Pete Dowson

Right, as I said. If it is being used as mixture then it will certainly cut the engines when pulled right back! It is NOT a throttle! Oh dear, you still misunderstand what I've been saying, and what the documentation tells you? How? :-( The mixture IS the mixture!!! You *can* use it as a reverser, via FSUIPC, but only if you tell FSUIPC to so do. It is one option available to you! In order to use it as a reverser you "Set" it (i.e. press the "Set" button top left in the Reverser section), and calibrate it as a reverser. Then it is no longer a mixture control at all and will instead act as a reverser instead. Please please do take some time to read the user guide. Regards Pete

Something very wrong there then. Are you sure that's a throttle and not a mixture? If you lean the mixture completely that will kill the relevant engine for sure (or all engines for the non-specific mixture control) -- in both a prop and a jet. In a jet the mixture is used in FS as the idle/cutoff lever. I think you have definitely got it assigned as a mixture lever, not a throttle. It is the only explanation. depends on the aircraft. Jet airliners tend to have reversing levers which can only be operated after pulling the throttles back to idle. Pete

Well, it is optionally set to the mixture, yes. It is configurable of course (and INI file option -- you can use any otherwise unused FS axis control)). And it isn't actually set unless you set it in the calibration screen. Of course you can do it that way if you wish. The choice is entirely yours. On a full throttle quadrant the reversing levers, although attached to the throttle levers, are separate "axes", but if you are short of levers you do it whichever way suits you. The addition of separate reverser calibration in FSUIPC (both the single one and the 4 separate ones for up to 4 engines) were later additions. Up until then everyone calibrated a reverse section of the main throttle levers, with idle as a sort of "centre". You don't seem to understand. There's nothing "tied" to mixture, that only happens if you set it. Just do not "Set" the reverser (press "Reset" if you have already) and it is the mixture again!!! And engines don't "cut off" if you reduce the thrust to idle, they simply idle. Where have you read that sort of stuff? If you want to calibrate throttles with a reverse section, just follow the detailed instructions provided. I am not about to reproduce sections of the User Guide here. Please do refer to it! Pete

You never need to run it as administrator EXCEPT to register FSUIPC. This is because the registration enters some small things in the Registry. FSUIPC doesn't touch anything else in the system in normal execution. Pete

The controls are FS controls. Whether they were actually listed in FS's own assignments I've no idea without loading old versions of FS up and looking. Sorry. How weird. I've honestly not seen any difference here. Maybe it's to do with the "defaults" for the specific joystick connected. There are files which define which buttons, by default, do what when FS detects a specific joystick. Maybe they have changed. Maybe. Sorry, I don't know how you did it in FS9 or before. Why not load FS9 up and take a look? Equally, if you had made assignments in FSUIPC3 then you'd only need to copy over your old FSUIPC.INI and rename it FSUIPC4.INI to get the same assignments. Good. Regards Pete

There's no such change that I know of. The controls are as they were -- there are Gear toggle, Gear Up and Gear Down controls just as before. The 'G' key is the default assignment for Gear Toggle and that is the one normally assignable in FS assignments. It must have been assigned to do Gear Up one way and Gear down the other. I doubt whether that was by default, however, as the separate controls are not usually assignable via the FS settings. That sounds more like how I would expect the default assignment to be. Just do the assignments yourself. The gear up and down controls are accessible through FSUIPC's buttons and switches page. Regards Pete

Really? I've never heard of anything like that before. The dialogue facilities FSUIPC uses are standard Windows facilities, nothing special or different at all. The only thing I've ever heard of which does cause dialogue window problems is something called "Window Blinds", which is an add-on for Windows which tries to provide user-controlled tailoring for Window appearances. It sounds like you may have something like that interfering. Maybe not that exact product, but possibly something like it? When you say the SCREEN goes black, do you just mean the FS window? Or are you running in full screen mode? If so, try switching FS to Windowed mode first. If it works okay then it is likely to be a problem with your video drivers, not correctly supporting standard Windows graphics in full screen mode. It changes depending on where FS is installed? That makes no sense. FSUIPC doesn't care at all where it is. Are you running FS9 on Vista? That may possibly make a small difference, though Vista treats FS9 as an old program needing special treatment. Please always specify the Version of FSUIPC when asking questions. If you are not using the latest, do try that (3.75), as well as Windowed mode. Regards Pete

