Captain's Log. Stardate 20170913.0947.
Upon further exploration of this planet, we have found no perfect fit or 'sweet-spot'. On one side of the planet, we have located Tornado 'fanatics' who would love a new Tornado but have little or no assembly language skills; on the other side, we have assembly language (ASM) programmers AND ex-programmers who are not active in re-coding the game beyond what it already is. Dr. Spock has determined that the chances of finding a perfect fit on this planet is 0.000001403.
Allow me to step out of character here. I slide out of the Captain's chair.
The person BEST to modify code is the ex-Digital Integration programmer who wrote 90% of the simulation code. He has agreed to assist in our understanding of his 24-year old code, but requests from us to him (to explain code) go out only intermittently. He has a managerial position job, and ceased active programming years ago.
For now, the closest we have to the ideal person to enhance Tornado is AH. AH did 16-bit ASM programming years ago, loves Tornado, and works in aviation (because of Tornado, it started him off in that direction!). Lately he has done some minor hacks on the game. He is limited by time and his working life. So without a lead programmer consistently making improvements to the source code, an enhanced Tornado is not going to see the light of day.
I suppose the person who has most of the jigsaw pieces in place is me. For me, I am missing the vital "16 bit ASM knowledge" and "how Tornado was written" jigsaw pieces. The original programmers used tricks to overcome the 640Kb conventional memory limitation of the game. Alas, if only I had paid attention to my lecturer during Assembly Language 101 back in 1991! I would love to learn assembly language in my spare time, but the thought of subjecting my life to torture scares me. Not to mention the time investment needed. Are there any online ASM courses?
My hope is that one day, a university professor teaching assembly language will be crazy enough to assign a Degree, Masters or Doctorate student a project to enhance the game. That would be great since it would be a concentrated and focused effort by an individual or individuals to pick apart the 16-bit code and to re-code the game. And that would only work if the student 'fell in love' with the game enough to be motivated to enhance it.
The BEST enhancement of the game, would be a multi-crew, bi-player feature where two players will man the plane. The pilot gamer will man the cockpit, and the navigator gamer will man the navigator's cockpit. Both can switch to the other person's cockpit view, and see the same outside views, but each will not control the other person's cockpit switch and keys. As in real life. So real-time telemetry data has to be fed over the Internet so that both gamers are essentially playing the same synchronised game but with different sets of controls. That would simulate the real-life two man crew working together. A push-to-talk audio platform like TeamSpeak or Discord can be used to provide the two-way audio communication.
Stepping back into character now, and sliding back into the Captain's chair...
Enough of my inter-stellar thoughts. Scotty, beam me up!
Bones, give me more power!
Out.