DEVELOPMENT OF "IFR FLIGHT SIMULATOR"

Ron Wanttaja


I'm a bit old-fashioned.  I was taught to be modest; to not brag about
my accomplishments.  I've posted a lot of my experiences over the
years to the aviation newsgroups, but in all but very few cases,
they've been along the lines of "Well, look what stupid thing I've
done now...."

If I'm going to tell the "IFR Flight Simulator" story, though, I have
to abandon my usual themes of ignorance, stupidity, and luck.  Most of
us have defining events of our lives, and there's no question that
"IFR" was one of the biggest ones in mine.  To tell the whole story,
to fully explain how things came about, I'll have to grit my teeth and
abandon modesty.  For once, I *did* do something right.

As you'll see, though, one of my usual traits still shines through:
Luck.  Luck in catching the home-computer frenzy early, luck in making
some decent decisions early-on, luck in finding a decent, honest,
company to market "IFR," and luck in making the right friends.
Especially the friends.

I'll have to apologize for any gaps or VIC-20 faux-pas in the
following.  It's been a long time since I last fired up my VIC, though
I finally abandoned using Commodore computers only six years ago.  I
kept a scrapbook from the period, which helps.  I've got all the
hardware, even all the tapes.  But a subsequent move has apparently
buried my hard-copy of the code itself.  So I'm going to have to
resurrect some of the programming details from rather faulty memory.

As I write this, I'm sitting in a comfortable armchair pounding on a
laptop computer about half the size of a Sears catalog.  A CD player
plays quietly in the background.  From the kitchen comes a hum as the
dishwasher flips through its programmed wash cycle.  I can hear the
the faint muttering of a TV upstairs, as my wife watches QVC as she
telecommutes using her Pentium-II PC.

It's hard to think back 17 years, to when I bought my computer. I was
just out of the Air Force, freshly married, working as a junior
engineer for one of the biggest aerospace companies in the world.

Home PCs were all the rage.  It was 1982, and IBM was selling its 8086
machine for about $2,000..

Now, $2,000 for an IBM sounds like an OK deal today, but that was a
HECK of a lot of money in 1982.  It was about a tenth of what my
Lieutenant's pay had been at the time I'd left the Air Force.

Fortunately, a bunch of upstart companies were introducing "Computers
for the rest of us."  There was the Timex-Sinclair 1000, the Atari
400, the TI-99...and the Commodore VIC-20

I was facing some minor surgery that would lay me up for a couple of
weeks, and thought that it'd be a good time to get a computer so I'd
have something to fiddle with.

We lived on a hill overlooking a shopping complex, and there were
several computer stores there.  At one store, a very earnest, *very*
young man explained the virtues of the VIC-20 to me.  I was completely
computer-illiterate, but Dave Paulsen was able to make it
understandable.

The VIC had a full-size keyboard, a definite plus.  It used the TV for
a display device, showing 23 columns and 25 rows of rather squat
characters.  In addition to the full upper-and-lower case character
set (an advantage over some of its competitors) it also had a bunch of
characters shaped like triangles, etc. that could be used to build
shapes.  It had 3.5K of RAM.  To put things better in proportion,
that's 0.0035 Meg.

I paid my $300 for the computer and went home happy.  After a couple
of days I was back...it was getting too tiresome to have to retype the
programs in all the time, so I sprung $40 for the Commodore
"Datasette"; their storage device using standard cassette tapes.  The
Datasette was one of the drawbacks of the VIC, as far as I was
concerned...other companies' computers used a conventional cassette
recorder.

Anyway, I programmed happily away.  As a newlywed in a new job, money
was tight, so I didn't buy any games.  I wrote my own.  I don't recall
any particular details of these early games, except for one.  It was
the typical artillery game, where you entered in the angle of the gun
barrel, trying to range in on the target.  Being a Hornblower fan, I
set it up as a nautical game called "On the Uproll."  The ballistics
programming was easy; I spent most of my time getting the
character-graphics navy cannon to recoil across the screen when it
fired.....

