Puffmac

Hi there, It has long been my ambition to purchase/create a hardware panel with all those frequently accessed functions on it (lights, engine controls, landing gear and autopilot). Now that I am finally of the age to work, and now earning enough money to pursue this long neglected ambition, I have decided to go for the former option, both for cost effectiveness and a bit of fun (and the challenge). However, being the type of person to thoroughly plan things before actually doing them I have been stuck pondering ways of controlling the MCP functions. All of the other things I've mentioned (lights, engine controls and landing gear) are just buttons that I can attach to a specific function either with FSUIPC or FSX's controller settings. However, the MCP's functions, as I see it, are a bit different. I've thought of at least 2 possible ways to do it: The first idea is that the physics control knobs only control the value in the physical window (heading, altitude, v/s, airspeed), and then this value would somehow be sent to flight simulator (or FSUIPC) and set the appropriate MCP value. The second idea is to have the knobs as axes which directly control the values in flight simulator, and then set the digital window on my hardware panel according to a variable sent from flight sim (or FSUIPC). Now, clearly, the first one appears to be the simplest, data is only sent to flight simulator from the controller whereas the second one requires data to be both sent and received to and from the controller. But I have to ask, are any of these ways even achievable with the information FSUIPC outputs or does FSUIPC even the ability to carry out such operations? Am I going about this entirely the wrong way? I have read through the manual a few times briefly to see what my options are but I'm still rather unsure. If anyone has any experience in this type of thing or could even offer me a deeper insight into how FSUIPC can most appropriately handle such inputs I'd be more than grateful! I know I'm jumping in at the deep end here but I'd really like to do this. I don't have a problem with the I/O interface, I've got that planned, it's just this bit which has stumped me, and I thought someone here could perhaps help, otherwise I might end up wasting money on components and wasting time doing things that were never going to work anyway :P Thanks very much for taking the time to read this rather long post, Andrew.

Pete, you're a legend! Sorted and now the rest of my SimConnect dependant addons are working. Thanks very much.

It isn't just that your SimConnect is out of date, but you have no working SimConnect installation at all. FSUIPC4.5xx can operate with any of the three versions of SimConnect, but chooses the most recent if it is available as that is the most efficient and error-free. Uninstalling and re-installing FSX actually makes things worse unless when uninstalling you take great care to remove the SimConnect parts too, separately. It's a problem with the uninstaller which doesn't actually remove the SimConnect libraries, so the installer then doesn't get to repair them when they are broken. Your FSX.EXE version number (61472) seems like the SP2 version (not Acceleration). Is that correct? If so, then you could probably get FSUIPC4 installed correctly by deleting only one folder then re-installing SP2. However, that would still leave other programs, needing the SP1 or base versions high and dry. So, I suggest that you start from scratch. Uninstall SP2, SP1 and FSX, in that order. THEN delete the three SimConnect folders from the Windows\WinSxS folder. Information about deleting the folders can be found in the Announcement at the top of this forum entitled "FSX HELP: Logging or Re-installing SimConnect". Then install FSX, run it to test, then SP1, run it, then SP2. Folks do advise running it once between each update, else the requisite files may not get created/updated. Regards Pete Ok thanks for the reply Pete! Much appreciated. The only thing is in the AddRemove programs section, even with Show Updates checked, SP1 nor FSX is there. Only FSX SP2 is there. Obviously I can uninstall SP2 via the control panel and FSX via the discs, but there would be no way to uninstall SP1.

Hello, When trying to install FSUIPC, I get the error in the attatched image. I realise that my simconnect version isn't up to date, however I can see no way of fixing it. I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling FSX several times and nothing works. Please help because I can't even use Active Sky which i suffering from the same problem obviously because SimConnect is out of date.