Installing the DVD Edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 in 2025

"We are all flying through unfamiliar skies in the dark. And ahead of us there is more darkness, until the lights go out forever." Wise words there.

Do you know who wrote those words? I did, back in 2020, whe I installed the DVD edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 for the first time. I'm a brilliant writer, truly brilliant. The only person in the whole of the United Kingdom who ever understood the internet. And you, dear reader, you're good enough to be my friend. That's right. You're worth it.

You're unusually attentive, and I like that. Let's talk about Flight Simulator 2020. I bought it a couple of weeks after it came out, in 2020. At the time my PC was a nine-year-old Intel i5-2500K, but I quickly swapped the CPU for a Xeon 1275 in order to squeeze a bit more performance out of the game. Flight Simulator didn't run particularly well - my PC was a generation older than the game's minimum hardware requirements - but it did run.

As mentioned in the previous post I've built a new PC, and I was curious to see if MSFS 2020 ran any better. Why did I build a new PC? The immediate cause was Windows 11, which won't install on my previous motherboard. Even if it could the 2011-era LGA1150 socket has reached a point where upgrades aren't cost-effective any more.

My new PC was going to be built around an Intel i5-12600K, which was launched in 2021. But to my surprise the CPU was faulty, so I settled for an i3-12100F instead. K means overclockable. F means "no internal GPU", and KF means "overclockable, and no internal GPU".

No-one respects the i3. Back when it was new, it was the weakest "real" CPU you could buy from Intel, just one step above the Pentium-branded budget models. Nowadays i3 is technically very similar to i5 but with fewer cores, which is less of an issue with gaming than it is with video editing, as very few games truly take advantage of multiple CPU cores. The benchmarks say that an i5-12600K is four times more powerful than my elderly Xeon, while my new i3-12100 is only twice as powerful. I thought it would be interesting to compare the performance, given that the system is otherwise similar. It even uses the same GPU, because I'm not made of money.

Let's benchmark the two with Cinebench. First, my old four-core Xeon E2-1275 V2, which would have been state of the art in 2013:

In comparison this is the score for my new four-core i3-12100F, which would have been state of the art in around 2018, albeit that it came out in 2022:

As you can see the numbers are considerably bigger. What do they mean? I have no idea, but they suggest that my i3-12100F has slightly more than twice as much single-core performance as my Xeon 1275, and slightly more - slightly, slightly more - than twice as much multi-core performance. In comparison the equivalent scores for the i5-12600K I originally opted for are 17,000 and 1,800 respectively, so the i3 isn't all that far behind in terms of single-core performance.

So I dug out my physical copy of MSFS2020:

Look at all those DVDs:

Back in 2020 the physical edition of MSFS2020 didn't make a huge amount of sense. Swapping a bunch of DVDs is faster than downloading the game, but the installation still requires a huge update, so the speed gains are marginal. Five years later the game has had so many updates that the original release is completely out of date. But still. Let's do this. Let's do it. I had trouble finding a DVD drive. I eventually dug out an ancient IDE model.

Let's install disk one. As mentioned back in 2020 it has been a long time since I saw the InstallShield wizard. A long time.

Back then I used to wake up with an erection. I still had hope. That's all gone now, and yet I remain. I carefully put the disk into the tray and closed the DVD drive.

It took about twenty minutes. After it had finished I loaded up the second disc:

I carefully placed the first disc back into the box, taking care not to scratch it. I rotated the disc so that it was right-side up. It's important to be right-side up. After twenty minutes I installed the third disc. Disc number three:

Long-term readers of this blog might remember the original post. It was an arch joke. The humour came from the stupidity of documenting the least interesting thing about MSFS2020. The disc swapping. What kind of nutso lunatic photographs the process of swapping ten DVDs. And also it was an attempt to make you, dear reader, feel my pain. Because there is only pain. Let's insert disc four.