IFR started as one of these games.  I've got an old flying buddy who
occasionally came to town with his wife to visit her parents.  Rick
and I go waaaay back, and love to bicker about trivia.  We
automatically take opposite sides of every issue, just so we could
argue it back and forth.

Anyway, Rick and I had done a lot of electronic experimenting in our
high-school days.  On one of his visits, he mentioned he was using a
new transducer to build a digital airspeed indicator for aircraft.

"G'wannnn," I told him.  "As I pilot, I want an analog needle so that
trends are more obvious.  Flickering numbers don't tell you as much as
a rapidly-falling needle."

We argued it back and forth, to the usual dismay of our wives.  But it
didn't end when Rick went back to Boise.  By God, I *knew* I was
right...and I would write a flight simulator program with a digital
airspeed readout to prove it to Rick, the next time he came to town!

I knew displaying an outside view would be way beyond my programming
capabilities, and would probably slow the simulation down to a crawl
even if I *could* write one (the VIC had something like a 0.5 Mhz
clock speed).  The lack of an outside view didn't bother me.  At that
time, visual displays even on REAL simulators were rare, and
non-existent on the ATC-510s and war-surplus Link Trainers that were
all the simulation devices General Aviation ever saw.

The first problem was how to display the aircraft's attitude.  I
needed an artificial horizon (AH), or the whole thing would be a waste
of time.

The ordinary character graphics were too clumsy...they weren't set
with the right charcters for all the conceivable positions an AH would
need.  Besides a one-character-wide AH was too small.

Fortunately, in reading some of the programming magazines, I
discovered how to "reprogram" character definitions to make the
character look however I wanted.  I could set up a 3x3 matrix of
characters for a bitmapped area for my AH.  I redefined several other
characters to surround the gauges to look like instrument frames.

But when I programmed the AH in BASIC...it was slow, horribly slow.
That was just a subroutine to draw one instrument...how slow would it
get by the time everything was working?

I scanned though the VIC's Programmer's Reference Guide.  I had always
skipped over the machine-language programming section, but looked at
it with renewed interest.  I'd recently taken an off-hours course at
work on programming the 8080 processor, and noticed how a lot of the
6502 codes looked similar.  On the course I'd taken, we'd programmed
EEPROMs by entering hex codes.  Reading up on the VIC, it appeared I
could POKE a decimal equivalent into the VIC memory.  Reading the RAM
map carefully gave me the hints I'd needed as to where to put the
machine language code.

I still had the programming forms left over from the 8080 course.  The
Programmer's Guide had the appropriate hex numbers for the 6502
operations.  I hadn't heard of assemblers or any sort of aids that
would let me just enter in the Op code itself.

Out of that ignorance, I ended up writing a simple
hex-to-decimal-to-POKE routine to program the machine language.  I
wrote the Op Code (INP, ROL, etc.) on the form, then wrote down the
proper hex value.  The program let me key in the hex, which it would
then convert to decimal and POKE into memory.  The program also saved
the resulting machine language program to the cassette drive.

Fortunately, allocating memory to machine code wasn't a problem
anymore.  I'd spent $150 for a 16K memory expansion for the VIC.
That's about $9,000/Meg, BTW.

The simple program I wrote to display the AH information worked
blazingly fast...but it had a problem.  I wasn't much of a Machine
Langauge programmer...I wasn't able to do more than a "four-banger"
calculator could do.  I couldn't come up with an easy way to do Sines
and Cosines, so I used a "cheat" routine to compute the relative tilt
of the AH based on the roll angle of the aircraft.

Unfortunately, the "cheat" didn't have a 90-degree point.  It worked
up to about a 60-degree bank, but the line started distorting past
that.

But as I considered *why* I was writing the simulator, I realized I
didn't need it to be able to roll past 60 degrees.  Having the BASIC
program handle the control reversals involved with rolling inverted,
etc. slowed the program down just too much.

So I made the decison: The flight model wouldn't allow rolling to
ninety degrees or flying inverted.  What to do about the AH, though?
Older model AHs couldn't handle aerobatic maneuvers and "spilled" if
their limits were exceeded.  I merely put in a subroutine into the AH
machine code that changed the display to "OFF" if roll or pitch limits
were exceeded.

