FlyTampa Amsterdam V1: the last Schiphol standing for FSX, and a trap on P3Dv5

Somebody at FlyTampa sat down one day and decided that the polite word for "old version we still sell" is Legacy. It is on their own price list, in brackets, next to seven products: FlyTampa-Amsterdam V1 (Legacy Product), Sydney V1, Copenhagen V1, Corfu, Grenadines, Montreal V1, Boston V3. simMarket has simply shouted it — LEGACY - AMSTERDAM FSX P3D — and left the rest to you.

The rest matters, because FlyTampa currently sells four Amsterdams. This one, for FSX and Prepar3D. A V2 for P3Dv4.5 and v5 at €26.99. An X-Plane 11/12 build at €28.00. And an MSFS build at €21.99 that got native MSFS 2024 support on 14 May 2026, nine and a half years after this one shipped. Only one of those four is what a 2016 buyer got, and it is the one sitting at #33 on simMarket's all-time bestseller list with a five-star badge over it.

Here is the arithmetic nobody puts on the product page. Buy the legacy SKU at €18.00, then take FlyTampa's V1-to-V2 upgrade at €12.00, and you have paid €30.00 for a scenery that costs €26.99 outright. The upgrade price is a reward for having bought in 2016, not a cheap route in for someone buying in 2026. If you run P3Dv4.5 or v5 and you are reading this page because it is cheaper, you are reading the wrong page.

Which leaves a narrower and more interesting question. There is still a real FSX and P3Dv3 userbase — people flying boxed FSX, people on Prepar3D v3 licences they are not going to renew — and for them the legacy build is not the cheap option. It is the only option. Aerosoft's Mega Airport Amsterdam X dates from July 2010 and never officially left FSX and FS2004. Nothing else payware covers EHAM at this standard for a 32-bit sim.

So the review that matters is not "is this as good as the new one". It is: does a 2016 airport, frozen, still earn eighteen euros from the people who cannot buy anything newer? We read 26 sources for this one — the developer's store, forum and support pages, four store listings including the rival's, ten threads on FlyTampa's own forum going back to December 2016, two AVSIM threads, a full written review from January 2017, three trade reports, a video and one freeware project. Reddit is blocked in this environment and contributed nothing, which for a nine-year-old P3D scenery costs us less than it would for a new release — the record here is in forums, and the forums are still up.

What you are actually buying

A 2.71GB download of Amsterdam Schiphol as it stood in 2016, plus a large slab of the country around it. The surrounding coverage is not a token: photoscenery for the Amsterdam area, custom buildings well beyond the fence, 3D terrain with modelled tunnels and bridges, animated road traffic on the motorways. FlyTampa have always shipped more scenery than airport, and EHAM is one of the bigger examples — the A4/A9 corridor, the Schipholtunnel, the polder either side of the Polderbaan.

You also get the FlyTampa Configurator, which is the part reviewers kept singling out, and two optional texture packs from December 2016: HITEX (500MB, adds 2048 textures the default install leaves out) and LITETEX (100MB, drops many 2048 textures to 1024 for people hitting out-of-memory errors). The default install sits between the two.

SKU	Simulators	simMarket	FlyTampa direct
Amsterdam V1 (this one)	FSX, FSX:SE, P3Dv3, P3Dv4\*, P3Dv5\*	€18.00	$18.00
Amsterdam V2	P3Dv4.5, P3Dv5	€26.99	$26.99
V1 → V2 upgrade	P3Dv4, P3Dv5	€12.00	$12.99
Amsterdam XP	XP11, XP12	€28.00	$28.00
Amsterdam MSFS	MSFS 2020, MSFS 2024 (since 14 May 2026)	€21.99	$21.99

\* The asterisks are FlyTampa's own, and on their price list they are hyperlinks. They point at two forum threads — Prepar3D V4 Compatibility, posted 27 May 2017, and Prepar3D V5 Compatibility, posted 15 April 2020 — from which you download a separate patch. The base installer does not cover v4 or v5 on its own. A simMarket reviewer complained about exactly this in September 2019: every P3Dv4 user is forced to fetch and install an extra patch, which he called needlessly awkward. He was right, and it has not changed since.

