Been playing with VB3-II for a bit, mostly comparing it to the original. Dropped it into an existing project that already had a VB3 track, matched settings and A/B'd them.
VB3-II initially sounded quite different. Not better or worse, just different. Especially the fast Leslie. However, after exploring all the settings - and there are a
whole bunch more now - I was able to match the tone of my original track very closely.
Mostly that came down to all the amp/speaker parameters you can now tweak. Gone are the "rotary speaker type" and "rotary speaker character" options, replaced with more configurations such as cabinet resonance. Theoretically, you can make it sound like any Leslie model - assuming, of course, that you
know what the differences are between models. It didn't take me long to settle on a rotary sound that I liked. Many say they like the Leslie sim better in VB3-II, and I have to agree, although the difference isn't revolutionary. The old one was already pretty good.
Most parameters are way more adjustable now, but in some cases that actually makes things more difficult. For example, in VB3 you could set the bass and horn speeds in Hertz, making it possible to look up the factory defaults for different Leslie models and match them exactly. Now those settings are in increments from 0 to 127, and it's anybody's guess what number corresponds to, say, 6.6 Hz. At least not without a lot of testing and experimentation.
The original 3 organ models (A, B or C) have been replaced by no less than 22 models (actual models, based on analyses of the original hardware). So instead of my usual fave, C3, I now have a choice of three different C3's from 1959, 1965 or 1973. Plus 8 B3's and 10 A100's. All are extensively tweakable, e.g. each drawbar can be independently trimmed.
Is it worth the 75 EUR upgrade price? Don't know yet. My first impression is a qualified "yes", meaning for true Hammond fans it's going to give you great versatility. But if you just use organs once in a while for background pads, then maybe not. However, if you're in the latter group then you've never needed anything this fancy anyhow, and you'll probably be perfectly happy with the organ samples in Dim Pro.
Question for longtime VB3 users: did it have a standalone executable? VB3-II does, but I'm not sure whether the old version did.