With that, it was time for the flight model.  I'd played around with
the early Microsoft Flight Simulator on a friend's IBM, and there were
a couple of things I didn't like about it.  First was the keyboard
interface.  As a pilot, I was offended.  If I had a flight simulator,
it was GOING to be joystick only.

Second...and probably most important...I didn't like the "remoteness"
of the control feel.  Too often, the airplane operated contrarily to
my actions the controls.  I'd flown a variety of aircraft and
simulators, right up to a KC-135 simulator at CAP camp.  I'd *never*
had problems in basic control.  So however else I worked the flight
model, I would always have it so that the airplane always responded
the same way to the joystick input (except for modes like stalls, of
course).

Unfortunately, the VIC-20 used the Atari joysticks, which were
switch-type devices, not analogs.  Pulling the stick back activated a
switch, and no matter how hard or far you pulled back, all that would
happen is that that single switch would activate.

So control would be pretty simple.  Pulling back on the stick would
give one pitch rate, and one pitch rate only.  Actually, I used the
"fire" button on the stick as a rate doubler...pressing "Fire" gave
twice the rate of control.  But the pilot ALWAYS had control.  Once in
a roll or pitched up or down, the airplane maintained that attitude
until the pilot changed it or the airplane stalled or crashed.

With this limitation, the fidelity of the flight model didn't have to
be too close.  There was no reason to write a complex, interactive
flight model when the only controls were the four little switches.

I started with an airspeed model, with an airspeed "delta" being
defined by the throttle position, pitch position, flap setting, and
landing gear extension.  Each factor was multiplied by a constant to
set the relative impact of each factor.  Also include was an airframe
drag factor that varied by the current airspeed...otherwise, the
airspeed would just keep increasing without limit.  The total "delta"
was added to the current airspeed to compute the new airspeed.

Altitude was handled similarly.  The altitude delta depended upon the
pitch angle multiplied by the airspeed, with flap position causing
some altitude drop as well.  An additional decrease in altitude
depended upon the amount of roll, too...that way, the pilot needed to
add some back pressure in a turn to maintain altitude, just like a
real airplane.

All of these delta factors were just simple math..though I may have
squared the airframe drag factor in the airspeed equation.  From my
earlier programming, I knew that complex math slowed down the
execution speed, so I kept the math as simple as I could.

The airspeed calculation looked good, the altitude calcuation looked
good, the AH was working, and the airspeed and altitude readouts were
simple PRINT statements.  Time to fly!

I started the program...and immediately the altitude dropped from zero
to negative numbers.  This started the second, probably most
frustrating part of programming a flight simulator: Getting all the
subsidary rules to work right.

What had gone wrong?  Well, I had nothing in the program to detect
WHEN THE AIRPLANE WAS ON THE GROUND.  It just calculated its new
altitude, and the program didn't care if the altitude was negative.

There were a lot of things like that that had to be caught and
accounted for.  Like I mentioned earlier, the program would always
change attitude based on pilot input on the simple four-switch stick.
But, of course, it SHOULDN'T do it when the airplane was sitting still
on the ground!  And if the airplane is rolling along at 25 MPH, moving
the stick back should lift the nose off the ground...but the
effectiveness should be less than when the plane is moving at 75 MPH,
and moving the stick to either side shouldn't cause the plane to bank.
If the plane is banking at 45 degrees, moving the stick back shouldn't
cause pitch-up at the same rate as in level flight.

The computer, of course, didn't know it was simulating an airplane.
All it knew was the programming I told it.  So I had to set a number
of flags, gimmick some of the basic flight equations, and include
IF-THEN statements to cover wide variety of flight conditions.

With the basic laws set, it was time to tweek the flight-dynmanic
constants.  I wanted the airplane to fly like a common light aircraft,
so I diddled the constants to produce the proper rates of climb and
cruise speeds for the Cessna 172.

This was one of the more enjoyable aspects, since it involved "test
flying" the simulator.  Establish level flight, then drop the
flaps...how much should the airspeed sag, and how should the altitude
start dropping?  If it seemed too much or too little, change the
constant for that factor and try it again.

