Vista 64bit

[Aeroman]

Hi,

I know this was just touched not too long ago, but I wanted to follow up...

I'm getting a new PC and went ahead and got Vista 64bit.  However, I'm still not ready to switch from FS9 to FSX.  I'm afraid that my many many addons, namely FSDT FS9 scenery, won't work. 

I know Virtuali has already said that FS9 sceneries aren't tested with 64bit, but my question is, is there any reason it shouldn't work?  I know that Vista has good backward-compatibility, which would allow it to run 32bit when needed.  If this is true (correct me if I'm wrong), then shouldn't it run most everything made for FS9 fine? 

To that extent, does anyone know of anything made for FS9 that only ran in 16bit, that relied on XP's backward-compatibility to run it?

I'm pretty sure I should be alright, assuming most things, if not all, that were made for FS9 were configured in 32bit and should run ok with Vista's 64bit...but if not, I suppose in the end I can always uninstall Vista and install either 32bit Vista or XP...  That would be a big pain though... 

[virtuali]

We don't list Vista 64 as being compatible with our FS9 products, simply because we don't want to add another platform to support, but they should work, in theory. But it's all depending how much reliable is the 32 emulation platform (WOW64), that handles the Win32 subsystem under Vista64.

So, if it works, we'll be happy to know that. But it's not guaranteed to work, and if there are issues, we'll never fix them, since we never advertised the FS9 products to be compatible to begin with.

But, knowing how complex the whole translation layer between win32 and win64 is, and how messy a stuffed FS9 install is (FS9 in inherently less stable, because too many addons, including ours, are using lots of undocumented direct memory access to do things which are cleanly and safely done in FSX with Simconnect), marrying FS9 with Vista 64 is asking for trouble.