LatinVFR Roatan MHRO: nothing has replaced it in twelve years, not even LatinVFR

Twelve years is a long time in this hobby. In October 2014, when LatinVFR put Juan Manuel Gálvez International on Roatán into FSX and Prepar3D, the sim world's idea of a Caribbean island was a landclass smear and six autogen palms. LatinVFR shipped 340 square kilometres of hand-worked island around a 6,857-foot strip, and people who had actually landed there said it looked right.

In March 2026, on an AVSIM thread titled "Airports you miss from previous sims" — a thread about Microsoft Flight Simulator, in the MSFS forum — a user typed two entries. "Sun Valley KSUN. MHRO Roatan." That is the whole review in one post. Nobody has replaced this scenery. Not the freeware community, not the payware competition, and — this is the strange part — not LatinVFR, who in June 2026 released an Airbus A380 for MSFS 2024 and have not built a new airport for any simulator since November 2022.

So what you have is an old product that never got beaten, sitting on a platform that is slowly going quiet, sold at two wildly different prices by two different shops. simMarket lists it at €16.99 and ranks it #25 on their all-time bestseller chart. LatinVFR's own Shopify store has had it at $4.99 since somewhere between November 2024 and February 2025 — a "sale" that has now been running for a year and a half. Same 835 MB download. Same 2014 build. Roughly a quarter of the price.

That gap, and the reason nobody has bothered to build a better Roatán, are what this review is about.

We read 20 sources for this: both store listings, LatinVFR's own product pages and catalogue, the 2014 release coverage, five AVSIM threads spanning 2015 to 2026, the competing and complementary add-ons, three freeware alternatives, a video look-around from the week of release, and the developer's public statements about where their attention now goes. Reddit is blocked in this environment and we could not read it, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing — worth knowing on a product whose entire public rating record is four store reviews.

What you are actually buying

One scenery, 835.26 MB, covering the airport and the island. The island is not a bonus; it is most of the download and most of the reason to own this.

Product	ROATAN MHRO HD (LatinVFR PID 8765)
Released	6 October 2014
Simulators	FSX (SP2/Acceleration), FSX: Steam Edition, Prepar3D v1–v5
Not supported	Prepar3D v6, MSFS 2020, MSFS 2024, X-Plane
simMarket	€16.99
LatinVFR's own store	$4.99 (marked down from $16.99)
Download size	835.26 MB
Store rating	5 stars displayed; four reviews, spread 3×5 and 1×4, true mean 4.75

Inside: the terminal, apron and ramp of MHRO modelled by hand with baked shading and occlusion; custom runway and ground textures; static GA and airline aircraft; AI-traffic compatible AFCADs; a PDF manual; and — the part that matters — the whole of Roatán with custom mesh, photoreal ground, hand-placed autogen, custom landclass and reworked shorelines. Plus birds and dolphins, which is very 2014 and quietly charming.

The two prices are not a like-for-like comparison, but the gap is real

simMarket's terms say displayed prices "include the respectively applicable value added tax", which for a session where no country has been resolved means 0% — so €16.99 is the pre-VAT figure and an EU buyer will pay more at checkout, not less. LatinVFR sell from Orlando through Shopify, where US sales tax is applied at checkout by jurisdiction. So the two figures are genuinely not directly comparable.

They are also not close. €16.99 against $4.99 is roughly a factor of four in any plausible currency and tax treatment. No VAT arrangement anywhere closes that. If you want this scenery, buy it from LatinVFR.

The version question

The name on simMarket reads "FSX P3D2-5", and the requirements block agrees: FSX or "Prepar3d V2,V3,V4,V5". The feature list on the same page — and on LatinVFR's own store, today — still ends with the sentence "FSX, Prepar3Dv1 and Prepar3Dv2 support." Both are half right. The 2014 release genuinely was FSX and P3D v1–v2; archived copies of the simMarket listing show P3D v4 added to the requirements by January 2018 and v5 by April 2020, and nothing has changed since. The marketing copy simply never caught up.

Prepar3D v6 is not covered. Lockheed Martin shipped v6 in 2023; this installer looks for a v5 registry key and will not find one. The community's answer is the registry spoof documented on AVSIM in July 2023 — write a fake Prepar3D v5 registry key pointing at your v6 folder, run the installer, then clean up. That thread has 46,100 views and 36 replies, and its author is careful to say it "isn't foolproof and some addons doesn't seem to work." If you are on v6 and unwilling to edit your registry, this product is not for you.