(It was necessary to have the altitude decrease with flaps
lowering...the pilot had to apply power and pitch up to maintain
altitude.  The plane thus ended in a nose-high pitch attitude in level
flight...just the sort of realistic effect I was looking for.)

I got the flight dynamics working pretty good.  The only unrealistic
result is that the Best Rate of Climb speed came out at about 90
MPH...a bit more than the actual 172RG.  Considering the simplicity of
the model, though, I was happy overall.

And wonder of wonders, Rick had been right.  Flying with the digital
airspeed and altitude displays wasn't much different than using analog
gauges.  I hadn't flown regularly since going into the Air Force six
years earlier.  I *really* enjoyed "test flying" the simulator.

With the dynamics up to snuff, it came time for the REAL fun
programming: Problem subroutines!

Something I didn't mention earlier is that I had some prior flight
simulator experience, in that I helped restore a WWII model Link
Trainer a few years' prior to IFR.  The Link is an analog computer in
vacuum (uses a vacuum system to "store" altitude, has an vacuum
manifold for the airspeed value, etc.  I ended up using the Link
Trainer systems as direct inspirations for IFR.

Take stalls.  On the Link Trainer, a pendulum is held forward by the
airspeed vacuum manifold and the pitch positon.  If the airspeed drops
too low for the current pitch angle, the pendulum drops back, leaking
vacuum out of the altitude storage tank.  It also triggers another
pendulum, which drops left or right depending upon rudder position and
puts the Link into a spin.

I pulled the same sort of thing with IFR.  I wanted stalls to be a BAD
thing, not the gentle experience they often are.  So when the airspeed
dropped below the limit value (set by bank angle and flap position),
the nose dropped a LOT and the plane ALWAYS spun.  I didn't have
rudder pedals, so had a random number generator pick the spin
direction if wings were level, or spun the opposite direction from the
bank if the plane was tilted.

Turbulence generation came almost directly from the Link.  The link
used vacuum bags to control the fuselage attitude.  A small motor
turned a set of cams, which could be cranked into close to a set of
keys like a piano.  When a cam hit a key, vacuum was leaked from one
of the bags.  In IFR's case, I generated a random number and XORed it
with the output from the joystick!  A magazine mentioned the memory
locations that set the display X and Y positions, so when turbulence
bumped the airplane, I had the instrument panel jerk
up/down/left/right as appropriate.

Other subroutines were fun.  Fly too fast and exceed Red Line?  Do
burst of white noise for a loud rushing noise from the speaker, and
have the airplane pitch down at 45 degrees, rocking the wings as it
plummeted into the ground.

Land gear up?  Shake the panel up and down with a scraping sound from
the speaker as the plane slides on its belly.

Crash into the ground or land with too much bank?  Change the screen
to RED with an explosion.

Land going too fast?  Have the pitch pop up as the plane bounces.

Land off the runway?  Increase the drag factor due to the mud, and
shake the screen as the plane taxis over rough ground.  Use the random
number generator to taxi the plane into a "Tree" on occasion to
discourage off-runway operations.

Other instruments were added.  I added a turn needle, basically as a
backup for if the AH spilled.  Fuel quantity was easy, and fuel burn
rate worked linearly with throttle position.  A VSI was simple enough.

Once the flight model and the instruments were working, it was time to
actually fly the plane SOMEWHERE.  I drew up a map, including four
airports and a mountain range.  There ws a high straight pass on one
leg of the L-shaped range, and a lower Z-shaped pass on the other leg.
I used an ordinary Sine/Cosine calculation with the speed to determine
the movement over the map, and a simple machine language routine to
determine the height of the ground at any particular location.
Postion was given to the pilot by a digital display of Latitude and
Longitude at the bottom of the screen.

Or at least, they were similar to Lat and Long.  The map itself was
initially 256 miles across (don'cha love 8-bit systems).  I started by
displaying the numbers as Lat and Longs...but soon realized that 256
miles doesn't cause a real big difference in lat and long (about 4
degrees total, in fact).  I didn't want to be flying by noting the
fourth decimal places, so I dropped the total map scale down from 256
miles.  On my first flight betwen the two farthest-apart runways, I
soon realized that my actual time in flight would approach *two
hours*...most of which was the droning along in flight that's the most
boring part of flying.  So I scaled the map down by a factor of ten.

