I also played X3. It took some time, but after a while I was making good money on my merchant fleet. I basically stopped playing due to some bug, though. I'd progressed quite far, ran into a bug which I can't exactly remember what was, but which required me to load a savegame from quite some time back and I think either I didn't have the savegames I needed or it would have me undo so much stuff I had done that I simply couldn't be bothered continuing with the game.
Consider yourself warned, Zarko
Keep a lot of saves!