Microsoft Flight Simulator

What works

Full installation.

Most things - front end selections, options, default aircraft, airports, sound, effects, Sidewinder joystick, ATC.

Freeware aircraft - IFDG A321, MelJet 777, Ito Kazunori F-4, Kirk Olsson F-16 etc.

UK VFR Photographic Scenery.

What does not

Top menu (you get most settings from Start Menu anyway).

Can't complete the Add-on Scenery process (still trying to load new airports).

Tried AI traffic - WOAI and PIA and can't see anything yet (also working on this).

Display hardware selections; stuck on monitor default - but OK at 1920x1080.

After starting the game by switching off the brakes I experienced "madscrolls" where selection of autopilot altitude, heading speed etc scrolled to the beginning or end of the ranges. It could be temporarily fixed by reboot but always reappeared because of FS9 play. It also happened in applications such as Firefox, Konsole or Nautilus after FS9 play and before reboot. I've done four full wipeouts - using 5x command lines in the terminal rather than just removing with Synaptic - and four reinstalls of Wine (1.3.4 and 1.3.6) with no success. Googling this problem seems to indicate a Wine bug.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Multiplayer.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Installation 1. use terminal e.g. wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Microsoft\ Games/Flight\ Simulator\ 9/fs9.exe (the "\" is to precede a space). IIRC Wine was in XP mode (some say Win98 works). 2. use terminal to run winetricks and load directplay. ~100MB. 3. use terminal to run winetricks and load dotnet20 if required for some addons. 4. use terminal to run FS9 eg. wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Microsoft\ Games/Flight\ Simulator\ 9/fs9.exe (fs9.exe Application Setting is best as Windows ME; doesn't work as XP). Notes 1. A nasty Wine fault was cleared by using terminal to run wineboot --update 2. occasional startup glitches sorted by changing file permissions eg. failed access of Scenery\World\Scenery.dat 3. NVidia Geforce 9300GS driver version 206.19.06 4. winetricks IE6 didn't work for window menu 5. virtual desktop not employed 6. used personal DVD in lieu of 4x CD

For 4 CDs installation, ignore automount in /media and manually u/mount each CD: sudo mount /dev/sr0 /cdrom sudo umount /dev/sr0 /cdrom start not from inside the cdrom dir: wine /cdrom/FS*/Setup.exe after the install is finished use winetricks to install directplay add the default automount cdrom drive /media... to: winecfg --> add app FS9 (by Michael)