At this point night was falling. Heck of a nice Christmas present, Microsoft, turning off Windows 10. There are Ukrainian orphans who were hoping for the gift of AI this Christmas, but no. There are kids out there who were born in 2015, for whom Windows 10 has been their whole life, and now it's gone. Disc five:

Now Windows 10's tummy is very still and it is very quiet like mother was when daddy took her tubes out and cried all night. There's still Linux, but that's sick and wrong. The Macintosh shakes its tassels and rolls its hips seductively, but can you trust it? Will you wake up in the morning? Windows it is. Disc six:

I got to thinking about how many floppy discs Doom came on, back in the day. So I decided to look it up. Four floppy discs. That's how many floppy discs Doom came on. Four. Or alternatively five if you bought the game on 5.25" discs. 5.25" discs were still at thing back in 1993. Disc seven:

The 2016 version of Doom would have required thirty-five thousand, five hundred and fifty 3.5" floppy discs if the whole thing had been released physically, which it wasn't. There was a DVD release, but it only had a small bootstrap that downloaded the rest of the game from Steam. Disc eight:

If Microsoft had kept Windows 10 alive I wouldn't have had to spend nigh-on £500 building a new PC. I could have used that money to do something else. Almost a year ago to the day, I visited Berlin and tried out a Canon EF-M film camera.

It's an odd city, Berlin. There are three defunct international airports, including one almost in the middle of town. Three defunct international airports. One of which is semi-defunct. Schonefeld. That's the name of the game. Schonefeld.

During the Cold War the town centre suddenly found itself behind the Iron Curtain, and then when the Iron Curtain fell the town centre became the town centre again, but there was also a new town centre at Potsdamer Platz, although when I visited last year it had a run-down air. The trendy word is polycentric. Berlin is a polycentric city. Disc nine, we're almost done:

£500 doesn't stretch as far as I used to. MSFS2020 was released in August 2020, which was accidentally superb timing, because there was a global travel lockdown and the game allowed people to explore the world without leaving their home. In the wake of COVID everything seems to have gone up by £200. I'm not a wealthy man, but pre-COVID I managed to save up enough to visit Hong Kong. That total cost of that trip wasn't much more than £500, because the air fare was unusually cheap and Hong Kong is not expensive if you're willing to bum it.

Six years later however air fares have risen, hotel fares have risen, and I feel sorry for all those poor travel bloggers. It was a booming industry pre-COVID. Disc ten, the final disc:

In theory the game won't run unless the first disc is present in the DVD drive. But in practice you only have to copy one very small .ini file to an ISO, and run that, and the game works.

At this point I typed in my code to activate the game. It told me that the game had already been activated, which is fair enough. I activated the game myself five years ago. Then it dawned on me that the game was now a Microsoft Store app, and the only way to run it would be to install it from the Microsoft Store. Which downloads a complete copy of the game and installs it in a separate location, so the rigmarole with the DVDs was a pointless waste of time.

Damn. After spending a surprising amount of of time finding out where the game had installed, and deleting it all, I instead downloaded the whole thing from the Microsoft Store, which took three days. After strategically installing some world updates the installation directory grew to 230gb, making it by far the largest game I've ever owned. Albeit that it models the entire world, including probably you and I.

So, while Microsoft takes away, it also gives, because we will live forever. The tops of our heads are digitised and immortalised in Microsoft Flight Simulator. And I suppose people who were sunbathing when Microsoft's satellite flew overhead had their entire torso digitised, not just the tops of their heads.

Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 ED, Again

Let's have a look at the Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 ED, a fast telephoto lens from the superbad 1980s.

I've actually written about it before, back in July 2024, but I was curious to see what it was like on an APS-C camera, and in any case it's a good lens, so why not dig it out again? And take it to Geneva. Why not take it to Geneva, and let the sun shine through its polished glass elements once more.

The 80-200mm f/2.8 ED is way old. It was launched in late 1987, about a year after Nikon switched to autofocus. Nowadays the lens is only available second-hand. It's the cheapest fast short telephoto from one of the major manufacturers, which is why I was drawn to it.

Why is it cheap? Partially because it was popular, so there are a lot of them about, partially because it was discontinued in 1992, so even the newest example is very old, and partially because it uses Nikon's screw-drive autofocus, which is fading into history. Most modern Nikon cameras won't autofocus it, but the aperture and metering are still usable.

How old is 1992? Well, according to Google, 1992 is 33 years old. That's old!

