Old scenery

[Kiwia1spad]

Hi guys, I am starting to fly old school propliners up until the L188 electra more and more, i have FSX and want to fly some of the old air ports, i have the cal classic FSX Hawaii, and a couple of others, but i want to get an old Whenuapai, and Sydney, possibly a Pacific Island or 2. I found the fs2004 Whenuapai of 1962 by Wolfgang Gersch but nothing for FSX.. does anyone know if this scenery will work in FSX?

[Ian Warren]

You may find some off these airports may work as long as they don't have the old FS9 ground polygons , generally when the the modeller build the airport scenery these get included course then the airport will not work, good example is all the earlier airports I built the models will work and the placement is pretty accurate for the time but I used old PC lingo and it would not work in FSX ... the models date back to 2002 and around there realistically flogging a dead horse unfortunately.

[emfrat]

If you look at the Cal Classic Forum, there are a lot of members working to upgrade the FS9 sceneries to work in FSX. Apart from what Ian mentioned, there is a big issue with transparent textures in buildings. The CC project has been growing for many years and many new modelling tools have become available in that time, which complicates things. Golden Wings and SilverWings will backdate the default FS9 landclass, but so far there is nothing like that for FSX.
I had two great FS9 installs, one classic and one modern, and I have been rebuilding them when I am not led astray by what I have in FSX, but in FSX I have to ignore the anachronistic skyscrapers, urban spread and so on if I fly a vintage plane. Sad to say, in Win7, I found that FSX and FS9 do not play nicely together. Even with the SW language.dll in one, and the CC language.dll in the other, I found the wrong FS.cfg was being updated. Moving the FS9 installs to a separate HDD fixed that.
I would say, to get the best of the Classic era, you should set up a separate install of FS9 and build it there. A lot of the most recent stuff for FS9 looks just as good as FSX.

[AdrianPetford]

Yes, it takes a while to build up separate installs but is well worth the effort involved.

I have three for FS9:

1. Standard FS9 with everything
2. 1903-1945 - based on Golden Wings and third party scenery
3. 1946-1970 - based on Silver Wings and CalClassic sceneries

The Silver Wings/CalClassic install is particularly effective and I find this is the FS9 I fly almost exclusively now.

NZ and Australia are still under represented but CalClassic recently added Melbourne to their Darwin, Sydney and Whenuapai, and there's also a vintage Sydney harbour on flightsim.com.

[Kiwia1spad]

Thanks for all the info guys, I should go into the CC Forums and investigate.
Adrian, unfortunately i dont have either the HDD space for an FS9 install or FS9 itself anymore. My FSX install occupies 50GB of an 80GB HDD, plus all the other things on the HDD. I am in the process of sorting out a new PC, so i can get away from my single core Athalon processor and win XP hahaha.
I want to only stick with one Flight SIm, but i am considering 2 SSD with an FSX install for each for different setups, one will be a classic airliners, and the other will be more military aviation based but i will probably end up with 2 SSD's and one will be for FSX alone hahaha

[emfrat]

Sad to say, while FS9 allows multiple installs, FSX doesn't, although there seem to be ways around that. SSDs are great for loading lots of big files quickly, but they don't like being written to many times. Put a bare-bones FSX on an HDD, but store your scenery and aircraft files on the SSD; they will be written once and read many times. FSX updates quite a few things while it is running, and repeated writes to an SSD will seriously shorten its life. That is why you should never defrag them either.
This machine (SuperBeast) has two 1TB HDDs. FSX is on the main, FS9 on the secondary - that saves me buying a second set of CH gear, which I would need if I brought the old BigBeast XP3 machine back on-stream as a dedicated FS9 box.
Windows, barebones FSX and FS9s, on a partitioned HDD - about 80GB - calling scenery and planes from SSD storage seems to me to be the way to go.

[Ian Warren]

Hmm between the 'SuperBeast' and the 'Big beast" you really won't need a 'Whopper Beast' back the fact is it amazing to see and as pointed out how friggen impressive FS9 dose run even a today's 'Mini Beast' , I did say this yonks back .... Imagine If you reverse engineered FS for today's small low end PC , It would shock the 'Bee Gees' or what left off them outta the techno world.

[emfrat]

Hmm between the 'SuperBeast' and the 'Big beast" you really won't need a 'Whopper Beast' back the fact is it amazing to see and as pointed out how friggen impressive FS9 dose run even a today's 'Mini Beast' , I did say this yonks back .... Imagine If you reverse engineered FS for today's small low end PC , It would shock the 'Bee Gees' or what left off them outta the techno world.

Hehe - MiniBeast is the No3 machine on my LAN - it has a barebones FSX, just in case I accidentally delete some default files from the SuperBeast FSX

[Ian Warren]

Bestiality .. I need to get back to my get Ian fat program .. wonder if I started to eat computers .. would that make me smarter as well ...