WideFS7: the developer will tell you himself that most buyers do not need it

Open the WideFS7 listing on simMarket and the one product screenshot you are shown is a grey Windows 95 button grid with a blue title bar reading "WideClient FS98 Eliminator - Connected - Rx: 2 frames/sec". That image is the marketing for a €24.00 product in 2026. Open the developer's own page for the same product and the first line under the heading is an editorial note left in production: "N.B. This is the SimMarket product description: to be updated". It has said that since the site launched on 5 November 2025.

Neither of those things is a reason not to buy WideFS7. They are, though, an accurate signal of where it sits. This is a twenty-five-year-old networking bridge that still does its one job perfectly, sold beside an FSUIPC line that gets a beta build most months, by a developer who is more honest about who needs it than his own storefront is.

The thing worth knowing before you spend anything: WideFS is not a version of FSUIPC and it is not bundled with any FSUIPC licence. It is a separate €24.00 purchase that unlocks a server component already sitting inside FSUIPC, so that FSUIPC-dependent applications can run on a second networked PC. inFlight News has reviewed FSUIPC7, FSUIPC6 and FSUIPC4 separately. This is the companion, and the honest review of a companion product is mostly a review of whether you need the companionship.

For a large majority of people reading this, you do not. That is not our conclusion imposed on the record — it is John Dowson's, stated in public, twice, to people who were about to buy.

We read 26 sources for this: the simMarket and fsuipc.com listings, the developer's news posts and changelogs, the new fsuipc.com support forums, archived threads from the simFlight forums that closed at the end of 2025, AVSIM and the official MSFS forums, the documentation of two third-party products that still require WideFS, two home-cockpit video builds, and the contents of the WideFS7 download itself. Reddit is blocked in this environment, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing; for a product this niche it would probably have been thin anyway.

What you are actually buying

A licence key. Nothing installs on the simulator PC that is not already there.

Product	WideFS7, version 7.160
Developer	John Dowson (Pete Dowson's son, who took over in 2019)
Price	€24.00 at simMarket (USD 27.85 / GBP 20.55 as displayed on 19 August 2026)
Upgrade	€14.99 if you bought WideFS6 at simMarket on or after 1 July 2007
Store	simMarket only — fsuipc.com's "Buy" button links straight there
Listed since	14 October 2006
Last build	WideClient.exe, 7 October 2021
Works with	FSUIPC4 (FSX), FSUIPC5/6 (P3D v4/5/6), FSUIPC7 (MSFS 2020 & 2024)
Does not cover	X-Plane. WideFS7 is FSX, P3D and MSFS only

The download is a 947 KB zip containing eight files. WideClient.exe on the client PC is the only program you run. WideServer — the half that lives on the simulator PC — has been built into FSUIPC since FSUIPC4, and your €24.00 key simply switches it on. That is why there is no installer for the server side and why "WideFS won't connect" so often turns out to mean "WideFS was never enabled".

One licence covers every client machine you own. Asked directly on 30 June 2023 by a Project Magenta builder running three computers, John Dowson answered: "The license is per user, so you only need one license." For a cockpit with a captain's display PC, a first officer's PC and an overhead PC, €24.00 total is not expensive at all.

FSUIPC registration is genuinely optional here. The installer's own guide confirms the WideFS key is entered separately and that "Registration for FSUIPC7 is optional". In practice almost nobody uses WideFS with an unregistered FSUIPC, because the applications people want on the second PC generally need FSUIPC's paid features anyway — so budget €29.99 for FSUIPC7 plus €24.00 for WideFS7, or €53.99, if you are starting from nothing on MSFS.

The price, checked

fsuipc.com quotes no figure of its own for anything, so there is no second store to compare against and no cheaper route — simMarket is the only seller of Dowson keys. The €24.00 you see is not necessarily the €24.00 you pay: simMarket's terms state that "All prices stated on SIMMARKET include the respectively applicable value added tax", and an unresolved browsing session is being shown the 0% figure. Log in from an EU address and it will move.

