What's Changed in 5.66?

Folks who keep up with X-Plane are way past 5.66. This page is for those that have come across an old V5.x CD and would like to move to the last 5.x version.

This page describes changes specific to 5.66. Also see the Installating and Upgrading page for general information.

Where do I get 5.66??

Some of the X-Plane mirror sites have 5.66. Try the following links (sites and contents come and go):

Can I use the mini-update?

Only if you're at 5.60 or later. There is no mini-update for 5.54 and earlier. Way too much has changed to make a mini-update practical. The folder structure has changed and there are new planes.

New system requirements:

PC software:

You need DirectX 8.
If you're using speech synthesis for ATC, you need the Microsoft Speech 5 SDK.
As of version 5.62, you need Windows98 or later.

PC hardware:

To support Speech 5, you need a full duplex sound card. Speech support on PCs has been very troublesome. There has been far more discussion in the tech list than I can summarize here.
To the best of our knowledge, 5.6x does not run with the ATI Rage Mobility and Rage Mobility Pro chips found in some laptops. There is no known solution.

Mac systems:

No new requirements.

What's happened to the folders?

The Planes folder has been renamed to Aircraft. The organization inside it remains the same.

The contents of the Additional Nav Data folder has been reorganized. Everything is now located in the Resources folder. Inside Resources, you'll find

What changes are there in the aircraft format?

When I open a new aircraft after starting X-Plane, I find the plane selection menu set to some random plane.

X-Plane does a random scan of the Aircraft folder to populate the sky with air traffic. The menu gets left at whatever plane it opened last.

The Weather Atmosphere menu tells me it's not detecting Real Weather, even though I've placed a Metar.rwx file in the X-Plane folder.

This is a minor bug - it just hasn't looked yet. Go ahead and enable Real Weather and it will find it. Close the Weather menu and then re-open it. It should now tell you that it is delecting Real Weather.

The EFIS map tells me I'm right near another plane. How come I can't see it?

You've probably stumbled across a radio controlled plane. They have no nav lights and are so small you can't see them even when you're close by. If you want to be sure you can find all the planes, move the Radio Control folder out of the Aircraft folder. (Do the same with Airships if you're fed up with encountering the Hindenburg.) Back to the main page