What the community consistently praises

The island is the product. This is the one thing every source agrees on, and it comes up in language that is unusually specific. On AVSIM's Prepar3D forum in October 2018, in a thread about whether LatinVFR's older Central American sceneries were worth installing in P3D v4, one member volunteered MHRO unprompted: "beautiful scenery, covers the whole island." A simMarket reviewer from Honduras, writing in January 2020, said the same thing from the other direction — that the airport matched the real one he had used many times, and that "all the island of Roatán is textured this way." Four independent voices across six years all lead with the island rather than the terminal.

The approach earns its reputation. LatinVFR's own copy calls it "spectacular and interesting", and unusually the marketing undersells it. Runway 07/25 is 2,090 metres of asphalt with sea at both ends and hills behind, and the scenery's mesh and shoreline work is what makes it read correctly on short final. The 2018 AVSIM thread's warning is the practical one: at 6,857 feet it is tight for a loaded narrowbody, which is exactly the constraint the real airport lives with.

Performance is not the problem you would expect. A photoreal island in a 2014 FSX-era scenery sounds like a frame-rate trap. It is not. A simMarket reviewer in December 2021 put it flatly: "You don't have any problems with FPS." The 2018 AVSIM thread makes the general case for LatinVFR's older Latin American work in P3D v4 — these airports sit in uncongested areas, so the usual penalty for running legacy scenery in a modern sim mostly does not apply here.

The terminal holds up because it was built at the right moment. InterAirports finished a terminal upgrade at MHRO in 2013 — larger check-in hall, bigger waiting area, expanded customs and security. LatinVFR modelled the airport a year later, so the scenery captures a facility that had just been renovated rather than one already going stale. That is luck as much as craft, but it is why the ramp still reads as plausible in 2026.

It ages better than its release date suggests. A March 2023 simMarket reviewer, writing nine years after release, put it alongside the sharpest names in the business: "Right up there with Fly Tampa and Orbx." That is one person's opinion and it is generous. But it is a 2023 opinion of a 2014 product, and nothing in the record contradicts it.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The platform ceiling. Still open, and permanent. The build stops at Prepar3D v5, which is where it stopped in April 2020. There is no v6 installer and no sign one is coming: LatinVFR's public position, restated in November 2024 when they discussed MSFS 2024, is that their development effort is in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Their release list since then is A330s, A340s, A321s and an A380 — no airports. This is not going to be fixed.

No MSFS version exists, and existing customers get nothing. This is the single most important buying fact and it is easy to get wrong. LatinVFR have been prolific in MSFS — but their MSFS airport line stopped at Baltimore-Washington KBWI in November 2022, and Roatán was never on it. Their generous upgrade policy — MSFS 2020 buyers receive the MSFS 2024 versions "at no additional cost", per their November 2024 statement — applies to MSFS products. It does nothing for anyone holding an FSX/P3D licence. If you own this and move to MSFS, you own nothing there.

Night lighting is FSX-era, and someone else built the fix. Mitigated, at a price. The feature list promises "Excellent night effects", and by 2014 standards that was fair: baked light maps and effect sprites. It is not dynamic lighting, because dynamic lighting did not exist in this product's target sims. The evidence is commercial: in March 2020 a separate developer, Living Airports, put a €5.00 SODE-driven dynamic-lighting pack for MHRO on simMarket, explicitly for P3D v4.5 HF2 and v5, with LatinVFR's scenery named as the recommended base. A third party does not build and sell that unless the base scenery leaves a gap. Budget the extra fiver if you fly at night.

Detail pops in late on approach. Still open. The January 2020 simMarket reviewer — the Honduran one, who liked everything else — flagged that the surrounding detail "takes some time to show up" when descending in, and hedged that it might be his PC. It probably was not entirely: a large photoreal and autogen coverage area streaming in behind a legacy FSX-derived scenery loader will do this, particularly at speed. It is a characteristic of the generation more than a defect of the product, but you will see it.

Support runs through a locked door. Still open, and eleven years old. LatinVFR's support forum at latinvfr.org has never been openly readable. In February 2015 an AVSIM member who had just bought his first LatinVFR scenery found that registration routed him to Cayman Airways Virtual, complete with a requirement to fly every three months. Three months later AVSIM moderator Ray Proudfoot hit the same wall after buying Montego Bay and wrote to LatinVFR to complain that they "make it difficult for new customers to post on their forum." We tested it while researching this review: the forum still returns a login page to anyone who is not a member, so the changelogs, patch notes and developer replies for a product you may be about to buy are not readable before you buy it.

The public record is genuinely thin. Four store reviews in twelve years. One video, from ADX in October 2014, two weeks after release, with 870 views. A handful of forum mentions. No written review from any of the major sites. For a product simMarket ranks #25 all-time, that is a striking mismatch, and it is worth naming plainly rather than explaining away.

