Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein. Remember that name. He is the person who has written the most number of
mods for Tornado. Pure genius. Pure creativity. That was more than 20 years ago. Together with Kenneth "ICEMAN" Larsen, Basil Copeland and Eric Joiner, Heinz churned nearly 20 mods, all meant to enrich the Tornado experience. Among his most useful mods include the Terrain Following Realism Patch, that allowed the Tornado to fly on autopilot at 100 feet, and the SoundBlaster patches that corrected the sound bugs of the game.
In my humble opinion, one of his most unusual (and humourous!) mods is the TORNADO SPOUSE REMINDER TOOL (TSRT) V.1.0. Basically this mod allowed the user to stick a BMP image of choice onto the front dashboard of the Tornado cockpit. Like so, with apologies to Claudia Schiffer.
What was the motiviation for such a mod? A clue can be gained by reading the preamble of the mod:
"Has this ever happened to you? You fly a really exciting Tornado mission, evading lots of SAMs and bombing the hell out of those orange enemies. Suddenly, a complete stranger enters the cockpit, and wants to talk to you about some irrelevant things like your children, mortgages, plans for spending weekends together etc. After some time, you realize this person is not really a complete stranger, she looks familiar ... she's your wife! How embarrassing! During all those hours in the cockpit, you forgot what she looks like!
Now, with this incredible new tool, the result of months of scientific work by our team of experts, this can no longer happen to you: We are proud to introduce the Tornado Spouse Reminder Tool (TSRT). This program allows you to stick a photo of your spouse to Tornado's front cockpit dashboard!"
The Claudia Schiffer BMP file was provided for for the single armchair pilots. For kids (what's a kid?), Heinz gave a BMP file of Garfield. For married guys, they were supposed to use a BMP image of their spouse. For those
"who keep forgetting how many children they have, there's a memo sticker included which can easily be edited". The operation was not that straight forward. Here's was Heinz' instructions:
To compensate for the non-square pixels in the TORNADO cockpit, you first have to stretch the photo HORIZONTALLY by a factor of 1.2.
Then you should resample (resize) the photo so that it's height is about 43 pixels (the height of the TDO dashboard), and it's width is chosen to maintain the photo's aspect ratio (*after* the horizontal enlargement). The width should not exceed 60 pixels.Thanks to the genius of Heinz, many Tornado widows were relieved to know that they were never far from the spouses' minds! Even when their spouses were in the middle of a JP-233 attack run that was under heavy AAA and SAM fire. To my mind, this kind of mod has never been reproduced in any other flight simulator game. I could be wrong though.
Since Tornado, Heinz has moved on to other activities. I believe that these days he spends much of his time plotting stars and constellations in their courses above. His work and calculations allow us to live in the comfort and peace of mind that no asteroid is racing towards earth at this very hour. All the best to you, Heinz, and THANK YOU for giving the Tornado community much fun and enjoyment through your mods.
Regards
Frankie Kam