One other item that came out of this was the addition of a "pause"
key.  I had deliberately not included one ("There ain't no pause in a
real airplane").  Then I got a phone call one day while on a tight
approach....

One other reach at realism worked out better.  I didn't like having an
"end flight" key that worked in the air, because, again, you just
can't quit flying when you want to.  But then I decided to make it
work in the air as well...but when you hit the "e" key in flight, the
words EJECT would flash on the screen....and the instrument panel
would shoot out the bottom of the display accompanied by a loud
WHOOOOSH!

But while I was adding all the heading and position calculations and
the tests to determine when to enter the special subroutines, bad
things were happening to the flyability of the aircraft.  It was
taking over a second to cycle through all the calculations...which
meant that the joystick postion was only being read once a second, and
thus the aircraft attitude would only be updated at the same rate.
This gave an incredibly ponderous control feel..and it tooks something
like ten second to roll 45 degrees.

The solution was simple: I just called the stick-reading and
attitude-display subroutine *four* times instead of once during the
full cycle of the calculations and subroutines.  While it didn't
affect the calculations, this quadrupled the apparent control rate.
The instruments updated once a second as before, but at least the
airplane seemed a lot more nimble.

I eventually had the program working pretty well.  I'd developed the
Saturday habit of stopping by the store where I'd bought the VIC, and
I'd enjoyed chatting with David, who'd sold me my computer.  One
Saturday I brought by a tape with the working version of IFR.  We
loaded up the program, and I let him fly around for a while.

"Y'know," said David.  "You could probably sell this."

I was a bit stunned.  I wasn't that familiar with the games on the
market for the VIC; I had enjoyed just writing my own.

But it sure sounded good.  While we were better-off than many
newlyweds, we certainly didn't feel that comfortable, financially.  My
wife was going to school full-time, with only a part-time job on
Saturdays.  "It'd be nice to make enough money back to pay for the
computer," she said.  "And a new convertible top for the VW," I
dreamed.

So, what the heck.  I wasn't sure how, exactly, to keep myself from
getting ripped off.  I called around and got the forms to apply for a
copyright.  Scanning through the ads in the computer magazines yielded
the names of about six companies whose product ads also invited
submissions of new programs.  I filed the copyright report, and sent a
query letter off to the companies..  "I have written a program for the
VIC-20 in which you might be interested.  IFR is a realistic
simulation of instrument flight...."  To show I was at least SOMEWHAT
cagy, I included a comment as to how I'd already filed for a
copyright.

Most of companies responded favorably, willing to examine the program.
A couple of them made me a bit skittish.  The one from Academy
Software impressed me the most: It was professional, it mentioned that
I didn't have to wait to get the copyright verification back before I
was protected (very true), and included a signed non-disclosure
agreement.

I sent the program in to them, and they loved it.  They called,
offering me a 15% royalty on sales.

At the time, I'd had absolutely no experience in any sort of royalty
sales.  I went to take to David at the computer store.  He allowed it
sounded fairly good, except for the lack of an advance on royalties.
But we knew software sales were iffy at best, so that was no big
drawback.

This being the usual Saturday mill-around at the computer store, there
were a number of other fellow computer geeks around.  "Man, why give
THEM all the gravy," said one.  "Publish it yourself!"

I didn't really consider that option.  There were a number of
self-published programs at the store...tapes in plastic bags, with
mimeographed instructions and cheesy-looking art.  I felt that a
publisher that could afford to advertise in COMPUTE! probably had
pretty good marketing and distribution.  Besides, I just didn't want
the hassle of doing it all myself.

So I signed, in March 1983.  They came back with a set of desired
changes, most of which I felt were pretty reasonable.

One, though, rather threw me.  I'd written the program on my VIC,
which, with the 16K memory expansion added to the 3.5K internal, had a
total memory of 19.5K.  I knew most folks wouldn't have that pricy
expansion, so I'd written it to run within the 11.5K that an 8K RAM
cartridge would give.

