Journey's end for Flight Simulator

[John P]

It was a sad day when the announcement was made. I saw FS on an Apple when first released and still have every version released on PC plus a heap of add-ons.

However...... a couple of years ago came across another product called X-Plane.

This simulator IMHO is better than MS Flight Simulator and has a commercial version in the US that is FAA certified!

Cheers
John

[Jayden Laing]

Here is a shot i took just after landing on an oval near Newcastle's Westpac Base. Helicopter is a Eurocopter EC145 painted in the REGA 1414 scheme.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/27375165@N03/3315234698/

[Zac M]

Shame. Would anyone be able to tell me how to get the a/c downloads to work? I have no idea and I am getting bored with the originals, I am on fsx.

[Jayden Laing]

Hi Zac,
There are a couple of ways in which you can download & add aircraft to your FSX library. For me personally, I just go into google & type into the search bar what aircraft im after ie Saab 340 FSX downloads. Once you download a file, you will normally have to unzip the folder. I then normally cut & paste the downloaded aircraft folder into the FSX aircraft folder (ie C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\SimObjects\Airplanes). This works for me so I'm hoping it will work for you. If you can't understand what i wrote above, don't hesitate to PM me .

Cheers,
Jayden

[Michael Arentz]

There's still a bit of life left in the Microsoft flight sim line yet, MS is apparently still going to publish and market FSX for the time being.

www.flightsim.com and www.avsim.com are good repositories for aircraft, scenery and other add-ons for Flight Simulator 98 to FSX, they even have files for X-Plane and others.

Multiplayer will also keep it going for a few years to come. The built in multiplayer functionality found in FS98 - FS2004 is pretty cumbersome, FSX is the only version with pretty user friendly multiplayer and built in voice communications. There are alternatives though.

VATSIM has been around for years and supplies real time ATC via dedicated people running different airspaces, there are usually two or three that will control at least the east coast of Australia. For the more casual flightsimmers there is the recently started Bigpond GameArena flighsim server which has no stringent rules or ATC requirements. Both of these options require the download of a couple of extra, but fairly easy to use programs. The biggest plus of these multiplayer services is that you can play no matter what version of flight simulator you have, handy if a friend has FS2004 and you have FSX. If your ISP is telstra, the gamearena server has the added bonus of being usage free, meaning it won't count towards your monthly download limit.

[Carsten Bauer]

Hi all,

I've been using MSFS for nearly 15 years now.
Starting with FS4, my greatest moment was when I installed the Sound Card add-on software, with real engine sounds, and also a scenery and aircraft design toolkit (Very basic). I used to make little secret airports around the world, one even in a really deep valley that made it impossible to land unless you know how to.

In FS5 I started designing more aircraft with some editor, and more scenery, nothing major though.

I also used fs98, fs2000 and fs9, and am currently using (On and off) FSX.

FS4 ran on my NEC Powermate 386 SX-16 with 4MB ram and 42MB MFM Hard Disk, 14" CRT Monitor, 8 Bit Mono Sound Card.

FSX runs on my Intel QuadCore Q6600 2.4Ghz, 4GB Memory, 1.5TB Total Disk Space, 256MB Video Card and 17" (Soon to be 22") LCD Screen.

Greatest moments include flying online for the first time with mates around the country over the space of a year (Every weekend), taking the SR-71 Blackbird for a short hop PER-SYD (The long way round), and finding a setting in aircraft.cfg that could change the thrust of the 737-400 so that you could take off and be at FL350 in under 60 seconds using only 50% engine power!

Cheers,

Carsten

PS: Does anyone know a good BAE146 or Avro RJ70/85/100 Sim for FSX?

[Zac M]

How do you re-write those cfg files? My computer doesn't have outlook, I have other than the default a/c, VH-QOH and the dash 8 100.

[Carsten Bauer]

Outlook? WTF?
Outlook is an email client.
aircraft.cfg is a plain text document.
Open Notepad, File | Open, change file types to All, then open aircraft.cfg
Make sure you backup any files.

Change the following line
static_thrust =

Cheers,

Carsten

[Zac M]

My Computer says it is a Microsoft Office Outlook Configuration file.

[Carsten Bauer]

Oh ok.
Well if you follow my instructions you will be able to edit the file.