On price, and why we are not calling a winner

simMarket shows €18.00. Their terms state that "All prices stated on SIMMARKET include the respectively applicable value added tax" — which for a session whose location has not been resolved means 0%, so an EU buyer will see a larger number once it has been. FlyTampa's own shop lists $18.00 and says nothing about tax anywhere on the site. simMarket's own currency widget puts €18.00 at $20.89, so the direct price looks lower, but the two figures are not on the same basis and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Check both carts before you pay.

Which simulators it actually installs into

FSX SP2, FSX Steam Edition and Prepar3D v3 out of the installer. Prepar3D v4 and v5 after the patch. Prepar3D v6 is not supported — Lockheed Martin shipped v6 on 19 July 2023 and three years later FlyTampa's compatibility grid still has no v6 column, and no v6 patch exists for Amsterdam. Asked directly in December 2023, FlyTampa's George said of another airport "YSSY should be fine in V6" and suggested pointing the universal installer at the v6 folder. A customer reported flying into TNCM on v6 in February 2024 and was delighted. That is the entire public record on v6: informal, encouraging, untested, unsupported. Treat it as a thing that might work, not a thing you are buying.

The briefing that sent us here said "P3D5". That is one of five simulator generations this thing covers, and the least useful of them.

What the community consistently praises

The ground. This is the finding that repeats everywhere and has never been seriously disputed. SimSmart's January 2017 review called the wear on the aprons and taxiways convincing enough to compare to AAA games; a simMarket reviewer in October 2018 picked out the same "Abnutzungsspuren" on the apron and taxiways as the thing that sells it; another in May 2017 called the textures sharp and clean. Nine years on, the ground textures at FlyTampa EHAM are still the reason people keep the scenery installed.

The surroundings. Repeated across every source class. The May 2017 simMarket reviewer named the surrounding coverage as "the finishing touches I always am drawn to". September 2024's reviewer — the most recent star rating on the listing — called it the best of FlyTampa outright, rating it above Athens, Vienna, TNCM and Corfu specifically on "best surrounding texture". For a hub sitting in the middle of the Randstad, having the Randstad there matters.

The configurator. Almost every positive source mentions it, and it is doing real work rather than decorating a settings screen. It toggles animated apron traffic, motorway traffic, parked cars in the garages, walking figures, static aircraft, snow, and — crucially for FSX — texture resolution. An October 2018 German reviewer's summary is the fairest version: the configurator lets weak systems run the airport acceptably while letting strong ones have everything. It is also how you pick which runways the AFCAD opens, which is not a small thing at a six-runway airport where the real Schiphol reconfigures constantly.

The small stuff. A model Fokker 70 in Cityhopper colours on a roof. A Heineken can sculpture further along the same roof. Jetway interiors with modelled floors and glass you can walk through with a camera add-on. None of it matters and all of it is why people write five-star reviews.

Night. SimSmart's reviewer was emphatic — everything good about the daytime textures gets "cranked up past 11" after dark — and the light beams onto the ground textures were the specific thing he praised. His one complaint was that the taxiway edge lights render too large, too bright and slightly stretched, which makes the airport easy to navigate and slightly cartoonish at the same time. That is still the fairest read.

What keeps coming up as a problem

Frame rates. Status: still open, and the oldest complaint in the file. The thread "Horrible FPS at EHAM" opened on 12 June 2017 and ran to 32 posts. The original poster had a 6900K, a Titan and a RAID0 SSD array, and got about 13fps with a PMDG aircraft. Others followed with 980Ti and 1080Ti machines reporting single-digit and low-teens figures with everything else in their sim running at 30–40. The pattern in that thread and in the store reviews is not "it is slow", it is "it is slow for some people, and nobody can say why". A March 2018 reviewer with a decent machine said performance dropped through the floor on approach and on the ground under P3Dv4. A November 2017 reviewer called the framerate loss disappointing next to Aerosoft and Drzewiecki. Meanwhile Saldo in the same 2017 thread had 25fps in v4 on three screens, and Emilios from FlyTampa said flatly that he saw no difference between v3 and v4 on his own machine. Both sides are telling the truth. This scenery is unusually sensitive to what else is in your sim.

