Old engineering simulation games, now open source [pdf] (opens in new tab)

Source code links: Rowan's Battle of Britain (flight sim): https://github.com/gondur/BOB_Src Rowan's Mig Alley (flight sim): https://github.com/gondur/mig_src Free Falcon (flight sim): https://github.com/FreeFalcon/freefalcon-central flightgear (flight sim): https://www.flightgear.org/download/source-code/ speed dreams (sim racing): https://sourceforge.net/projects/speed-dreams/files/

The car and flight sims are engineering simulations - differential equation solvers employing multiple degrees of freedom, flight models and tire models validated vs. data, etc. Game manuals, which are hundreds of pages long, describe how to, e.g., set your differential coast and power ramp angles to tune racecar responsiveness, and how to decide whether a one-circle or two-circle dogfight is more advantageous based on the specific power diagrams of your aircraft and your AI opponent's. These games have staying power because they are clearly labors of love, where accurate physics was top priority in game development. Dave Kaemmer, a top sim racing developer, summed it up this way: "We don’t care if it’s fun or not. We care if it’s real"

There's a python script that makes the organization more clear. Once you've installed the games package, run "./launcher.py" at the ubuntu command line to see a text menu "Top Level Menu" which launches the games.

This menu is shown on page 2 of the brochure here: https://github.com/sim-museum/esports-for-engineers/blob/mas...

My sentiments exactly! It is a tribute to the wine developers that these 20 year old games run as well (or better) on linux and modern hardware than on the ancient PC's and MS-Windows versions they were designed for. One recommendation - with each game try wine-6 first (./wine_default.sh), if anything is not quite right use wine-7 (./wine_experimental.sh). That should be sufficient to run all games; use the oldest wine version that works. If there's still a problem go to winehq.org and try wine-8 (winehq-stable). (You can also run most of the included game exe's on Windows 10, emulating the appropriate old Windows version. If using Windows, the linux install script serves as handy documentation for the install, showing which patches to apply, what directories to copy, what settings to change, etc.)

Another recommendation concerning installation - be sure to check the Mastodon forum for this project: https://fosstodon.org/@esports_for_engineers/followers

The racing sims include dozens of cars and tracks, Combat flight sims, which simulate entire wars, include terrain and hundreds of vehicles and munitions. There are dozens of games in this package. There's no need to install them all, but if you did, you'd need about 210GB for a single installation, more if you don't delete intermediate installation files