What the community consistently praises

It works, and it keeps working. This is the single most repeated finding and the least disputed. Across every thread we read, we did not find one unresolved bug report against WideClient itself. The failures are always configuration — a missing key, a firewall, a disabled server — and they always resolve. simMarket's three customer reviews are all five stars (5.0 average, spread 3/0/0/0/0, from 31 December 2009, 16 September 2011 and 28 November 2021), and the 2021 one puts it plainly: "very stable over the sim updates".

Licences outlive simulators. In June 2026 a user reported that WideFS7 keys bought in April 2015 were not connecting to FSUIPC 7.5.7. The answer from support was that the licences were fine and needed no renewal; the actual fault was WideFsEnabled=No in his ini. Eleven years, four simulators, one purchase. Very little else in this hobby survives that.

The server half is still maintained. WideClient.exe has not been rebuilt since 7 October 2021, but WideServer rides along inside FSUIPC7 and still gets attention: FSUIPC7 v7.5.5, released 8 November 2025, added a fix to "ensure WideServer is stopped before FSUIPC exits (to allow shutdown commands to be sent to WideClients)". Earlier entries in the same changelog cover WideServer threading (v7.3.11, 5 October 2022) and remembering the enabled state (v7.3.8, 28 August 2022). "Abandoned" is the wrong word. "Finished" is closer.

Support is free, personal and quick. No subscription, no tiers, and the replies come from the developer. On the current forums the WideFS threads are answered inside a day.

Where it is required, it is the only option. SPAD.neXt's documentation is blunt — for a network connection you need WideFS running — and Project Magenta's glass-cockpit suite documents a registered WideFS as the requirement for its networked displays. If you use either, this is not a choice.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The developer tells buyers they probably do not need it. Still open, and by design. On 9 December 2021, six weeks after WideClient's last build, John Dowson posted that FSUIPC7 v7.2.13 and later can itself run on a client PC where MSFS is not installed: "This should allow FSUIPC clients to be ran on the client PC and allow them to communicate to the FS without the need for WideFS/WideClient." He was careful — "Note that this DOES NOT replace or duplicate the functionality provided by WideFS", because the client keeps its own offset area, cannot send keypresses to the sim, and has no auto-start. But in June 2023, asked by a Project Magenta builder whether he needed to buy WideFS, Dowson volunteered the alternative unprompted: it "should be suitable for most needs". That is the developer of a €24.00 product routing customers away from it. It is admirable and it is also the review's central fact.

The manual you receive was written in April 2011. Still open. The WideFS User Guide in the current download is dated "11th April 2011" and signed by Pete Dowson. It describes WideClient as "version 6.86" — you are being shipped 7.160. It sends you to purchase links for WideFS6, to a support forum that no longer exists, and to schiratti.com for updates. It mentions FSX, FS2004 and FS98. It does not mention Prepar3D, MSFS 2020 or MSFS 2024 once. The companion technical reference is dated 30 May 2018 and spends its opening pages on Windows 2000 and Windows XP mailslot behaviour and SPX protocol fallback. The rest of the zip is older still: WideClient.ini carries a 27 June 2003 timestamp, the bundled WideFS Closer utility 5 May 2013.

Twenty years of troubleshooting went offline and was not archived. Still open. The simFlight forums that hosted Dowson support since the late 1990s closed at the end of 2025 — announced by the developer on 5 November 2025, and gone by early January. Every forum.simflight.com URL now serves the same page: "This forum is no longer available". On 23 January 2026 an MSFS forum user reported it and a second replied that "The new forum did not include the posts from the old one, years of discussions have disappeared". For FSUIPC that hurts; for WideFS it is worse, because WideClient.ini troubleshooting was almost entirely folklore held in those threads. The replacement forum's WideFS section held two topics and twenty-one posts when we checked on 19 August 2026, and its WideFS FAQ held exactly one entry. We verified this independently rather than taking it on trust, and it is the most material change to the product's ownership experience in years.

Registration is a hand-editing job. Mitigated, not fixed. The WideFS key is not entered where people expect it. It goes into FSUIPC7.key as three lines — NameForWideFS, WideFSaddress, WideFS — and if you re-run the FSUIPC7 installer to add WideFS you must re-enter the FSUIPC key too, or the file is regenerated without it. This has been the root cause of "WideClient says waiting for connection" complaints since at least 2021. The current installer has a WideFS field, which helps; the 2011 user guide that ships alongside it does not describe any of this.