Sorry, I do not understand what you are asking. You have a program which is working, but it doesn't? What DLL are you trying to "open up" and what exactly do you mean by "open up"? What is "run32"? Regards Pete

But that's really weird. There's no dependency on hardware built into FSUIPC, and the Key checking code is identical in both the FS9 and FSX versions! And it is okay with the new motherboard you put in? Regards, Pete

Please don't confuse the "EFIS" flight hoop facilities provided by older versions of FS with airliner EFIS control panels. Those offsets you refer to relate to the FS facility for hoops/squares, T's or "yellow brick roads" displayed in the air in the 3D scenery view to guide beginners into the ILS for landing. None of those offsets have been supported since FS2000, if then, and they may have only applied to FS98. I don't really know. The EFIS switch panel to which you refer is a gauge mode thing. There are no in-built FS facilities for that, it is just one part of the panel telling the other what to display. As such there are no assignable FS controls. If you are using an add-on aircraft with sophisticated gauges there may well be specific keypresses you can use, and some may even have known offsets if they use FSUIPC. I use Project Magenta which has its own range of offsets for these things. Failing all of that, if those controls are only operable by mouse, you'd need something like Luciano Napolitano's Key2Mouse program to drive them from keypresses. Regards Pete

Using a registered install of FSUIPC you can re-assign any of the PFC buttons and switches, and even the axes (but in the latter case you have to disable them in the PFC driver too). Just go to the Buttons & Switches option tab in FSUIPC. Operate the Gear lever, then reassign as you wish, to FS controls or to Key presses. Unfortunately the FS parking brake control is a "toggle", meaning there's only one control and it switches on and off alternately. This means you'd need to synchronize the lever to start with. Alternatively you can program the "off" position ("released") to write a zero to the FSUIPC parking brake offset -- Control "Offset word set", Offset xBC8, Parameter 0 -- and the "on" ("pressed") to write 32767 to the same place -- Control "Offset word set", Offset xBC8, Parameter 32767. Then it should be in sync as soon as you use it. Regards Pete

Yes, I've replied by email. Pete

One (or both) of the Keys you are using to register FSUIPC and WideFS is not legitimate. Where did you get them from? If you like, ZIP up the FSUIPC.KEY file (from the FS Modules folder) and send it to me to check. petedowson@btconnect.com. Regards Pete

FSUIPC doesn't do anything surreptitious like that. It is a DLL in FS and it keeps to doing its job, not messing about in your private affairs! You would have to buy a new registration and re-register. The email address is only used as part of your identification, tying that Key irrevocably to you. A street address would have done too -- those are used for folks with no Internet connection. A new email address is unnecessary for registration (as it is never used as such), but you can buy a new key if you wish. ;-) Regards Pete

Yes, I understood that. But I don't think you need to be quite so mean on the amount of data being sent! ;-) You might like to look at "pmRemote" too -- see http://www.projectmagenta.com . It produces web pages containing info, acting as a little web server, so you could use Internet Explorer at work. Regards Pete

Good! Well done. Me too. Not sure where you are looking. Maybe I didn't lead you quite exactly enough. Let me do it whilst I'm typing ... Start - Settings - Control Panel - System - Device Manager. Scroll down to "Universal Serial Bus controller" and, for each "USB Root Hub" you find, in turn, do this: Right click - Properties - Power management. That should show a couple of options. One of these is "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power". This seems to get checked by default. Uncheck it. Regards Pete

The packets of data are probably going to quite small in any case. Why are you wanting to reduce updates to such an infrequent level in the first place? I can understand you not needing to match the FS frame rates (which is what WideFS tries to do), but a few seconds would be no hardship, surely. I really do think there will be connection problems if you try to make them too infrequent. Regards Pete

Well, it isn't designed to do so. You can experiment if you like, but it may fall foul of internal timeouts. I really don't know. The client has to send "I'm here" messages a lot more often than 300 seconds in order to stop the Server assuming that it has disconnected and closing the link. The timeout is of the order of 30 seconds or so, so I don't think you want to set "pollinterval" less than 20000. The responsetime parameter is in seconds, not milliseconds, so this one should be 300. However, if the Server isn't sending out stuff more often than that the timeout may expire. Generally you need to allow a lot more -- say 450. Are you landing the plane from a WideFS client? Or do you mean you have another client at home with the FMC? You can't change these parameters dynamically. With FSX you can disable WideServer, alter the INI file, then re-enable it, all without closing FSX, but you can't do that with FS9 or earlier. Regards Pete

