I bought my first payware addon in September 2005 (I just looked at the receipt) and it was the Cessna 182 Skylane II RG FS2004.

I bought my first Captain Sim addon (757-200 Base Pack v4.2) in April 2009. The 757-300 and Freighter followed very soon after that.

Abacus Airbus Collection. The best waste of money in my life.
Pete

LIkewise it Abacus rubbish the Lockheed Constellation and Catalina (about 2007 or earlier) real duds actually, cheap, nasty and orrible! still got them in their boxes as a momento.

Then it was onto to first up the Capt Sim, 727, then Legendary 707, C130, 767, 707 and now the 737. Some other publishers are ok but after Capt Sim there are not many who come close to the quality of Capt Sim.

Only one other payware has come close to Capt Sim but alas I think they are defunct and they did a darn good DC-9. The remainder are so so except a well know german company who do good stuff too, scenery and aeroplanes but limited range. So much so called payware is ported MS2004 stuff which given the world of VC's (I use nothing else so that is my criteria for any model) is terrible and I hate 2D screens and pop ups.

All my other stuff is good quality freeware and some of it is excellent and a darn sight better than a lot of so called professional payware stuff.

In 1992 or so I bought an IFR simulator for MAC II that was excellent. Can't remember the name now (20years ago! IS that possible?) I probably still have the floppies cause I never throw anything away. It cost about $100 as I recall, back when that was a significant expenditure.

My first payware was the CS 777 Exterior in May/2011, followed by the CS 767 Base Pack... then a lot more came along.

I sometime heard about Abacus but never knew how it was, now that I've seen some videos I laughed, specially with their 787 and its crazy rudder!  

Yeah Abacus is kind of weird, they are really old developer and sure could do much better job with their planes if they wanted. At least they seem to be good at programming as they have made many good editor programs.


But I have actually found a developer with even worse planes than theirs, AFS Design. Their aircraft seem to have a lot of similarities with Abacus ones.

I bought some Airbus collection package from them through Simmarket. I knew that it was in poor quality and didn't expect much (mainly bought it for A320NEO & A340-200 stuff), however it was much worse than I expected. It had some serious graphical errors that were clearly known by the developer at the time of release, however he just took screenshots from angles that didn't show these serious problems.

Also product info said that it included both A340-200 and 300 models & A330-200 and -300 models when in fact both -200 models were just retextured 300 models with fewer windows...

When I then contacted this developer he refused to fix these problems as I had written negative review about his horrible scam product. Also he kept saying that both -200 and -300 models were built individually when they were not, and when I told him that I had found out they both use same model by looking at aircraft.cfg of this addon he told me that those files installed on my computer are his property & I'm not allowed to look at them and threatened to call police  

Thankfully I got refund from Simmarket.

LMAO  

Im glad that I always stayed away from those guys, they only do Airbus right?

Who said "If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going." ?