People keep reaching for it to do things it has never done. Still open, and it is a marketing problem, not a bug. In March 2022 an A320 home-cockpit builder on the official MSFS forums asked how to distribute sim load across two PCs, was pointed at WideFS, read the product page, and quoted the disclaimer back to the thread before moving on. In October 2025 a user wanting NeoFly on a second machine got as far as "Hmm… maybe FSUIPC WideFS?" and then answered himself: "Nope, that's just for applications that use FSUIPC." Both were right, and both wasted time getting there. The listing's IMPORTANT block is doing real work, and it still is not enough.

The addressable market is shrinking. Still open. FS2Crew was asked in December 2021 and again in March 2022 to support WideFS for a networked second PC and declined both times — "Most people use dual monitor, and they just drag the FS2Crew panel to the 2nd monitor." That is the pattern across the current generation: tools either speak SimConnect over the network themselves, run their own client/server pair, or serve a browser. WideFS is for the class of application that talks FSUIPC offsets and nothing else, and that class is not growing.

Performance and stability

There is nothing to report, which is the point. WideClient caches every offset it has ever been asked for in local memory and answers applications from there, while WideServer pushes only changes at frame rate. It is a small, old, extremely well-understood piece of software, and in a record going back two decades the complaints are about connecting, never about running.

The one genuine performance consideration is one Pete Dowson wrote down in 2018 and it still holds: on anything short of a very fast simulator PC, WideServer behaves better if the sim's frame rate is capped a little below what the machine can actually manage, and clients poll at roughly that rate. That advice predates DX12, MSFS 2024 and every CPU you are likely to own, and nobody has revisited it publicly.

Who should buy it

Cockpit builders running Project Magenta, SPAD.neXt or similar offset-driven suites across multiple PCs — buy it. You have no alternative and you do not need one. One €24.00 key covers all your client machines, it will still work in ten years, and the fiddly part of your build is not this.

FSX and Prepar3D users with an established second-PC setup — buy it, and treat the price as trivial. The FSUIPC7 client-PC workaround is MSFS-only. On FSUIPC4, 5 and 6 WideFS remains the way, the tooling around it is legacy tooling that expects it, and €24.00 against what you have already spent on that rig is nothing.

MSFS 2020 or 2024 users who want one FSUIPC-based utility on a laptop — do not buy it. Install FSUIPC7 on the second machine instead, copy your key file across, add a global SimConnect port on the sim PC and two ini lines on the client. It is free, it is the developer's own documented method, and he has told buyers in your position that it should cover most needs. Come back to WideFS only if you hit its specific limits: keypresses sent to the simulator, auto-start, or a shared offset area.

Anyone hoping to spread simulator load, mirror scenery, or run a non-FSUIPC app remotely — do not buy it, and do not buy it twice. WideFS has never done any of those things and never will. If your application does not speak FSUIPC offsets, this product cannot see it.

X-Plane users — this is not for you at all. WideFS7 covers FSX, P3D and MSFS. Nothing here applies.

Where it stands today

WideFS7 in August 2026 is a product in an unusual position: technically sound, commercially honest, and quietly obsoleted at the edges by its own author. The code has not needed changing since 2021 because it is finished. The server half still gets maintenance inside a simulator interface that shipped a beta this very week. The licence you buy today will almost certainly outlast the simulator you buy it for, and the man who answers your support question will be the man who wrote it.

What has changed, and changed recently, is the surrounding record. Losing the simFlight archive at the end of 2025 cost WideFS more than it cost FSUIPC, because FSUIPC has a maintained manual and an active forum while WideFS has a manual from 2011 and a forum section with two threads in it. A buyer today gets a product that works and a paper trail that does not describe the simulator they own. The developer is plainly aware — his own product page carries a note saying the description is due to be rewritten — but the note has been sitting there for nine months.

So the recommendation splits, harder than for almost anything we review. If you are building a cockpit, this is a €24.00 rounding error on a rig that needs it and there is no debate to have. If you have one utility you would like on the laptop next to you and you fly MSFS, the free route exists, the developer wrote it, and you should take it. The score below reflects both halves at once, which is why it sits where it does rather than at either extreme.