15 hours ago, cobalt said:

FYI, I had an Alienware X51 that had an i7-2600 3.4 GHz processor and 8GB memory, and FSX worked just fine on that system. I did upgrade later when I acquired MSFS2020 in 2020. 

That's allot of horse power for such and old sim (a spec that was available over five years after FSX's initial release).  Now go back and look at what was the top machines at the time of FSX's release.  The sim was a dog on day one with the top machines of the time and it stay that way with allot of tweaking 4-5 years after.  By the time we could buy your machine did performance get better but by then P3D was on the market.  FSX never performed as good as MSFS on it's worst day.🤔

11 hours ago, Luis Hernandez said:

I was the one who brought FS9 to the discussion. Looks like some people did not read it correctly: I was talking about aircraft. Regarding scenery and utilities, I think MSFS is ahead. Specially since Microsoft did the hard part this time (mixing the scenery with the surroundings).

Yeap, I remember that time, when I could look for a good model, a good panel, and good sounds, all by separate, and then mixing and matching. After VCs became the norm, there were less and less freeware airliners available.

The thing about VCs is that they actually were supposed to be the norm in FS9 already. The default FS9 aircraft all had clickable virtual cockpits. 99% of the freeware aircraft of that time and following years did not.

So yes, there were more freeware planes in the FS9 era than today. But when it comes to "freeware planes at least matching the quality of the default aircraft", the amount was really not that high, as far as I remember. There were some, but really just a few. And even in the FSX era, it took quite a while until the amount of freeware aircraft with nice AND interactive VCs started to increase.

FSX was great if you knew how to handle it. I never had issues with it except the odd crash here and there usually caused by the addon itself (remember that really weird LOWI by aerosoft approach crash, fixed later on?)

Now regarding freeware, with MSFS we're way way above and beyond what has been offered previously in _ANY_ platform. Yes, i mean X-Plane too and no, i don't want to cause nor will i participate in sim wars. It's just a whole new world with MSFS and the experience overall has been incredible.

I had an Athlon 64 3200+, Radeon X800 GT and 2GB of Cruical Ballistix RAM when I bought FSX in 2006. Interestingly, the RAM cost nearly twice as much as the Radeon.

I upgraded to a Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and GeForce 8800 GTX in December 2006, but I've got a receipt in Jan 2007 for the PMDG 737 for FS9, so I was obviously still using it as the main sim.

Did anyone else buy Doug Radcliffe's book 'Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight'? I had a flick through it last night, the book and the tutorials in FS9 taught me a lot about flight simming.

 

27 minutes ago, flyingscampi said:

Did anyone else buy Doug Radcliffe's book 'Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight'?

Yes I did. Is that the one with Concorde on the front cover and a gold /bronze /color scheme? About an inch thick too! 

1 hour ago, Daube said:

So yes, there were more freeware planes in the FS9 era than today. But when it comes to "freeware planes at least matching the quality of the default aircraft", the amount was really not that high, as far as I remember

I beg to differ. Yes, the default aircraft may have had virtual cockpits, but the systems simulation was very, very basic. Check out the overhead panel:

Notice that much of the overhead is just a static, low-res, non-functional bitmap.

Most of the freeware aircraft went well beyond the default aircraft in terms of systems simulation (Edit: for example, the Tin Mouse 737-200 blows the default 737-400 out of the water in terms of systems), and as a result I didn't fly the default aircraft a whole lot at the time.

Edited November 14, 20241 yr by martinboehme

38 minutes ago, sloppysmusic said:

Yes I did. Is that the one with Concorde on the front cover and a gold /bronze /color scheme? About an inch thick too! 

Mine was published by Sybex and the cover matched the FS9 DVD with a DC3 and Wright flyer on the front. It was an official book to accompany the sim "Official Strategies and Secrets".

2 hours ago, martinboehme said:

I beg to differ. Yes, the default aircraft may have had virtual cockpits, but the systems simulation was very, very basic. Check out the overhead panel:

Notice that much of the overhead is just a static, low-res, non-functional bitmap.

Most of the freeware aircraft went well beyond the default aircraft in terms of systems simulation (Edit: for example, the Tin Mouse 737-200 blows the default 737-400 out of the water in terms of systems), and as a result I didn't fly the default aircraft a whole lot at the time.

I remember the Tinmouse 737 and it had 2D panels only, no virtual cockpit. At least when it first appeared. And I'm not sure it appeared before the FSX era...