Out-of-memory errors. Status: mitigated, then made irrelevant by 64-bit. In 32-bit FSX this was the headline risk, and FlyTampa took it seriously enough to publish a full VAS test on 16 January 2017 showing steady-state figures from 2.25GB with LITETEX to 2.45GB with HITEX against a 2.28GB stock-airport baseline. A May 2017 reviewer who owned every FlyTampa FSX product described running into OOM on approach with everything at HD, dropping to LITETEX, and losing almost nothing visually. A reviewer who rated it badly in April 2017 came back on 5 August 2019, said his upgraded machine handled it beautifully, and revised himself to five stars. If you are on P3Dv4 or v5 this is a solved problem. If you are on boxed FSX, install LITETEX first and thank yourself later.

The missing land-class layer. Status: still open. Two independent sources, fourteen months apart. On 16 December 2019 a simMarket reviewer warned that in P3Dv4.5 the installer does not add the LC scenery layer automatically, and that without adding it by hand you get elevation errors and floating buildings. On 16 February 2021 an AVSIM thread hit exactly that — aircraft sitting below the add-on textures on the default runway underneath — and a second user confirmed it, noting that the newest version shipped with no Amsterdam_LC folder at all and that reverting to the previous build fixed it. Nobody from FlyTampa answered the AVSIM thread. The user who started it had already tried their forum and described it as "like a barren desert over there".

The 2016 airport. Status: superseded, not fixed. The AFCAD files this scenery ships are literally named for the year — ADEX_FLYTAMPA_EHAM_2016_ALLRWYSOPEN and siblings for east, north, west and south operations. The real Schiphol has moved since. The A/B taxiway extension around Quebec went live on 27 January 2022 and is not here. The Corendon 747 hotel, towed across the A9 in 2019, is not here — FlyTampa said in November 2021 it was "planned for one of the immediate updates", and that was for V2, not this. What has not changed is the terminal footprint: the long-promised new Pier A has slipped repeatedly and Schiphol now targets April 2027, so the piers and the tower you fly into here are still broadly the piers and tower that exist. The layout is dated at ground level, not wrong at the skyline.

SODE jetways and VDGS. Status: never came to V1. This is where two credible sources collide. SimSmart in January 2017 reported a few gates where "the SODE jetways refused to connect". A German simMarket reviewer in October 2018 said the SODE jetways were still missing and he was hoping the forum's optimism would bear out. FlyTampa's own support page settles it about as well as it can be settled: most sceneries use CTRL+J, only some jetways are interactive and others are static, and SODE jetways exist on "the latest Prepar3D versions" and must be switched on in the configurator. The unambiguous fact is what the store copy for V2 says — animated jetways and VDGS are listed as V2 features. If docking guidance matters to you, this is not the SKU.

Performance and stability

EHAM with full traffic is one of the heaviest things anyone models, and the honest summary is that this scenery is a 2016 airport built for a 32-bit sim, running under 64-bit engines it was never recompiled for. A user in the June 2017 FPS thread put his finger on it before FlyTampa did: the scenery was not rebuilt for P3Dv4, it was carried across, and the slow texture loading and the frame cost follow from that. FlyTampa's answer was a compatibility patch rather than a rebuild — the rebuild is V2, and you pay for it.

What that means in practice. On P3Dv4 or v5 with the patch applied, most people are fine and some people are not, and the difference tracks how much else you have loaded — Orbx Global, TrueEarth Netherlands, live AI traffic, a study-level airliner. The Dutch reviewer on the simMarket listing in September 2019 was blunt: run this alongside Orbx TrueEarth Netherlands and you want a strong machine and at least 8GB of video memory. A December 2020 AVSIM poster running almost everything maxed reported a smooth sim with 84 live aircraft and real weather, and also reported 8.9GB of VRAM in use across two screens. Both statements are the same statement.

