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fognozzle

X Plane on an iMac

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Hi Flyers,

 

I am about to upgrade my old iMac to a new one, and so I am addressing the possibility of moving to X Plane 11, and running it in OSX. Has anyone done this and are they willing to share their experience and opinions?

 

I am currently an FSX user, and I have a windows PC for that alone. I am very keen to get rid of both, but I have some specific requirements that may preclude this, or at least set a direction.

 

Firstly, I am a VFR Piper Warrior II flyer in Victoria, Australia, and I use FSX with Plan G and Active sky Next to plan and rehearse my flights. I also like to rehearse ATC calls when possible, but this is rare these days. So I need Australian scenery, including small airfields, mapping, flight planning and the ability of controlling the weather. Integration with my iPad EFB would be nice too.

I recognise that some of this may require me to run Windows on the iMac, and I would be willing to do this, but I'd prefer not to.

I have looked at the difference between the X Plane 11 recommended system requirements, and those of my chosen 27 inch iMac, and I find that the only difference is in the graphics card, and I don't know how much impact this may have on my X Plane experience. I have tried the demo in Windows and I found it sensational when compared with FSX, so it may be ok. Everything else I do with a computer is perfectly handled by the iMac.

This is an exciting journey and not something I've needed to start since the introduction of FSX all of those years ago.

Over.

 

Foggy

 

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MAC is not a good platform for XPLANe. From what I read Apple have no intention of fixing some of the things they broke. Although XPLANe will be updating eventualy the graphics to work with MAc same time as Vulcan. Teh ORG has plenty of posts on subject.

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6 hours ago, fognozzle said:

Hi Flyers,

 

I am about to upgrade my old iMac to a new one, and so I am addressing the possibility of moving to X Plane 11, and running it in OSX. Has anyone done this and are they willing to share their experience and opinions?

 

I am currently an FSX user, and I have a windows PC for that alone. I am very keen to get rid of both, but I have some specific requirements that may preclude this, or at least set a direction.

 

Firstly, I am a VFR Piper Warrior II flyer in Victoria, Australia, and I use FSX with Plan G and Active sky Next to plan and rehearse my flights. I also like to rehearse ATC calls when possible, but this is rare these days. So I need Australian scenery, including small airfields, mapping, flight planning and the ability of controlling the weather. Integration with my iPad EFB would be nice too.

I recognise that some of this may require me to run Windows on the iMac, and I would be willing to do this, but I'd prefer not to.

I have looked at the difference between the X Plane 11 recommended system requirements, and those of my chosen 27 inch iMac, and I find that the only difference is in the graphics card, and I don't know how much impact this may have on my X Plane experience. I have tried the demo in Windows and I found it sensational when compared with FSX, so it may be ok. Everything else I do with a computer is perfectly handled by the iMac.

This is an exciting journey and not something I've needed to start since the introduction of FSX all of those years ago.

Over.

 

Foggy

 

Download the XP-11 demo and try it on the Mac OSX & Windows 10 partition. I am getting ready to purchase it on this week's sale, either Steam or from X-Planes store. I am running the demo on an old Mac laptop and it run's fine, fairly amazing actually, but my Windows 10 partition will NOT run that version for some reason. Also, if you are wanting to use ACAR's for a virtual airline you must be able to run the Windows version. Try the demo on both Mac OSX and Window's to make sure they will work. Also some DLC could require Window's in some case's, but also a lot of add on's work on both platform's.

 

At least you can try the demo to make sure! Best of luck!


"Coffee, if your not shaking, you need another cup"
Flight Sim Break Discord Channel: https://discord.com/invite/fCV62Ka2QZ

 

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Thanks for the answers.

 

Interesting that you mention Windows 10. My windows 1o declared FSX, FSInn and Plan G incompatible and so I moved back to win 8.1

My upgrade project is moving slowly forward. I do however have some new issues to solve, since playing with the demo version of XP 11:

 

I attempted the scenery conversion process using some of my extensive Australian scenery and the process resulted in a huge window of hieroglyphics and when I tried to fly again XP11 just crashed to the desktop. what did I do wrong?

I am trying to replicate what I've been doing in FSX, which is to manually enter a VFR flight plan into Plan G, export it to FSX, which lets me load it into the GPS and then I go flying, with the GPS showing the way and Plan G showing my track. I've tried exporting the plan to .FMS but my version of XP11 appears to have nothing to do with this format, and only accepts .fpl, .fdr and .rep. How does one make files in these formats?

 

Foggy

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Hi Froggy,

 Yes, iMacs are not able to use native graphic drivers for acceleration. I installed FSX and X-plane a long time ago before I built my windows rig and used the bootcamp software included with the iMacs. I installed windows 7 at the time, then booted up to windows and installed all there drivers and off I went. Unfortunately, my iMac is a late 2009 model so the CPU wass not able to keep up and the graphics card was pretty weak, so I ended up building the new rig, which is already three years plus outdated. I'm using an i7 3770K clocked at 4.4ghz with a Titan 12 gig card on Windows7 and that still has its struggles. I haven't touched my sim in 8 months now, but may dig back in.  Good luck with everything!

 

Best, Jeff

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As a non-MAC user, except for their iPhone, iPad devices. I will give my opinion as to why MAC is not the platform to use for flight sim or anything else.

Money!!!!

For half or less of what you will invest in a MAC, which you cannot modify outside what they want you to have, you can build yourself a PC which will outperform any MAC out there.  It will do anything that a MAC will do inside or outside the Flight Simulation realm with the proper software and, should you need to upgrade something, you can buy it and install it.

MAC has a wonderful plan for making people believe they cannot use anything other than their products by furnishing schools and indoctrinating the students and staff to their systems, thereby creating a MAC dependency.

We can see, just in this tread, the frustrations experienced by MAC users and, if they want to continue that, fine, but why not just build a cheaper, more functional system and be done with it.

As stated, Apple produces the best hand-held devices available as they invented them, but even they suffer from the Apple tentacles by not allowing you to just plug in a new battery or several other things that their competitors do with their products.  Today, Apple is falling behind in even these devices because of the expense and the ever continuing upgrades which offer little in functionality - just fluff.  

I'm sure my thoughts will rankle some, but just think about it (which has been going on in this thread already) and make your own decisions, but don't be persuaded to do something either way that you just can't live with.

John

 


John Wingold

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Basic X-Plane operation is perfectly fine on a Mac. X-Plane is also developed on a mac. Of course there is limits to what the GPU in an iMac can do (don't even think about running X-Plane in native screen resolution, think more like 1600x900), and yes, it's always more expensive than a even better PC. I'd prefer having a dedicated X-Plane Windows machine, but as I stated above, for the average user, a (maxed out) iMac will run X-Plane just fine.


-

Belligerent X-Plane 12 enthusiast on Apple M1 Max 64GB

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You could opt not to pay the Apple tax, and build a Hackintosh. I built one; dual SSD for OSes, dual spinning drives for user data. One of each for OSX, one of each for Win10. I run XP11 in both OSes without problems and with similar performance. My frame buffer is a GTX1080, using nVidia native/generic drivers in OSX and EVGA drivers in Win10. There are some XP add-ons that do not have OSX versions. For example, xEnviro; so I use SkyMaxx Pro 4 in OSX. Haven't found an add-on plane yet (that I want to fly) that doesn't work in both. HotStart TBM900 runs equally fantastic in either one.

https://www.tonymacx86.com has some great buying guides for components and build guides to help get through the process.

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