If you're an obsessed sailboat-racing skipper as I am, or if an afternoon’s sail sounds like a pleasant break from your afternoon’s work, you should check out Sailing Master 1.1. This program is a fun simulation of sailboat racing, and a good way to learn the wind-shifts at the same time.
You can sail against as many as three boats (with various levels of skill), on Olympic and windward/leeward courses. You can’t sail against other humans except by using a Time Trials mode, which ranks subsequent sailors on the same course. Sailing Master handles the basic racing rules, forcing you to do a 720-degree turn, for instance, if you fail to respond to a leeward boat coming up behind you.
The interface is straightforward (see “Racing to Win”). The wind shifts in intensity and direction across the course, with wind-shifts sometimes presaged by dark and light areas on the water upwind.
Sailing Master’s Autotrim and Autoheel options handle the sails and the angle of the boat for you, so you can concentrate on strategy and tactics. Once you’ve used Sailing Master a while, you can control sail trim and heeling angle manually.
A new feature in 1.1 — Smart Tiller — adjusts your course to be 45 degrees off the wind (optimum sailing angle) when you point up or down. This makes it much easier to compete with the other racers. There are keyboard shortcuts for controlling direction, but unfortunately, they don’t work with Smart Tiller.
Speed is Sailing Master’s biggest problem, though it’s not a fatal flaw. Motion is jerky even on a Centris 650, unless you turn off sounds (which are essential to notify you of wind-shifts and competitors’ tacks, but which cause the program to pause momentarily). Motion is very jerky on a Macintosh SE, though the program is still usable (that is, as long as you install the program over a network, since it comes on a 1.44MB floppy disk).
Sailing Master isn’t completely compatible with an extension-heavy Mac system (it crashed a few times, though almost always when I was quitting the program), but it seems stable in a more vanilla setup.
Though speed and other clues point to less-than-polished programming. Sailing Master is a lot of fun — well worth the price for an inveterate competitor like me.
Roth, Steve. (November 1993). Sailing Master 1.1. Macworld. (pg. 88).
D. Gary Shelef
Games
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24 / 
2020-09-11 / 
eb8b14021c9ce40f53be187a39917268b0a962d6 / 
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sailingmaster_dsk.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