It's exactly what I was trying to say: most of the addons had only 2D cockpits, especially the complex ones. Dave Maltby (I'm probably mis-spelling the name here, apologies for that) addons were some of the very first "freeware very complex virtual cockpit" addons I've ever seen in FS9 and FSX (steam gauges were much smoother in FSX, by the ways 😉 ). 

2D panels were already completely unacceptable for me back in the FS9 era. There were many discussions on forums at that time. It was like "yeah, 2D cockpits are ok-ish for liner pilots only", but literally everybody else needed 3D cockpits like the default planes. People who wanted to fly VFR or bush flights with a 2D cockpit were already a very small minority at that time.

4 hours ago, Dillon said:

That's allot of horse power for such and old sim (a spec that was available over five years after FSX's initial release).  Now go back and look at what was the top machines at the time of FSX's release.  The sim was a dog on day one with the top machines of the time and it stay that way with allot of tweaking 4-5 years after.  By the time we could buy your machine did performance get better but by then P3D was on the market.  FSX never performed as good as MSFS on it's worst day.🤔

If that's your recollection then so be it. One thing I know is that I have never possessed anything close to "one of the top machines of the time" -- don't I wish! I do know that while there were some who were perpetually frustrated with FSX, most simmers at the time found it a great program, the best by a wide margin. Notwithstanding your own problems with it, it was certainly not "a dog on day one" for most of us. I am sorry about your experience, but please don't try to generalize to everyone else.

46 minutes ago, cobalt said:

If that's your recollection then so be it. One thing I know is that I have never possessed anything close to "one of the top machines of the time" -- don't I wish! I do know that while there were some who were perpetually frustrated with FSX, most simmers at the time found it a great program, the best by a wide margin. Notwithstanding your own problems with it, it was certainly not "a dog on day one" for most of us. I am sorry about your experience, but please don't try to generalize to everyone else.

You were one of the few that didn't have an issue with it.  These forums were/are full of posts in that time frame that outlined what a hog it was upon release.  A simple search in these forums would spell that out.  I'm going to drop this as it's always good some of us had no issues.🙃 By comparison MSFS was amazing upon release and got better over time especially when it had to be optimize for XBOX among other platforms.  We never had it this good.👍  My point is there was a reason FS9 had so much more freeware with new offerings long after FSX was released (also well into the P3D era).  The facts I outlined above bares this out.  Just the same MSFS benefited from a strong freeware market as it was such performance friendly platform.  Throughout the history of the franchise the best versions get the most attention from our community plain and simple.  FSX may have worked for you but many stayed with FS9 for a reason and the freeware market stayed there as well.  I for one didn't stop using FS9 until MSFS was released and up until that point there was still new freeware being offered.🙂  

2 minutes ago, Dillon said:

You were one of the few that didn't have an issue with it.  These forums were/are full of posts in that time frame that outlined what a hog it was upon release. 

The frequency of complaints in the forums cannot be taken as a poll of all MSFS users, for the obvious reason that those who have no problems are far less motivated to post in forums than those who do. There is no basis for saying that only a few had no issue with FSX. That may be your impression from the forums, but that doesn't make it a fact. 

3 minutes ago, cobalt said:

The frequency of complaints in the forums cannot be taken as a poll of all MSFS users, for the obvious reason that those who have no problems are far less motivated to post in forums than those who do. There is no basis for saying that only a few had no issue with FSX. That may be your impression from the forums, but that doesn't make it a fact. 

As they say follow the money.  Which sim had the most community support both freeware and payware?  FS9 hands down.👍

3 minutes ago, Dillon said:

As they say follow the money.  Which sim had the most community support both freeware and payware?  FS9 hands down.👍

Another unproven assertion. But this discussion of a once great but now-obsolete sim seems pointless to continue. 

5 minutes ago, cobalt said:

Another unproven assertion. But this discussion of a once great but now-obsolete sim seems pointless to continue. 

Agreed.👍

The performance of FSX on my i5 2500K powered PC in late 2008 was fine....but then I never tried to use the default scenery and autogen. After having used Flight Unlimited 3 (and the Flight Unlimited 2 San Francisco scenery region) exclusively between 1999 and 2008, I was only interested in photoscenery. My decision to switch to FSX in late 2008 was because of the release of the Horizon VFR Generation X photoscenery of southern England (and the UK2000 VFR airports to go with it).

For the record, I used the Flight1 Cessna Citation Mustang, and it ran smoothly with 16xAF and 4xSGSS AA enabled.