After Hours- CD ROM & Tornado

The capabilities of such a system are quite astounding. Perhaps the best popularly available example is Microsoft’s “Encarta”, a work which is hard to describe, but could be called a general knowledge encyclopedia. What sets it apart from staid books is the variety of ways of finding and presenting information. Some work with searches or tree indexes takes you rapidly to the information you seek. After you arrive, you find not only written words, but pictures, sound and even video clips. Often, you can copy the information and paste it into another application such as a word processor. What a boon for school projects!

Not all CD-ROMs are created equal. There are several standards which reflect the rapid advance in the technology. If you are tempted, buy at least a double spin, multi-session drive. This level of specification allows you to transfer data at a fast enough rate to support video clips (double spin) and to enjoy products such as photos on a disc which are progressively added over time (multi-session). While you can buy triple spin drives, they are expensive. A double spin, multi-session CD-ROM drive can be purchased in Australia for at little as $270.

You can install a CD-ROM in an IBM compatible computer by yourself if you have a modicum of technical common sense. Ideally, you should have already installed a sound card. If you previously chose a SoundBlaster Pro or better, you are halfway there, as the card has a built-in interface for a CD-ROM drive. If you do not have an interface, the driver card is only about $70.

To install the CD-ROM drive, turn the power off but keep the computer plugged in to provide an earth path. (Keep away from the AC power circuits sealed inside the power pack!) Open the computer and taking care to earth yourself on naked metal inside the computer to discharge static electricity, plug the card into a spare slot on the motherboard.

Most computers will have a spare 5¼” drive bay, and with the nuts and mounting kit, physically fit the drive to the computer. Provide DC power to the drive with one of the spare power leads – they have a four-pin position coded plug and black, yellow and red wires. The installation kit comes with a flat ribbon data cable and you connect the CD-ROM drive with the SoundBlaster card, making sure pin 1 on the CD-ROM connects to pin 1 on the card. Finally, an audio cable connects the drive and the card – take care here as on my card you had to put a three-pin cable on the correct side of a four-pin plug or no sound emerges.

An installation disk is used to load the CD-ROM driver software into the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files that define the configuration of the computer on power up. Test software checks the drive. While I am a bit of a technofreak, I must admit to a sense of pride when my ab initio installation worked first time and sound flowed from my CD-ROM, through the sound card and out my speakers.

Once the CD-ROM is installed, it looks exactly like another drive – in my case a D: peripheral. You put a CD-ROM into the drive, type D: and you can then list the files using the DIR command. If you use Windows, you can even bring up an image of a CD-ROM audio player, insert a music disc, and enjoy Beethoven while you work or play.

Cool Tornado from Digital Integration

While I know it has taken a while to get here, the purpose of this article is to review “Tornado”. With the CD-ROM drive on line and the Tornado disc in the drive, you type D: to get to the programme then type “GO”. An installation programme opens a directory on the hard disc, and transfers a few files such as a flight log. The programme starts the simulation.

The Tornado kit comes with several maps, installation instructions, a control card summary and an excellent manual written in proper UK English – you know – the type your English teacher would have liked you to write at school.

As soon as you open the manual, you can detect the nature of the game. This is a serious piece of work designed to emulate the Tornado aircraft as closely as possible, and even more remarkably, to emulate the operating environment.

In another life, I have the job of reviewing air power doctrine, and the authors have gone to great lengths to capture current NATO operational practice. They claim to have had assistance from many Tornado aircrew and I must say it shows. The emphasis of this simulation is the total mission environment. Operational aircrew will tell you that planning is a major part of each mission, generally taking much longer than the mission itself. If this interests you, then Tornado probably has the best implementation of this function of all flight simulators on the market. Some 50 pages are devoted to the subject, and if I had to teach newly fledged boggies the art of mission planning, I would be tempted to give them a copy of Tornado and tell them to come back when they had reached the skill level of “Group Captain” in the simulation.

Being naturally impatient, I jumped straight into the quickstart function. After one false start when I bent the nose gear on takeoff, I got airborne for a fast flit, and promptly bent the flaps and froze the swing feature of the Tornado at the 25-degree takeoff position. This simulation has no “games” compromises, and I strongly recommend that you enter this simulation with a fair degree of experience with another simulation.

Once you can keep the Tornado in the air with enough knowledge to stop bending things, you see the strength of the work. A CD-ROM can hold up to 650 megabytes of data, and while many games gobble up to 40 megabytes of hard disc space, consumer resistance limits the size of a game. With a CD-ROM version, this constraint could be lifted. Expecting to find ZilloBytes of data, I checked the size of the files on the Tornado CD-ROM and was surprised to find that it only consumed about 9 megabytes, or 1.39% of the disc capacity! Tornado on CD-ROM seems to be simply another format of the floppy-disc based game, but it does illustrate the point of the reserve available for future works. The format also prevents software piracy, which may be the point of the exercise.

Notwithstanding the limited size (!) of the files, the graphics are excellent. The programme uses the SVGA capability of my graphics screen, and the presentation of options is the clearest and cleanest yet. I would have liked to have seen the same approach taken for the cockpit, with clear digital displays like the Light Aircraft Simulator reviewed recently, but the authors have preferred “photo-realism” and many of the gauges are blocky and hard and confusing to read at a glance.

Looking outside, the rendering of the scenery is very good. Polygon graphics are used and I prefer this format, especially when trying to fly up a valley under 100 feet. The ground opens up into a series of smaller polygons which gives clear height cues.

The flight controls are of high quality. After I learnt how to get the gear and flaps tucked away and to sweep the wings, I tried some air combat tactics, only to find the Tornado flies like a thick brick. Delving into the 330 pages of the manual, I found that while the aircraft has some nice features such as an auto-throttle which holds a commanded air speed, you have to manually sweep the wings. “What! No auto-sweep function?” I asked. Sadly not, and in air combat tactics you have to work like a one-armed paperhanger decorating teflon walls to keep things under control in a dog fight. To be fair, the Tornado is designed for very low altitude air-to-ground penetrations, and air combat tactics is not its forte.

Approach and landing is always a good test of a simulator, and I found Tornado to be excellent. Although it does not have as comprehensive a cockpit pan control as (say) Strike Eagle III, it is possible to look aside, up and forward with the coolie hat on a CH Flight Stick Pro. You can even suppress the “ironware” of the cockpit, which helps. Airfield graphics are fully implemented and the angles are such that it seems very natural. I managed to land reasonably well on my first attempt, notwithstanding being told the aircraft damage would only take 30 minutes to repair. The cheek of these Poms!

I won’t go into chapter and verse on all the capabilities of this simulation as it would take the entire magazine and the Editor would get very pointed (a synonym of “thorn”). I can say the simulation is complete in every way in comparison with its peers, and as I mentioned before, if you complete all the simulator, training and campaign missions, including two-player options, you will have been entertained and skilled up over several weeks, if not months.

Now for some scores. This simulation cracks the ton, so in my estimation offers high value for money. My scores were constrained in the “excitement” area as my personal preference is air-to-air with close-in dogfights, something the Tornado is not designed for. If your preference is for low altitude penetration missions, you may prefer it over other excellent works such as Falcon 3.

Now that CD-ROM is being used as a medium for distributing complex programmes such as flight simulations, it will be very interesting to see how long it will take for more of the disc capacity to be used for extended operating areas, video clips, briefings and so forth. For a time I thought flight simulator technology was starting to plateau, but it would seem the arrival of the CD-ROM has just upped the ante.