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07-04-2021, 08:03 PM | #1 | ||
Join Date: May 2009
Location: Weiherhof, Germany
Posts: 533
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Games created with Domark/Simis Flight Sim Toolkit (FST)
I wonder if anyone here ever came across DOS flight sims made with the Flight Sim Toolkit (FST) - a create-your-own-game set developed by Simis Limited and published by Domark Software?
I first learned about it some ten years ago when I found a shareware WWII themed flight sim called Great Air Battles on a CD at cd.textfiles.com. Back then I could not find much more info on other sims but took note of it. It turns out that back in the early to mid-90s, there was a thriving flight sim community that actively built various simulations based on FST. Just like with The Bard's Tale Construction Set, users could not only distribute complete games made with FST, but also sell them as shareware if they so wanted. More recently, I chanced upon a different FST title, Wings of Thunder, at MobyGames. Using Hallfiry's magazine coverdisk catalogue I was soon able to find a copy, and from here, I decided to seriously dig the topic using the Wayback Machine -- as any other traces of the games have almost completely vanished. And just about the same time a different user posted a topic at VOGONS asking about FST games. That conversation was soon joined by an FST scene veteran going by the username ragefury32. The big site about FST was this one: http://www.mcnett.org/fst/ Unfortunately, Wayback Machine has only piecemeal preservation of the site's contents (which also mirrored several FTPs), exacerbated by the 1,024 KiB limit for files stored from 2000-2001 or so. There are numerous partially preserved, broken ZIP files. The interesting part is that Simis apparently provided long-term support for the product with several updates and improvement both to the binary executable and to the tools. What's more, at some point they released the source code, and a community-made updated Windows version was in the works, currently available here. Separately, Bryan McNett who ran the largest FST site I mentioned above created an open source clone of FLY.EXE called OpenFly: http://ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au/~gjo/ However, it looks that this project had not got a lot of traction. So here are the games that have been found so far. They all work in DOSBox with no apparent issues. a. Complete games by Ron Walker/Ground Zero Simulations (all free, all Wayback Machine links work):
A few more sims are available from Mic Healey's archives. A certain Adrian Brown maintained pages that listed several dozens FST projects. Here's an archived version of his catalogue in mostly intact condition: http://www.adrianebrown.co.uk/flightsimtoolkit/frc/simulations.html The download links there all point to Kuju's FTP (Kuju was the successor of Simis), which apparently hosted user-created FST games. FST was also available for non-PC platforms, including RISC OS. So far I only found this page with two sims. If anyone has any further info on the subject, or any ideas how to repair the broken archives (e.g. the ARJ with Great Air Battles demo), please don't hesitate to share!
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FED2k Forums - Westwood Studios' Dune games and more Last edited by MrFlibble; 27-04-2021 at 09:20 PM. Reason: added more download links |
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