FlightSim.Com Reviews: Microsoft Flight Simulator For Win95

Review of Flight Simulator For Windows 95

By FlightSim.Com Staff

ell, it's been some time since my preliminary review...time that has changed my opinion on FSFW95. At first I loved it as you see from my preliminary review. Well, I did. Until I used it for a couple of weeks and found out that depending on where I flew, the performance on my new P133 was not acceptable. The result is after trying to figure out how to improve the new flight sim's performance, I became exhausted and fed up with trying to fix something that just wasn't meant to be. Here's why I gave up FSFW95 and returned to FS5.1 and am currently happier than ever with the operation of FS5.

Delays and Pauses

FSFW95 does not correctly use DirectX. The scenery displays in chunks and jerks about every 20 seconds or so. The frame rate is great, with many areas above 30 fps. The problem is that the scenery doesn't load as in FS5 and will stop for long pauses (some as big as 25 seconds!) if you don't copy all your boosters to your hard drive. Now, even with the boosters on your HD, you will still see scenery slow downs cutting the frame rate in half for recuring periods. These slowdowns always seem to happen in the landing flare, where you need smooth operation the most! My frame rate runs at about lets say, 25 for 40 seconds, then about 12 for 20 more seconds, then back to normal for the next 40 seconds or so. Sometimes the sim will stop for about one second, even though the hard drive is not being accessed.

This performance is totally unacceptable. Even a neat game like Monster Truck Madness runs jerky in a similar manner under Win95! This is not a problem exclusive to FSFW95 but the inability of Win95 and DirectX to run games and graphics.

Too bad, because in my mind, what good is a flight simulator that pauses and stops on a P133. I can only imagine the anguish others have on slower machines.

To some, FSFW95 is acceptable. I wouldn't have removed it if it weren't for the pausing. I loved some of the new features, dispite some that we lost with the new version. But now as I fly FS5 in style, through DOS, I realise how great and tweaked with scenery and adventures it was and that now, I feel as my "new" flightsim is indeed FS5.1.

I am sure FSFW95 will be patched, or maybe "FS7" will arrive soon, but whatever the case is, the current FSFW95 is a beta progam at best that looks good only when parked at the ramp!

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