Academy wanted to shorten it further...so that it'd fit on an 8K ROM
chip.  "If we limit it to folks who have memory cartridges, we'll cut
down on sales," said Academy's Bob Weidner.  "We'd have to bring it
out on both tape and disk, too."

In any case, the thought that IFR would come out as a cartridge really
pumped me up.  I quickly cut the required 4K out of the program,
mostly by elminating the detailed crash modes and the ejection seat.
But as I kept looking at the program, I found unneeded and duplicated
code.  I quickly trimmed enough that I was able to replace the deleted
features.

All I had for a storage device was the cassette drive, and Academy
quickly got tired of having to load in tapes.  They sprung me a $200
advance so that I could buy a disk drive for my VIC.  The reality of
having a big 180k storage device was a minor consideration, next to
NOT having to take five minutes to read the program from a cassette
tape.

We needed an instruction manual, too.  I didn't have a printer for my
VIC (or for that matter, any sort of word processor) so I went to my
friends Judy and Bo Stringer's place and used their IBM.  I learned
Wordstar as I went, ending up with about twenty pages.  I drew the
maps by hand, which Academy redrew in decent format.

Versions went back and forth as bugs were eliminated.  Finally, in
July, I received the first FEDEX package of my life: An IFR cartridge,
and a sample of the cover art to go with the insructions.  I opened
the package and just started laughing: The cover art was PERFECT!  A
head-on, wide-angle view of a Cessna landing in the raid, with a
narrow mountain pass in the background and the inset of a sweaty hand
on a joystick in front of the IFR panel.

A real joy it was, too, when I plugged the cartridge into my VIC.
Power switch on, and there it was... "IFR (FLIGHT SIMULATOR) By Ron
Wanttaja."  No loading, no waiting.  Just like an Atari game.

Right about the same time, an advertisement in the Seattle Times
newspaper caught my eye.  Compufair, the first-ever citywide computer
fair aimed at general users, was being held in the Seattle Center
Exhibition Hall (a leftover from the 1962 World's Fair) in September
1983.  As part of the program, they were having a contest... for
"Individual innovators or anyone else with a bright new idea in
computing."  Seven finalists would be picked for the "Cloud Nine Idea"
contest, and all would receive free display booths at Compufair.  The
winner would receive $1000!

I put in an entry, and on August 30th, received notice that I was a
finalist.  I would get a free booth, a table, and a couple of
chairs...everything else was up to me.  I had two weeks to put it all
together.

Academy was thrilled...except the production plans for the IFR
cartridge would make it JUST miss the show date.  Instead, they
printed up advertising sheets with coupons for $10 off the mail-order
price of $40.

Now, how can I spiff up the booth?  Judy Stringer volunteered to sew
up fluffy clouds for the backdrop.  I had a 727 pilot seat I'd bought
from Boeing Surplus and a B-50 autopilot joystick that I'd bolted to
it (I'd built an A-D converter to allow it to work with the VIC).  I
bought some particle board and cut out a 1/4 scale Cessna rudder,
covered it in white contact paper, then put "IFR" slanting down the
tail just like Boeing put the model numbers on its new jetliners.

Somehow we were ready by the weekend of the show.  Bo and Judy hauled
our TV, the pilot chair, and the rest of the gear down to the Center
on Thursday.  Friday morning the show started.

I damn near talked myself hoarse.  I usually had a pretty good crowd.
A lot of pilots came by, and several of them managed to take off, fly
to the other airport, and fly a successful instrument approach.  Many
wanted to buy the program, and were a bit disappointed when all I had
were order sheets.

I still remember one older man.  His arms were loaded with purchases,
and he was being followed by his wife, who had a suffering expression.
He saw my booth, and his eyes positively lit up.  He almost ran over
to try his luck flying the program.  Turns out he was an airline
pilot.

The local CBS affiliate even did a live report from the fair for their
noon news show...with me sitting in the pilot chair, flying IFR, while
the reporter interviewed me on the air.

Sunday noon came the announcement of the winner.  It wasn't me...but
the winner had a cool teaching program that he needed money to bring
market, so it was a good choice.  I'd given alway all my discount
certificates, and turned down about a half-dozen offers to buy the 727
seat....