Stability itself is good. Across nine years of forum traffic the crash reports are thin, and the ones that exist trace to the LC/elevation problem or to a botched patch order rather than to the scenery misbehaving on its own. SimSmart's 2017 stability score of 8/10 — a few colliding textures, a shadow popping, occasional jetway misbehaviour — reads as accurate today.

The one genuinely unglamorous risk is the install itself. Read the compatibility thread before you run anything. The P3Dv4 patch requires you to open the configurator and select "East" under the Amsterdam runway setup before applying it, or it will not take. That instruction is one line on a 2017 forum post and nowhere in the store listing.

Who should buy it

If you fly FSX, FSX Steam Edition or Prepar3D v3 — buy it. You have no alternative worth the comparison. Aerosoft's Mega Airport Amsterdam X has been on sale since 9 July 2010 and never claimed P3D support; the freeware NL2000 project gives you a superb Netherlands and a competent Schiphol, but not this Schiphol. Install LITETEX on day one if you are on boxed FSX, use the configurator honestly, and you have one of the best-looking airports your simulator will ever run.

If you fly Prepar3D v4.5 or v5 — do not buy this. Buy V2. €26.99 gets you the PBR rebuild, the corrected layout, dynamic lighting, SODE jetways and VDGS, and no compatibility patch to chase. €18.00 plus a €12.00 upgrade gets you the same thing for €30.00 and an afternoon of forum archaeology. The only reason to touch the legacy SKU on v5 is if you already own it.

If you fly Prepar3D v4.0 to v4.4 — buy it, with your eyes open. V2 requires v4.5. You are in the one window where the legacy build is both the current product and the only one, and where the compatibility patch is genuinely load-bearing.

If you are on Prepar3D v6 — wait, or ask first. There is no v6 patch, no v6 column on FlyTampa's grid, and no statement about Amsterdam specifically. The developer's public position amounts to "it should be fine". That may well be true. It is not a purchase justification.

If you are on MSFS, MSFS 2024 or X-Plane — this is not your product at all. The MSFS build models the 2023 airport, costs €21.99, and has been MSFS 2024-native since 14 May 2026. Buying the FSX/P3D SKU by mistake is the single most common way to waste eighteen euros on this listing.

Where it stands today

The star rating on simMarket reads "5" over thirty ratings. It is not five. The spread is 22 / 3 / 4 / 1 / 0, which averages 4.53 — still excellent, and still a rounding decision the store made rather than a number anyone earned. We looked for evidence that the rank or the rating had been inflated by a free giveaway, as has happened with other products high on that all-time list, and found none: FlyTampa's promotions in the record are competition raffles and a 30% simMarket sale in March 2022, not a giveaway of this SKU. The #33 all-time placing looks like nine and a half years of steady selling to an airport that a lot of people fly to.

What has aged is not the modelling. It is the support. FlyTampa's attention moved to MSFS and X-Plane years ago, and even V2 — the supposedly current P3D product — last saw a version bump on 14 January 2022, with a promised A/B taxiway extension that customers asked about in January, July and October 2022 and never got. The MSFS build spent eighteen months incompatible with MSFS 2024 while customers were told nothing and used a community mod from flightsim.to to paper over it. Against that background, a legacy scenery still being sold, still installing, and still looking like this is not neglect so much as a stable end state.

Judge it as what it is: a nine-and-a-half-year-old airport that was near the top of its class on release, has been overtaken twice by its own developer, and remains the only serious Schiphol for two simulator generations that a lot of people have not left. On FSX and P3Dv3 it is a straightforward recommendation. On P3Dv4.5 and above it is a trap with a €12 exit sign next to it. Read the label before you click Add to Cart — and the label, to FlyTampa's credit, does say LEGACY.