The original 80-200mm f/2.8 was replaced in 1992 with an AF-D version that was optically the same, but with a revised focus limiter and a chip that could transmit distance information to the camera's flash system. The second version was replaced in 1997 with a model that had twist-to-zoom instead of push-and-pull-to-zoom. That model appears to have remained on sale until 2024-ish. Perhaps Nikon just forgot about it.

As of this writing it's no longer listed on Nikon's website. Instead the company sells a 70-200mm f/2.8 model that has image stabilisation and a swishy modern autofocus motor.

For all the images in this post I used the lens with my Fuji S3 Pro, which is now well-travelled. I took the same camera to Greenland a couple of years ago and still use it now and again. The S3 takes universally-available AA batteries and has lovely vivid colours, but more importantly it has a special sensor. That's why I still bother with it.

Over the last thirty years most digital SLRs used mass-produced sensors made by Sony or Philips, but a few manufacturers went their own way. Canon pioneered the use of CMOS, Sigma came up with a high-resolution Foveon sensor, and Fuji invented Super CCD, which had slightly larger imaging pixels than the competition.

Two of their digital SLRs, the S3 Pro and S5 Pro (pictured above) used an upgraded Super CCD sensor, Super CCD SR, which has two layers of photosites. Imagine a conventional six megapixel sensor, albeit with octagonal sensors, and then imagine a second set of much smaller pixels inserted into the gaps between the first set of photosites. Imagine that.

Now try to remember the number 949368. It's a simple number, just six digits. Try to visualise an interleaved pattern of dots in your mind while also remembering the number 949398. Nine four nine three six nine. Did you know that there was an episode of Star Trek: Voyager with The Rock in it? He played a wrestler in space.

No, I'm not making that up. There actually was an episode of Voyager with The Rock. It was called "Tsunkatse" and it was from the second half of the show's run. It also had Seven of Nine, because at that point in the show's run the ensemble cast had degenerated into Seven of Nine, The Doctor, Captain Janeway, and some other people. Late-period Voyager should really have been called Star Trek: The Seven of Nine and The Doctor Show, and yet Kate Mulgrew, Jeri Ryan, and Robert Picardo were charismatic actors who worked well together, and the show went up a notch when they appeared.

Which wasn't a surprise, because the original ensemble was pretty dire. There was the resentful co-star who didn't want to be on the show but continued because he was being paid a lot of money, plus the annoying fake-happy alien chef whose amusement value was undercut by a decision to direct him as if he was suffering from PTSD, which technically he was, but it made him pathetic rather than funny, plus the anonymous alien lady who was only two years old but was involved in a romantic relationship with the aforementioned alien chef - what was that all about? - and the ensign who wasn't as irritating as Wesley Crusher, but on the flip side had no distinct personality. There was also Tom Paris, whose name had Paris in it. And some other people.

And some of them were space terrorists, but only in the first episode. From the second episode onwards they weren't space terrorists any more. Because the show's producers wanted to have interpersonal conflict and actual jeopardy, but because this was pre-Battlestar Galactica they wanted to have family-friendly interpersonal conflict and not too much jeopardy.

None of this has anything to do with lenses. I just had to get it off my chest. That's not a reference to Jeri Ryan's physique. I just wanted to say it. Yes, technically it was Seven of Nine, The Captain, and The Doctor, plus some other people, because Kate Mulgrew was great as well. You remember how the James Bond franchise retained Judi Dench as M when the series switched from Pierce Brosnan to Daniel Craig, because even though the films were tonally different Dench was excellent in the role? Kate Mulgrew was like that. She transcended the material. For all the opprobrium directed at a female Doctor Who in recent years my recollection is the the grumbles about a female Star Trek captain faded away almost immediately because Mulgrew was excellent in the role.

There was also an episode where Captain Janeway went back in time to the twentieth century in the holodeck to investigate one of her ancestors, and it was almost a completely different show? It was something about the upcoming millennium. I admire the production team for at least trying something different. Suffice it to say that the end result of all these photosites is that every exposure with an S3 and S5 contains two images, a regular exposure, and a second exposure four stops dimmer.

Top command-line RAW processing tool DCRaw can even split them apart, viz:

Where this is useful is for retaining highlights. Consider the following image of a swan, which is way overexposed:

With any other camera that image would be a bust. That's not a reference to Jeri Ryan of Star Trek: Voyager, by the way. It's just hard difficult to get the mental image of Jeri Ryan in a fortified catsuit out of my head. It's one of the key pop cultural visuals of the late 1990s, which was my time. I promise I won't have any more digressions or sexual references in the rest of this post. This isn't going to turn into an elegy for Star Trek: Voyager, not again.

