Best Apple II Game

For the purposes of my computer game commentary I refer to the Apple 2 of 1977 as a Western computer game machine.

The Apple 2 (Apple II) was powered by an 8-bit MOS Tech 6502 clocked at 1 MHz. RAM on the Apple 2 ranged from 4 to 64 kbytes.

Apple 2 graphics is displayed in 15-color 140x192 resolution, with a color-fringing effect; high-res is 2-color 280x192 resolution.

One of the best Apple 2 games is Silas Warner's Castle Wolfenstein of 1981.

Castle Wolfenstein is one of the most conceptually-advanced computer games of the very early 80s.

Castle Wolfenstein was influenced by the Berzerk shoot 'em up and would lead eventually to Wolfenstein 3D.

FS1 Flight Simulator Apple 2 1979

One of the most extraordinary Apple 2 games was SubLOGIC's 16 kbyte A2-FS1: Flight Simulator of 1979. Designed and coded by Bruce Artwick in 6502 assembler, FS1 would lead to Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 of 1982 and the 16-bit SubLOGIC Flight Simulator 2 on the Amiga in 1986, which was souped-up in Microsoft Flight Simulator 3.0 of 1988 for IBM PC.

FS1 came out in the same year as VisiCalc on the Apple 2, which was the first commerical spreadsheet program available for a personal computer.... this is the timeframe we're in.

As of 2024, FS1 is a 45 year-old computer game.

FS1 cockpit instrumention includes air speed, altimeter, tachometer, oil pressure gauge, oil temperature gauge, compass and fuel gauge. Indicators include turn rate, vertical velocity, roll rate, elevator, throttle, stall and armament.

There are two simulators in FS1: navigation and kinematic. Navigation handles position, velocity and heading whereas kinematic employs no fewer than 13 factors, including lift, drag and gravity.

In 1979, FS1 simulated flight of the Sopwith Camel light aircraft at up to 120 MpH over a wireframe 6x6 grid of terrain representing 36 square miles, while dogfighting, bombing and barrel-rolling. But no, the Sopwith Camel of 1917 cannot perform a loop-the-loop -- don't get too carried away!

FS1 employs SubLOGIC's own A2-3D1 graphics driver and high performance line generator that was capable of drawing 150 lines per second in FS1.

Amusingly, one can fly outside of the grid boundaries to reach... the void. Be sure to scream into the void when you get there.

cf. History of Combat Flight Simulators.