1991 · Flight simulation · Simulation

Hellcats Over the Pacific

Hellcats Over the Pacific is a flight simulator focusing on the Pacific Theater of World War 2. The player assumes the role of a Grumman F6F Hellcat pilot in both land and carrier-based missions using guns and bombs.

Released: 1991
Platforms: macOS
Genres: Flight simulation Simulation World War II
Developers: —
Publishers: —
Modes: Single-player
Perspective: First person Third person
Themes: Action Historical Warfare
Country: United States

About

Hellcats over the Pacific is a combat flight simulation game for the Classic Mac OS. It was written by Parsoft Interactive and released by Graphic Simulations in 1991. Hellcats was a major release for the Mac platform, one of the first 3D games using a 640 × 480 8-bit display at reasonable frame rates in an era when the standard resolution of IBM PC compatible video games was 320 × 200. The graphics engine was combined with a simple Mac interface and a set of randomized missions It was followed by a missions disk in 1992, Hellcats: Missions at Leyte Gulf, which greatly increased the visual detail and added many more objects to the game.

After the release of Leyte Gulf, ParSoft began work on another flight simulator for Graphics Simulations, based around the McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet. The two companies parted ways during the initial development. ParSoft began work on a new networked flight simulator that would emerge years later as A-10 Attack! and followed by its own missions expansion, A-10 Cuba.

Keywords

world war ii - ww2
flight simulator
flight

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Development

The Hellcats engine was based on an idea Eric Parker formulated while studying the SPARCstation 1. The SPARCstation allowed the memory of the graphics card to be mapped into main memory; any data the CPU placed in those memory locations would automatically be copied over the SBus to a frame buffer on the graphics card which the card periodically drew to the screen. This method of access allowed the card to continually refresh the screen without interrupting the CPU; if the two shared the memory directly, it can lead to contention issues that will slow overall performance.

However, the path between the main memory and the frame buffer was relatively slow, so while both the CPU and the frame buffer could move memory quickly within their own private memory, they could not easily communicate those changes. Specifically, the CPU could create 40 MB/s of data in main memory, but this could only be copied to the frame buffer at 5 MB/s. The SPARCstation had a resolution of 1000 x 1000 x 8 bits per pixel, about 1 MB per frame, so at best the display could run at about 5 FPS at full resolution if each frame was being generated by the CPU and sent over the bus.

Reception

Power Unlimited gave a review score of 95% writing: "Other flight simulators dwarfed Hellcats over the Pacific when it came out. Among other things, the simplicity of the scenarios and the clarity of the image contributed to this."