Whatever detail was present in the swan's feathers has clipped to pure white, but with deft use of PhotoShop's RAW conversion tools I can make the image look good again:

Isn't nature beautiful. On a more serious level, and a little bit more work, I came up with the following, which still looks a bit iffy, but it was an extreme case:

Highlight retention is a really esoteric selling feature. Back in the 2000s Fuji went to great lengths to market the S3 and S5 to wedding photographers, the idea being that the technology could capture a white wedding dress and a dark suit in the same exposure without blowing out the dress. But the built-in JPG conversion engine does a mediocre job of utilising the extra dynamic range - the colours are still nice, though - and wedding photographers are not by and large fond of spending hours tinkering with masks and layers in PhotoShop, so nether camera sold particularly well, although the S5 still has a following.

Still, the extra highlight range is also good for clouds. Fuji eventually gave up on Super CCD SR. Today the technology's dynamic range is still impressive, but after twenty years modern digital SLRs have reached a point where it's practical to expose for the highlights and bring up the shadows instead.

But what of the 80-200mm f/2.8? And what of Geneva? An odd holiday destination, from a UK perspective. I was drawn to it by sexual frustration. The city oozes pent-up sexual frustration. Switzerland's chief product is chocolate, which it exports. The people who actually live in Switzerland have to make do with raw grass and rocks. Everybody wears a suit so as to disguise their animal nature. The major landmark is a spurting jet of water that gushes all over the locals:

The political posters ooze raw sexuality:

I think the message is that doctors, the police, and construction workers are weak cowards, and that women are going to destroy public services. The centre of the city is gently split by a tram line which has trams that slide in, and out, and in, and out, and in, and out of the city, for hour after hour:

As I wandered the shores of Lake Geneva I could swear that the city was vibrating with pent-up protein lust, although this might just have been a combination of the tram lines and the electric scooters buzzing around. A six megapixel sensor does not overly tax the 80-200mm f/2.8. With a full-frame sensor it's decent at f/2.8 but glowy, sharpening up nicely at f/4, with f/2.8 at the bottom here:

At f/2.8 there's also a lot of purple fringing, obvious here in the water, but again it largely goes away at f/4 and is gone by f/5.6:

On the positive side there's virtually no vignetting, even at f/2.8, and the colours are nice. The S3 has particularly vivid colours. All of the following images were shot with the built-in JPG engine rather than being converted from RAW, with HARD and HIGH colour and tone, WIDE dynamic range and STD film processing, and then PhotoShop's Auto Contrast, although it was mostly unnecessary:

Distortion is minimal at both ends of the range. The autofocus worked fine, but I had the benefit of sunny weather. When it does miss - if you're shooting through glass, or a spray of water - the lens goes WHIRRR to one end of its travel, then WHIRRR to the other end, then WHIRRR until it settles on something. There is a focus limiter ring, but I didn't bother with it because I wasn't in a hurry.

Incidentally CERN's campus has a plaque that commemorates the very first website, but you can't see it unless someone lets you in, because the place has security gates. The World Wide Web in a recognisable form slightly predates The X-Files, which was one of the first contemporary pop cultural things to have a major internet presence. By the time Voyager came along, two years later, the Web resembled its modern incarnation, but narrower, slower, with smaller images, and tiny tiny videos. Voyager was a thing, but it was quickly forgotten, and then Enterprise famously failed to be a thing, and Star Trek itself faded into irrelevance while Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica had a renaissance.

And then Trek made a comeback, and so did Star Wars, and then so did Trek albeit on television, and so did Star Wars also albeit on television. We've come a long way since the 1990s. I remember an episode where alien duplicates of Voyager's crew attempt to meet up with the main cast, because they're disintegrating and they need help, but they don't quite manage it. That one stuck with me. Also Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine. She was funny! By the end of the show the cast essentially consisted of Seven of Nine, the holographic Doctor, and Captain Janeway, plus some other people that no-one remembers. Tom Paris, for example. What did he do? What was his quirk?