This is one logic of MS i could not understand. Less than 10% of world PCs have a graphics card leave alone a good card with enough memory!! Now to fear that there will be pirates in that little fraction of high end computer gamers who can afford a $150+ graphics card but not a $30 original game cd is higly illogical to say the least. Also, the p2p network download logic does not apply. In my country to dowload the 4 cds it would cost me $105!!! LOL the original is available at $29-special eastern edition!!Never let accountants and lawyers decide your sales policy! Simple.

It's not just a "pirated copy" problem. It has been well-proven that many CD drives often cannot read the original CD#4. This CD utilizes SafeDisc 2.9 copy-protection and it's not all that uncommon for a drive to fail when trying to read the encoded tracks.Doug

>"BTW, I have now performed the upgrade on six machines here>at St. Gregory House, and guess what? I don't NEED the silly>CD in any of the drives in order to launch FS9...">>How did you manage that? Also just to play the devils>advocate, did you use 6 different boxed versions for those 6>installs or just 1? If you now something about Safedisc 2.9 I>would like to hear it. I have to use my CD after the patch.I have six purchased copies of FS9 here.I'll have to retract the above statement though. Having copied what I believed to be an intact, original copy of the fs9.exe into all six machine's FS9 root folder, and having the "update patch" successfully complete on all six installations, I assumed that all was well. I then noted that none of them required the CD to launch, and was delirious with joy!Much to my surprise and humiliation, I went back and checked all six machine's fs9.exe... and discovered that they were, in fact, unpatched versions of the no-CD fs9.exe... How and why the "update patch" successfully completed is anyone's guess, but the fact remains that it did... six times! Unfortunately, the intended effects of the update are largely unnoticable, since the update code was not written to the fs9.exe...

I am having the same problem as Tom and received my FS 9 direct from Microsoft...so pirated copies is not the issue.Ted CreaghFlight Ontario

Safedisc 2.9.x can detect if the disc is in a CD/RW combo drive or a CD-Rom drive and also checks the media-descriptor info on the disc. Thus it can detect a duplicate made on a CD-R disc and probably uses the same logic about the drive type. The best combo drives to handle SD 2.9+ are Plextor, Lite-On, LG (Hitachi)as well as other medium to high priced drives. HP combo drives won't always work as later models are made by Sony ....who owns Macrovision ...who makes Safedisc. Generally SD 2.9+ discs should read OK on CD-Rom units.

>Bill, no matter how much boldface type you use, I don't think>you understand much of programming architecture. When you>have your completed source code and go to compile it, you have>two options, a statically linked compile, and a dynamically>linked compile. >While I do agree that we don't know exactly what is changed>inside the FS9.exe file, I showed in performance tests in an earler>thread that replacing the new FS9.exe with an "older version">executable retains the framrate gains and autogen fixes of the>9.1 upgrade.Actually Dan, we do know some of what has been changed in the post-patch fs9.exe...Ample evidence is available that the memory offsets ("hooks") in fs9.exe have changed. The fact that the .dlls for Active Camera, FSUIPC and RealityXP have to updated is rock-solid, proof positive that changes were made.Although no one outside of the MSFS programmers can be certain, it is near certainty that offsets used by FS9's own .dll files have also changed. Hence, it logically follows that some - if not all - of the "fixes" provided by the proper application of the patch will not function properly, if the old, non-patched no-CD fs9.exe is used in place of the updated original fs9.exe...

Bill Leaming wrote:>BTW, I have now performed the upgrade on six machines here at>St. Gregory House, and guess what? I don't NEED the silly CD>in any of the drives in order to launch FS9...I'll bite. In the absence of That Which Must Not Be Named, how did you accomplish this?

>Bill Leaming wrote:>>BTW, I have now performed the upgrade on six machines here>at>>St. Gregory House, and guess what? I don't NEED the silly>CD>>in any of the drives in order to launch FS9...>>I'll bite. In the absence of That Which Must Not Be Named, how>did you accomplish this?See the previous message, where I had to eat my words. I was mistaken...

Eventually in the registry you can work to a Microsoft GamesFlightsimulator9.0 directory. Check the value of the CDPath key which is atring like "M:" for the correct value. I would check the local machine and local user sections to see if there are entries and the letter matches your CD drive.If you reinstalled from a different drive, maybe it did not change.Search the registry for all instances of CDPath and if they fall under Flightsim9.0 and they are not correct change it to where the key disk 4 will be.Of course, the usual caution applies with registry editing and if it is an XP machine I'd create a restore point before changing.