Then they sold it, and the new owner is now pulling a Train Simulator and going for thousands of dollars of DLC on Steam, which will likely kill the entire modding community that kept FSX alive once they realize they can sell it on Steam. Kind of sad to watch such a historical product be squeezed for the last dollars in slow motion.

X-Plane 11 looks absolutely fantastic, thankfully. Might be about time to pay FSX a final salute, and nice to support X-Plane as a reward for standing up to patent trolls.

There's actually two living forks. One is Dovetail Games' FSX: Steam Edition which you're talking about. The other is Prepar3d, sold by Lockheed. The license stipulates that it is "not for entertainment purposes", but otherwise it's basically just a port of FSX that works better in modern systems.

> "not for entertainment purposes"

That's kind of a weird stipulation: fun is prohibited.

The general consensus among the flight sim community is that their license from Microsoft forbade them selling it as a video game, to avoid them competing with first Microsoft and later Dovetail.

There's actually a reason for that: Microsoft had a separate product called ESP [1] that was based on the Flight Simulator codebase that was marketed as a platform for doing industrial training simulations.

Development stopped with the dissolution of ACES, the Flight Simulator team, but Lockheed acquired rights to continue to develop MS ESP, which eventually became Lockheed's Prepare3d [2].

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc526948.aspx

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator#Clo...

Licensing is weird sometimes.

Can confirm. XP11 is amazing. Though be prepared to pay a lot for addons.

It's one of the oldest Microsoft products that's not Office or OS-based. Truly amazing how much time they've invested in it over the decades. I wonder how much code from the 1980s is still shipping.

> It's one of the oldest Microsoft products that's not Office or OS-based.

It's older than any of the Office components, too.

Yeah, looks like the core code dates from 1977 (!) and Microsoft acquired it in 1981. That's a heck of a legacy.

Definitely is quite a legacy. I didn't realize it went back that far, but I do recall it running on DOS. Only had one brief go at it on a friend's computer in the late 80s. Don't recall being very good at it. As I recall, it wasn't very friendly to mistakes, especially on landing. I remember crashing a lot.

I had a version for C-64 in high school. Taking off and landing was about all you could do, given the graphics.

Yeah, I played Atari ST version and it was a blast. Gorgeous filled polygons, up to 4 simultaneous 3D views, weather conditions, stunt flying... However this is off-topic as only PC versions were made by Microsoft.

It even lives inside Office as an easter egg:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gYb5GUs0dM

Not anymore. Around the turn of the century Microsoft adopted a strict no Easter eggs policy as part of their trustworthy computing initiative.