X-Plane 7 on CD

7.30 Final Release on CD: One purchase (on 4 CDs) includes world scenery, all updates, and all airplanes

	This is Version 7 on CD. It will run on any PC with any CD/DVD reader. If you've got the power, Version 8 on DVD for bigger, faster computers is now shipping! X-Plane is a comprehensive flight simulator for both PC and Mac pilots. It's possibly the most realistic flight model available for personal computers. It can be configured into almost any configuration or task that you can imagine, and it includes design, mapping, and weather tools unlike any other flight sim package available anywhere. X-Plane is the software used in the Motus Full-motion flight simulator. Not only is it vast and enormous, it also flies very nicely! It loads and starts without problem, and the aircraft fly, well, like the real thing! Note: the airplanes are so realistic that they need rudder pedals. X-Plane is most unusual in that it runs on both Windows PCs, and on Macintosh (both OS9 and OS X). Both versions of X-Plane are included on the X-Plane 4-CD package that we ship to users.
Flexible! X-Plane offers ready-made props, jets, single- and multi-engine airplanes, as well as gliders, helicopters and VTOLs such as the V-22 Osprey and AV8-B Harrier. Dozens, or even hundreds, of different airplanes are available. This is an amazingly useful tool for pilots, engineers, and designers since you can also design your own aircraft. There is no other package outside of Lockheed's Skunkworks that allows you to design an airplane - and then fly it. You can use it to design real aircraft, or you can fly it as a straight training simulator.
Included Airplanes: X-Plane comes with subsonic, supersonic, and rotorcraft flight dynamics. It includes not only dozens of standard aircraft types, but also exotic and/or supersonic aircraft such as the Bell Tilt-Rotor, and the Concorde. The arodynamics are extremely well-done and each aircraft has a very realistic feel to it, including such nice touches as adverse yaw, and control feel which changes with airspeed. X-Plane comes with about 40 aircraft spanning the aviation industry (and history), and several hundred more are freely downloadable from the internet. Tools for designers make up a huge part of X-Plane. There's a whole lot of new technical features in this new edition.
	Weather: Weather is variable from clear skies and high visibility to thunderstorms with controllable wind, wind shear, turbulence, and microbursts! Rain, snow and clouds are available for an instrument flying challenge, and thermals are available for the gliders! If you run into hail, your airplane really gets damaged! If your plane ices up, it really starts to come down like a box of bricks. Real weather conditions can be downloaded from the internet, allowing you to fly in the actual weather that currently exists!

Scenery:

Failure Modes:

While X-Plane is the world's most COMPREHENSIVE flight sim, it's also extremely customizable, allowing you to easily create textures, sounds, and instrument panels for your own airplanes that you design, or for the planes that come with the sim. You can either use it as a simple flight sim, or as a training tool, as a design tool, or as an engineering tool.

Intuitive Aircraft Design:

Use Plane-Maker to enter your own aircraft designs... whether it's the airplane you fly every day, the homebuilt you are building in your garage, the dream-machine that you would love to own some day, or simply some wild flight of fancy, you can fly it now! Plane-Maker lets you simply point and click to enter data, and then plots the aircraft on the screen so you can be sure that everything "looks right" before taking your machine flying! Remember, you need only enter the airplane's DIMENSIONS... X-Plane will FIGURE OUT how the airplane will fly based on these dimensions! Therefore, you do NOT need to know in advance how the airplane will fly! You enter the GEOMETRY of the aircraft, and X-Plane will FIGURE OUT how it will fly based on that geometry.

System Requirements:

• PC: Pentium III or IV (600+) with Microsoft Windows® 98, Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me), or Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP. Microsoft DirectX-8 or better is required; DirectX 9.0 is OK, and it will overwrite the earlier versions
• Mac: PowerMac's (OS9 or OS X) are OK, G3's are OK, G4's are better, and G5's rock incredibly

The faster your CPU, the better the frame-rate!

X-Plane is a 3-D accelerated program, which means that it needs a decent CPU and a 3-D accelerator card to run. 3-D accelerator cards are designed specifically to do high-speed graphics, so they work many times faster than your CPU ever could. The three languages of 3-D accelerator cards are OpenGL, Direct-3D, and Glide. All Laminar Research software on PCs use OpenGL and requires Direct-X 8+, plus at least 384mb of system RAM. You must therefore have a 3-D accelerator card that can run OpenGL to use X-Plane's latest software. 1024x768 video is supported (way excellent)!

Joystick options should start with CH Products yoke , plus rudder pedals. X-plane flies like a real airplane and needs rudder pedals. You can't keep the propeller-planes straight on the runway without rudder pedals. Two throttles are a nice touch when flying twins. Logitech joysticks are hopelessly slow and sluggish - don't even think of flying X-Plane Version 8 with a Logitech unit! Helicopters (X-Plane includes the R22) are difficult to fly without a collective (a joystick works OK as cyclic); a separate CH Pro Throttle can be rigged to work like a collective.

Installing X-Plane: