Celestia Forums

G'day.

I am a big fan of Microsoft Space Simulator, I enjoyed the real time trips you could make (i.e 3 weeks to Mars in real time!) and that they were real places. A while ago I lent the discs to someone and they killed them somehow, it was OK at the time as you don't need the discs but then my PC died and I needed to reload Windows and wipe my harddrive, thus losing SpaceSim. I am using an iMac (G4, OSX) and a Win95 pc with something akin to a 233 Pentium processor (I think...) and 32mb RAM. Would I be able to run this program? And is there anyone else who enjoyed SpaceSim for the same reasons and can recommend this?

p.s, if my PC won't run Celestia, tell me it is a really bad sim and that I wouldn't like it so I don't get upset.

Welcome to Celestia.
I too at one time used Microsoft's Space Simulator. I even went out and bought the guide book. I still have my discs but they haven't been installed on a system in well over six years. If your system has a basic 3D video card then you should be able to get Celestia to work at the lowest settings. Of course a much more modern system would have Celestia knocking your socks off.
Celestia really is not in the same kind of sim that Space-Sim was. If you want the reality of that you got from S-S you need to look too the free-ware space-flight simulator called Orbiter. It is almost a total parallel to the old MS Space-Sim as you are going to find. Although your system specs again my be problematic. But because Orbiter uses Direct X instead of OpenGL this will give you a little more leeway with your system and its video card. You can find Orbiter here http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~martins/orbit/orbit.html

And if worst comes to worst you can give me a private message and maybe I can figure how to get you back your favorite space-sim.

Don. Edwards

I downloaded the Mac version of Celestia, at first I was quite impressed, but after a few minutes I realised that it was really just like piloting a camera around, no ship physics or stuff like that - a great tool for astronomy and looking at comets etc, but not for me. Thanks anyway. I did manage to download MSSpaceSim for free from http://www.the-underdogs.org, and again, thanks for your help.