So there was my moment in the limelight...fun while it lasted.  I took
Bo and Judy and David out for dinner that Sunday night, after we took
down the display.

Back at my engineering job on Monday, it was like Cinderella back
scrubbing the hearth.  The ball was over...or so I thought.

I got a call from Bob at Academy in the middle of the week.  "We just
got a massive order from Toys-R-Us.  Your royalty on that sale comes
to eighteen thousand dollars."

I was absolutely, totally stunned.  That was a signficant percentage
of my salary at that time.

I couldn't stay at work. I went home, and called my wife's school.
I'm sure she (and everyone else) thought there was some sort of dire
emergency.  Everyone else probably STILL thought so when I told her
the news...she screamed, long and loud.

We went out to eat that night, too.

As the VIC version of IFR wrapped up a couple of months earlier,
Academy asked me to do a Commodore 64 conversion, and I was right in
the middle of THAT project.  The Toy-R-Us order included orders for
the C-64 version, so we had to get it competed and published in time
to get it in the stores before the Christmas rush.

The C-64 version was about the same as the VIC, with the addition of
twin fuel tanks and a DME.  Everything else worked the same.  The 6502
machine code worked the same on the 6510, with some minor changes
necessary.

We made it, with a month to spare.  I had been haunting the local
Toy-R-Us, and it was another big thrill to see the red boxes on the
shelves, proclaiming "IFR FLIGHT SIMULATOR by Ron Wanttaja."  The
chain started advertising for Christmas..and there was IFR, in the
ads.  Academy printed up posters, which Toys-R-Us displayed in their
computer area.  Academy added IFR to their full-page ads in the
computer magazines.

One hell of a feeling.

The reviews started coming out.  They all seemed to take the "There I
was" approach... "Ceiling is 200 feet in light rain...."  The reviews
extolled the play and interface of the game, with the only negatives
referring to the rather crude depiction of the panel.  A fair hit.

Academy passed on a few fan letters, too.  One was written on
stationery from the Hotel Lexington in New York, from a 747 pilot who
just loved the program. I got letters from happy mothers, telling me
how their kids had developed an interesting in aviation science from
playing with my program.  Once letter was from the "Institute of
Social Sciences" in The Hague, with some small suggesions but a
closing comment calling it the "Best simulation I have yet seen."
Some letters expresed admiration at how well the airplane model
worked, others asked about how some of the little tricks were done.

Not every one was positive, of course.  One writer stated his opinion
clearly and distinctly: "It stinks!"  He didn't like the lack of an
outside view...again, a fair hit.

All this trickled in during 1984, the first full year of release.
Personally, I was waiting for my first royalty check.  The contract
specified the delay between sales and royalties, so I knew the first
one of my quarterly payments would come out about mid-August.

Good timing, really.  I was turning 30 that month, with the visions of
over-the-hilldom dancing through my head.  I was looking for a nice
check to make it seem like I'd accomplished something with my life.

It did.  It was a tad over $25,000....more than my yearly salary.  I
had driven home from work to open the envelope when my wife said it
had arrived.  I drove back to work laughing maniacally all the way.  I
deposited the check, keeping out $500, which I gave to my wife for a
shopping spree.

The next quarterly payment came in mid-November.  It, too was over
$25,000.

We opened up an interest-bearing checking account to deposit this
windfall.  We nicknamed the checkbook, "Bottomless."

Our friends Bo and Judy took a trip, and I picked them up at the
airport.  On the way home, I said, "Hey, there's an interesting
airplane at that little airstrip near your place.  Let me show you."

We drove onto the ramp and stopped in front of a Cessna 150.  "What do
you think?"

They looked on silently for a moment.  "What's so interesting about
it?"

"I bought it, yesterday."  After thirty years of dreaming, I finally
owned my own airplane.


Fortunately, my wife and I have simple tastes.  We didn't go crazy
buying sports cars, stereos, or trips to Europe on the Concorde.
Other than the airplane, there was only one major expense: We finally
had the down payment to buy our own home.

Oddly enough, though, the VW never *did* get a new top.