On the bestseller rank

Several legacy products near the top of simMarket's all-time chart got there partly by being given away for a period, which inflates both units shipped and store rating. We checked this one specifically. Archived copies of the simMarket listing from January 2016 through March 2026 show it at €15.99 and then €16.99 throughout, never at zero, and it does not appear on archived captures of simMarket's free-products page. On the evidence available, the rank was earned by selling.

That still leaves a tension we cannot resolve: an all-time top-25 product that has accumulated four ratings. The most likely reading is a long tail — twelve years of steady trickle from a store whose all-time chart rewards longevity — rather than a burst. But we cannot see simMarket's unit numbers, so treat the rank as what it is: a sales statistic, not a quality verdict.

Performance and stability

Nobody in the record reports a crash caused by this scenery, and the two store reviewers who mention frames say there aren't any problems. That is a small sample, but it points the same way as the general experience of LatinVFR's Central American work in P3D v4 described on AVSIM in 2018.

The relevant stability history is adjacent rather than direct, and it cuts in the developer's favour. In 2021, when Prepar3D v5.2 arrived, an old DLL shipped with LatinVFR's Fort Lauderdale v1.1 caused an immediate CTD on load. LatinVFR identified it, released KFLL 1.2 with the offending file removed, and their Ricardo posted the fix publicly — AVSIM's root admin pinned it. So the developer does react when a legacy product breaks a current sim. The caveat is that this was four years ago, when P3D was still a platform they shipped for.

The one thing to plan for is the v6 install. The registry spoof works for many legacy add-ons and is well documented, but it is a community workaround, not a supported path, and if it goes wrong there is no support forum you can post in without joining a virtual airline first.

Who should buy it

The Prepar3D v4 or v5 pilot who flies the Caribbean. Buy it, from LatinVFR's store, for $4.99. At that price the island alone justifies it, and you are getting the best Roatán that exists in any simulator. Add the €5.00 Living Airports lighting pack if you fly nights.

The FSX or FSX: Steam holdout. Buy it. This is a native FSX product from the era when developers still cared about FSX, and it will install and run without argument. You are not going to get another Roatán.

The Prepar3D v6 user. Only if you are comfortable writing registry keys, and only at $4.99. There is no supported installer, the workaround is unofficial, and nobody is going to help you if it fails. If that sentence made you uneasy, skip it.

The MSFS 2020 or 2024 flyer. Do not buy this. It will not install into your simulator and no upgrade path exists. Your options there are all elsewhere: the freeware MHRO by DeltaGolfCreatio on flightsim.to, which is fine and free; TanTheMan's Roatán Island Scenery & Airport Overhaul from January 2021, which fixes the island's near-treeless default rendering; or the payware MHRO that Scenery Builders released on 30 August 2025 at €13.90, which covers MSFS 2020 and 2024 — but read its own product page before you pay, because it says the airport was compiled from Google imagery with "no accurate textures and sizes; almost all the time", is 78 MB against LatinVFR's 835, and does not include the island.

Anyone hoping this purchase buys them a future MSFS version. It does not, and it will not. LatinVFR's free-upgrade policy covers MSFS customers only. Do not buy this as an investment in a conversion that no evidence suggests is coming.

Anyone shopping on simMarket at €16.99. Not at that price. Not because the scenery is not worth it, but because the same file is sitting on the developer's own site for a quarter as much.

Where it stands today

The record on this scenery is small, old and unusually consistent. Four store ratings, one 2014 video, a scatter of forum posts, and every single one of them says the same thing: the island is beautiful, the airport is honest, and the frames are fine. There is no argument to referee here, which is rare and, in its way, a compliment.

What has changed around it is everything else. Prepar3D moved to v6 and this scenery did not follow. Microsoft Flight Simulator arrived twice and this scenery was never brought across. LatinVFR themselves have become an airliner house — an A380 in June 2026, an A330-900neo V2 upgrade announced in August 2026, free to existing customers — and their last new airport for any platform shipped in November 2022. The FSX/P3D catalogue on their store is a museum wing with the lights left on, which is presumably why Roatán has been marked down to $4.99 and left there.

Judge it as what it is. This is a 2014 airport-and-island package that still does the thing it was built to do, on simulators that a real and stubborn population still flies, for the price of a coffee. It is compromised — the night lighting shows its age, the detail streams in late, the platform list stops two versions back, and the support door is locked. It is also, in August 2026, still the most complete Roatán anyone has built, and the fact that an AVSIM thread this March listed it among the airports people miss says more about the state of the alternatives than about nostalgia.

Buy it from the developer, fly it in v4 or v5, and enjoy the approach. Just do not expect anyone to update it, because nobody is going to.