Karoliina Salminen

I love this sim and have been using it for a while. It has some weird features such as the user interface is from some details quite messy and some buttons are not particularly easy to use (e.g. in aircraft editor etc.), but the simulation quality is very nice. And with the new global scenery even the long problem with poor scenery has kind of gone away at this time. There is always room for improvement in eye candy - one easy thing to fix would be to use high resolution panels, the truth is that the 1024x1024 panel looks crappy on my 1920x1200 cinema display and not that good at home either with a 1600x1200 display. Or the panels could be done entirely with vector graphics and get rid of this pixel mess which looks jaggy with higher end displays alltogether.

I am running the game with Open Suse 10.1 Linux machine which has the following hardware configuration:
- AMD Athlon 64X2 4200+
- Nforce4 mainboard with SLI option
- 2GB RAM (dual channel 400MHz DDR)
- Geforce 7800GT 256 MB (only one, no SLI config so far)
- Plenty of electrical power
- Watercooling (Thermaltake Tai Chi case) (which leaked until I sealed the leaks with epoxy)
- Flightstick
- Rudder pedals
- And a home cockpit under construction (sort of)

It runs at about 20...24 fps at 1600x1200 with maximum detail settings ("insane" settings). Quite reasonable.
With standard settings it reaches over 100 fps.

I have both 7 and earlier 8 versions purchased but now that I had lost the version 8 DVD somewhere (I couldn't find it), I had to order it again because the game has a not so nice copy protection which forces you to keep the CD/DVD on the drive while you are using the game. Nice thing is that I get the new global scenery, so in that sense the money wasn't lost 100% as this is a really an update that we have waited for long time.

Now I am waiting the new nice set of DVDs to arrive with the wonderful new global scenery. And on the other hand I am wishing that somebody has time to port the Cozy MKIV model from X-plane 7 to 8 since my home cockpit will resemble that aircraft. Here is the version 7 model of the Cozy MKIV for X-plane: http://x-plane.org/cgi-bin/links/out.cgi?id=6311
(Can be found from page: http://www.x-plane.org/registry/74_Homebuilt.shtml )