Was hoping to share thoughts on Mega Scenery

[Guest cw1011]

But the installation took about three hours last night. If you upgraded to XP from an older MS operating system and didn't set up an NTFS file system, but instead went with the old FAT 38, expect that the program will not install, but will hang up at an agonizing 80% to 90% completion of installation. 1) Download and install all service packs and critical upgrades from Microsoft (this took a long time).2) Convert your drive to NTFS using an XP Config command. All in all, about three hours, though a good 45 minutes of that was spent trying to install the mega scenery, unsuccesfully. And you will have to reinstall your FSD airplanes in both 2002 and 2004 - the conversion screwed up their anti-piracy system. Megascenery gets points for having an FAQ page up with this issue already identified, but, asking customers to screw around with systems that are working just fine seems like a bit of a leap. I'm sure there are many reluctant to do this, no matter the quality of the scenery. The package also came with charts, airport diagrams and a nice VRF tutorial - printed in actual manual format! Very nice touch. I did get to fly a few minutes - bring a lot of horsepower. Frames are fine, they are not the problem. But my machine could not keep up with the demands of swapping high and low detail textures - so the view over the cowl was a nice patchwork of perfectly square textures, some high detail, some not. This happened far more than with the default textures and tends to take away from the beauty of the scenery. System:XP - now fully patched and up to dateP4 2.6Radeon 9700 - cat 3.6 drivers764 megs or RAMBUS memoryMesh textures on 80Texture detail on HighAutogen mediumEffects minimum - very bottom of the scaleExtended textures onSun reflections onLens flare offAircraft casts shadows - offAA off in the program, on in the Radeon control panelMip mapping on 8.Colin

[Guest luhiss]

try disabling AGP texture caching in your fs9.cfg as well as increasing the texture bandwidth from 40 to something higher (I use 360)My system is a p41.7 768RAM ti4600-128 and my textures refresh fairly well. I also have XP PRo... for me the install took about 10 minutes...Once you get it working nicely.. go shoot an approach into Catalina Island... frickin awesome!Luhiss

[Guest cw1011]

Thanks for the advice. I will try these tonight. I think that most people will have no trouble with the install. This was more a heads up for those of us who bought early p4s that still had ME and updated as soon as XP was available. I'm still using my old Dell 8100 box, though the processor and graphics care are upgraded and so is the RAM.

[Guest luhiss]

I have the same box. Dell Dimension 8100... I trashed ME (frickin horrible OS) as soon as XP came out. Since then I've upgraded memory and vid card... When I installed XP though, I converted over to NTFS...Luhiss

[Guest Milamber]

"Megascenery gets points for having an FAQ page up with this issue already identified, but, asking customers to screw around with systems that are working just fine seems like a bit of a leap."Dude, it is not their fault that some people foolishly decided to stick with Fat32. The only reason to do so would be if you wanted to dual-boot with an older os. Otherwise it would have been smarter to convert to NTFS (acually it would have been even smarter to install XP from scratch rather than upgrading 98 or ME but that is another issue). The only thing I wonder is how the installer works with ME or 98. Does it change the way it installs the program depending on the OS?

[Guest product]

I don't like any program that forces you to mess with your settings in order to use it, don't think they thought through the process properly. The British Photorealistic scenery installs beautifully and makes recommendations about display settings for optimal use- but doesn't take control of your computer to force those changes.Joel

[JiBrady 20]

Can I get some idea of how "safe" the conversion process is. I am sort of scared that something might go wrong during it, and no way to recover other than reformat/start over. I guess if I knew most people do not have a problem, then I would fell better about doing the conversion. I will run Norton WIN Doctor, and disk check before attempting it. Anyone gone thru this process yet?TNX,Jim B

[Guest firehawk44]

I converted my FS drive to NTFS. The process was fast and easy. I too was worried about losing data but the process seems to be very safe. Goto Help and Support and search for "convert" and you'll get more details on the process. I'm thinking of converting all my hard drives to NTFS now. Also, the megascenery install program was much faster on the NTFS drive vs FAT32. I think it cut the time of installation in half. You can move all your files on the drive you're converting to a temp directory on another drive (assuming you have the space) and then run the conversion. After the conversion is complete, move the files back onto the drive.Jim

[Guest sssummer]

How do you disable the AGP texture in the FS9.cfg?

[Guest cw1011]

The only thing more useless than runway behind you or altitude above you, is advice on something you should have done that you can't change now...Thanks "dude," you are clearly far more intelligent than I, and clearly a much nicer person as well.