I suspect these will all be specific to the particular panel. If the authors have not provided keystroke shortcuts to control them, only mouse clicks, then I'm afraid there's no way to drive them from buttons unless you have some sort of mouse driver, like Key2Mouse by Luciano Napolitano. That allows you to make a key press perform mouse positioning and button clicking. Then you can program your buttons to send the selected keystroke. Regards Pete

That's very strange. The values are all kept in the INI file, so unless that is somehow being lost or corrupted I couldn't explain that -- unless possibly the device was coming up with a different joystick number sometimes? I believe that can happen on Wind98 and before, but it was certainly fixed in the USB drivers of the later Win98 and WinXP/Vista. Did you ever notice the joystick number referred to there was different? Another possibility, though one which should right itself, is where power management is being applied to the USB ports. If Windows withdraws power it may upset the device. Check in Control Panel - System - Device Manager. Find the USB Hubs and make sure power management is off on all of them. Very strange. What version of Windows are you using? And please do check those power management settings. Regards Pete

The type is specified in the Programmers guide. It is part of the description. Try using FSInterrogate which will give you real-time updating values to view in an asortment of formats. I'm not surprised -- 65536 * 65536 is one more than the maximum that can be accommodated in a 32 bit unsigned value, let alone signed. You need put the original value into floating point form first THEN do your calculations. Obviously for accurate angles an integral value (in degrees!) in not much use! Pete

Well, that's not so much "too often" as "off the beat". If you are writing comfortably at 25 try limiting FS's frame rate to 25. Really the main enemy you have is FS's own simulation engine trying to do its thing -- every beat you miss it will fill in. You are fighting it all the way. I think the usual way to get things smooth is to defeat the sim engine by putting FS into slew mode, or possibly pause mode. If you only want the views not the gauge readings then either might work better for you. Another alternative is zero sim rate (actually setting the sim rate value to 0). Otherwise you have to beat the Sim Engine into submission by matching the frame rate, and one way to do that is to limit FS's. This also has the good side effect of generally making it more constant, easier to match. There are ways but they involve hacking to hook into the right routines, and they are different in each version of FS. Best these days to use FSX -- then you get official SimConnect support for all this stuff. There are no SDKs for DLLs in FS2004 or earlier. Regards Pete

It isn't whether FSUIPC is fast enough, it's the frame rate you can achieve in FS. FSUIPC cannot feed data into FS faster than its frame rate and to try to do so merely has the opposite effect. There are only two areas of overhead in this interface - first is process switching, if you have the interfacing program running in the same PC. The other is simply the normal Windows message queuing system, which can also of course sometimes defeat they synchronicity. >> My program will be a simple FS DLL that has a second thread reading/writing FS's lat, lon, alt, pitch, bank and heading. << Having it as an FS DLL helps reduce the process switching overhead, and by using the module access method you avoid the message queuing problems, mostly, too. But take care not to introduce stutters in FS by using its processing slot too much. Your "second thread" should be the main thread -- i.e. the same one as FSUIPC and most of FS is running in, otherwise you won't be able to lock into the frame rate and there may well be other problems if you manage to make FSUIPC try to use non-re-entrant parts of FS from the wrong thread whilst they are being executed from the main one. Make the UDP part the separate thread. Regards Pete

I replied to your post about this in the AVSIM Simconnect forum, as follows: Yes, but only a small subset of facilities are available. Should be okay. Try it. The "official" interface for FS98 was actually FS6IPC. I developed FSUIPC for FS2000 and made it work in its basic form (as an interface to FS variables) in FS98 just to make sure I had the same things -- i.e. that it was compatible. So, if you have trouble with the later, much more developed FSUIPC versions, see if you can find FS6IPC. (The interface is the same). Regards Pete

You surely mean control the elevator and ailerons? A yoke is an input device such as the one you are trying to interface. Instead of thinking "affect the yoke" think "affect the aircraft controls". A yoke controls two sets of surfaces on an aircraft -- elevator and ailerons. FS's controls for these are called, respectively, AXIS_ELEVATOR_SET and AXIS_AILERONS_SET. You can send values for these using SimConnect's "SimConnect_TransmitClientEvent" after assigning an ID to these Sim Events by using "SimConnect_MapClientEventToSimEvent". The associated parameter values for these vary from -16383 to +16383, with zero being straight and level. Regards Pete