We had some taxes to worry about, though.  One of the secretaries at
work had a daughter who'd just started a tax company, so we worked
with her.  Income Averaging was still allowed, so the big windfall of
that year was softened by my lower salaries in years past (including
the last year or two I was in the Air Force).  Still, my engineering
salary that year all went to pay the tax bill.

That second $25,000 royalty was the peak, though.  Sublogic had
finally come out with their flight simulator for the Commodore 64.  It
was slow and clunky in operation, but it did have that all-important
outside view people wanted.

Royalties for the second year were about a third of the first year,
and subsequent years showed similar drops.  Commodore came out with a
new set of computers, the Commodore 16 and PLUS/4, and, per Academy's
request, I ported IFR to those platforms.  Due to the rarity of
joysticks for these computers, I had to break down an allow optional
keyboard control.  It was mostly for naught, thougy, as the computers
flopped in the US, Pretty soon my annual royalties dropped to below
$1,000.

Other things were happening in my life, though.  In 1985, my airplane
suffered an engine failure due to bad gasoline.  I managed to nurse
the glide to a safe landing at my home field, then wrote up a report
of the incident for the Usenet newsgroup net.aviation.  Response was
positive, and I decided to work on the tale a bit and submit it to
FLYING magazine.  They bought it, my first sale as a freelance writer.

I eventually sold the Cessna and joined a local Flying Club flying a
small homebuilt open-cockit airplane called a "Fly Baby."  I submitted
an article to PRIVATE PILOT magazine about the airplane...but the
editor of a sister magazine intercepted the article, and felt it
worked far better in HIS magazine: KITPLANES.  He called me and
invited me to send him lots more articles...just the thing a
freelancer dreams of.

His name was familiar, though.  Eventually, I looked in my scrapbook.
He had written a report on flight simulators for an aviation magazine
back in 1986.  He had panned IFR.

I kidded him about it, but he kept buying my articles.  Within a year,
a book publisher had talked to him about writing a book on building
homebuilt airplanes. He didn't have the time to do it...but told them
to contact me.  TAB Books sent me a letter inviting me to write a such
book for them.  The book turned out to be 100,000 words long, and was
written on the Commodore 128 left over from my IFR days.

KITPLANE CONSTRUCTION was published in 1991.  The first edition came
out in five printings, with the second edition published in 1996.  The
book even won a journalism award.

Back in 1986, I started working on a novel about a young boy in the US
Navy during the War of 1812.  Working title for the book: ON THE
UPROLL, the same name I'd used for that cannon-firing game I'd
orginally written for the VIC.  Not quite as much success on that; I
sent it to publisher after publisher. The name eventually morphed to
THE KEY TO HONOR.

Fast-forward back to 1994.  I was facing the big 4-0.  Like my 30th
birthday, I needed a bit of perking up.  It came late, but it came:
Two months after my birthday, a publisher enthusiastically bought THE
KEY TO HONOR and asked if I could make a series of it.  The first
sequel, THE PRICE OF COMMAND, came out last year.  I'll start the next
book, A DASH OF DARING, right about when I finish writing up this
report.

All through this, I kept working at my aerospace job.  I had tried to
write new programs after the fade of IFR back in the mid '80s, but the
competition was no longer individual hackers like myself.  Games were
built by teams now; able to merge multiple talents together and crank
out high-quality products a lot quicker.  I was lucky IFR had come out
when it did.

"Lucky," of course, sums things up pretty well.  I was never so much a
good programmer as a lucky one...I hit the market with the right
product at the right time.  I'm lucky at the variety of decisions
resulted in just the right combination of accuracy and playability.
I'm lucky in my wife, who tolerated the distraction and lack of
attention that development of the program engendered (and who proudly
wore the "Computer Widow" T-Shirt I bought her).  I'm lucky in my
choice of Academy, with them turning out to be 100% honest and
upfront.  I'm especially lucky in my friends, from Rick Reierson to
David Paulsen to Bo and Judy Stringer and a host of others who helped.

Thanks, guys.  It was a heck of a ride while it lasted....

Ron Wanttaja
(http://www.wanttaja.com)
March 29, 1999