active New Orbx purchase

[BR07]

Good morning All, from Queensland Australia,

 

This is my first post on Orbx, I hope I've read all the relevant FAQs and terms and conditions.

Like many of you I'm a long-time FS user, having used most versions up to FSX Gold, the best yet.
I use a multi-boot i7 with two monitors, CX yoke and pedals. My favourite aircraft is the Aerosoft PBY

Catalina WW2 amphibious flying-boat, with fabulous detail and originality.

The scenery I like is a great mixture, including some of my own made with ADE. There is a lot of the old Orbx

material in there too, from when it was freeware. It was always a cut above the average and I respect and

admire it, and wish the "new" Orbx and FTX well.

So, when I got an email the other day offering 47% discount on much of the current work, I jumped in and

bought a bunch of it - Australia AU, Caloundra YCDR, Bundaberg YBUD, Brisbane Intl YBBN and Hervey Bay YHBA. I

also manually downloaded some of the freebie updates like Holgermesh Australia and Nanaimo CAC8.

About eight months ago however, after bad experience with Win 10 and a surge of nostalgia for the good old

days of Win XP, I re-installed FSX with Acceleration, ADE, SDK and all the trappings onto my XP partition and

it has been working well again with many of the old add-ons. For anyone interested, XP with SP3 is pretty good

on modern hardware, and there is still an occasional security update or two.

At the moment I only have one FSX licence so I have removed the previous Win 7 installation completely but

have backups.

I realise that Orbx needs FTX and .Net 4.5 to run ,and XP SP3 only runs to .Net 4.0, but I am hoping there is

a way to manually install all this new scenery into the XP version?

I haven't downloaded my new purchases yet - should I ask for a refund, or bite the bullet and give Win 10

another go? What are the pros and cons of FSXSE and Prepar3d, in Win10? Are there any compatibility problems

between Aerosoft aircraft and Orbx scenery?

Thanks for reading this far, I'm not always so long-winded.

 

[Nick Cooper]

Hello and welcome to the forums.,

You need FTX Central version 3 to install the scenery and you need the full and latest .net framework to install

and use FTX Central.

I have Windows 10 and find it to be entirely compatible with FSX, subject to a couple of modifications

to FSX that are required for Windows 7 and 8 as well.

It is also entirely compatible with all the FTX software and so far, all the other software that I own or use,

whether to do with flight simulation or not.

[Larry_R]

Hi BR07,

Since you mention CAC8, perhaps I can add to what Nick says. My sense is that as time goes on it will become increasingly difficult to stick with Windows XP.   In that CAC8 can only be installed by FTXC3, you would not be able to try it with XP.  However as installed, Widows 10 can be very frustrating especially if one is used to previous versions where using them becomes almost automatic. There are several small apps that will give Windows 10 a familiar interface.  I've been using Classic Shell for a  number of years but there are other options. Classic Shell is free. It's the first program I install after a clean Win 10 install; otherwise I have trouble doing much of anything.

[BR07]

Thanks for your advice. All understood.

I've decided to run both FSX on XP, and FSXSE on Win 10 on my quad-boot setup. 

I just bought Steam Edition and will install it in Win 10, so I can run either as I like.

The FTX material will go into FSXSE so I can run it with any of my golden oldies that still work there.

Another consideration we all have to think of is the future development of P3D. It's probably not worth changing to the current version at this late stage, and any 64-bit version of the future will probably warrant a major hardware overhaul, maybe on Win 11, Win 12, or   That's a decision for next year.