"Night Mission Pinball" wasn't created by Budge but rather Bruce Artwick, the same guy who created the Sublogic Flight Simulator (and early versions of the Microsoft Flight Simulator which descended from it).
Night Mission was great. It felt so different from other Apple II games. I can't quite put my finger on it, but there was something about it that felt like a real arcade game in a way other programs (and certainly other pinball simulators) didn't.
It was about 1fps, but, apart from that, it was more or less real-time. It'd take about 5 hours to fly from Chicago to NYC. It's quite a miracle they managed to approximate real-time on the Apple II with only cycle counting.
Wow - that's a trip down memory lane - I learned the basics of flying from Flight Sim 1 on an Apple. The manual was pretty damn good. The application was amazing for its time.
Same. The manuals.. they were like real flying manuals. I was never a gamer, but I was working shifts through the nights with lots of spare time, so I played Flight Sim on the Apple.
Then one day a pilot friend invited me to fly with him in his club's Cessna. To my surprise, as soon as the wheels were off the ground he said "Now you fly." And I did.. for the next half hour. Around the mountains, here and there.. the thing is, the instruments in that Cessna worked just as in the sim, some were slow reacting, some were fast, and the pedals and yoke.. everything was familiar, I just had to use the real controls instead of a keyboard. A quick adjustment. So i could actually fly that thing. My pilot friend took over when we were ten meters from landing.
Once I played with Cessna Caravan simulation, with a physical cockpit instruments and controls, and I was amazed by how easy it felt to cross over, even decades later, to the physical controls. In no time I was flying sideways between buildings using the pedals to keep the nose pointed half up while I passed by the windows.
Unfortunately, the very surprised and concerned inhabitants were not simulated.
I hated those floppy analog joysticks, being an Atari computer fan and used to the firm click of contacts for each direction.
I took an Apple analog joystick apart when I was in junior high and measured the resistance in all directions. Then I took a Wico "bat-handle" digital joystick apart and wired resistors in to simulate the full deflection of the analog joystick. Then I had to cut the 9-pin plug off and solder the necessary wires to a DIP plug to go into the Apple computer. The Wico joystick already had two buttons, which were necessary for the Apple (ironically, considering Steve Jobs's stand on multi-button mice years later).
I wrote the whole thing up as a how-to article for Compute magazine, but I don't recall what response I got to the submission. They didn't publish it, but the thing worked. I still have my one prototype around somewhere in its original box.
heh my friend and I (young teens at the time) used to wire photoresistors into the analog in pins on the joy port. We put the sensors in toilet paper tubes on one side of a hallway with small lights across from them and wrote BASIC code that would turn on a light via the annunciator outputs when change was detected.
Then we’d see if we could sneak down the hall undetected, Mission Impossible style. I never noticed the detection speed varying with light level but I guess it did!
Wow, ancient memories. Yes, the swerve, overcorrect, swerve, overcorrect , swerve, crash game. Spent many hours on that when I was too young to have any patience at all.
I've been playing since about 1989 with FS4. It's come a long way in the last 35+ years! FS2024 is so incredibly immersive that it is almost unimaginable. With modest gaming hardware, you can play at 40fps at 4K.
The Atari ST and Amiga versions of Flight Simulator II (still II, there must be a story there) were such a huge step up at the time, when the CGA version was still current on the PC.
Bruce Artwick's Flight Simulator was one of the programs that blew my mind in the very early 1980s and convinced me that computers were the best thing ever. Other programs in the same category are muMath (symbolic math with a side of LISP) and Visicalc.
I don't know if many Apple II users realized that you could use Jet (another Sublogic flight sim, but with F-16 and F-18 fighters) and use the Flight Sim disk for the scenery.
It took me a long, long time to master flying an F-16 (could be the 18) through the Golden Gate.
https://archive.org/details/wozaday_Night_Mission_Pinball