun for sale in a long time.
There was actually two 3/80s on ebay last month and in the last two years there has been a 3/50, 3/60, 3/280, 4/110 and a 4/330. There was also two broken mg4 and a cg4. So they're out there you just search hard and get lucky.
 
There was actually two 3/80s on ebay last month and in the last two years there has been a 3/50, 3/60, 3/280, 4/110 and a 4/330. There was also two broken mg4 and a cg4. So they're out there you just search hard and get lucky.
I didnt see those. I'm surprised someone dropped $500 on one.
 
So I have figured out what was causing aviator 1.2 to crash, it was the data sets for Boston and Hawaii. I don't know if they're corrupt, the wrong version, or just not compatible with my later hardware. However the program will run with the Grand Canyon data, altho it still has some rendering issues. On my SGX and GX+ it doesn't handle the colormap properly so it's in shades of blue with some other minor rendering errors but otherwise seems to work. On my TGX the colormap is correct but the first time I ran it I got some major rendering errors with triangles spanning from top to bottom, that hasn't happened again but maybe I've just been lucky. The program doesn't support extra VRAM and only runs in 4bit color and can only run at 1152x900 so I don't think it was coded with future hardware in mind, so maybe the program will run better on an original multi chip GX.

Side note on performance. I've run both versions on the slowest CPU I have, sm30 & sm100, and they were still very fast and responsive. So based on that I think you could probably run them on almost any sparc machine and still get good performance.


Since Aviator 1.2 is a full version you can fly for as long as you like so I think it would be a good demo to use at a computer festival, especially with the network game play.
 
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