limits either, allowing a number of unrealistic extremely high-g maneuvers. A completely new flight engine was created for the VBE system that simulated subsonic aerodynamics with a fair degree of realism, with effects like dutch roll and adverse yaw "falling out" of the engine without being deliberately coded in. Additionally, the system included a new physics engine that featured simple finite element analysis that allowed damage to be realistically simulated, including its effects on the flight dynamics of the aircraft. The resulting simulation was arguably the most advanced of its era. All of this was combined with an improved version of the graphics engine developed for Hellcats, allowing players to use multiple monitors and any resolution their machine could support. Hellcats used a polygon-based flat-shaded system that used differential updating to avoid bottlenecks in the computer bus and thereby improve frame rates. A-10 retained the basics from Hellcats, but added the ability for small areas of texture mapping to be applied, which was used on the vehicles to add roundels and squadron markings. A combination of improved code in the engine and the rapid improvement in computer performance since the release of Hellcats allowed the new engine to feature greatly increased scene complexity. Early versions of the game were shown at MacWorld Boston in the summer of 1993. At the time the physics and graphics engines were operational, although there was no "game" per-se. The world consisted of a single-runway airbase and a nearby target range with several "bullseye" targets. This was followed some time later by a fairly functional demo version, which took place on a mythical island with a number of friendly and enemy objects in the area. For the release version, a series of missions in northern Germany were created, along with a new mission-planning map system that was widely lauded. As the game was being finalized for release, Apple introduced the new PowerMac systems. Running in the 68k emulator the game proved to be very slow, so a delay followed while they wrote a PowerPC "native" version, and the game was finally delivered in 1995, a full three years after starting development and about a year later than promised. A-10 Cuba! followed, although at first it did not use VBE and was shipped in the form of a stand-alone application. It was only later that Cuba was re-released to run as a VBE module that allowed