Ian P

As a user of Saitek equipment for years, I have never had any problem at all calibrating any of it with either the default settings or FSUIPC. Indeed right now I have a CyborgX and Saitek pedals stick plugged in, calibrated through FSX. Later today, I hope to swap the stick for the "full rig" of a Saitek yoke and two additional throttle quads, all of which are calibrated and assigned using FSUIPC for FSX. There is a known issue - supposedly with the early yokes and which was eliminated later (they replaced my yoke and it now works fine) - with random button presses. Pete put a function in to FSUIPC which eliminated button "spikes" shorter than a set time frame and it did help the Saitek yoke a lot, but getting a replacement for the faulty one was still the best thing to do. MadCatz, I believe, took over Saitek several years ago, but their online support has usually, to be honest, been pretty terrible. I believe that there have been issues with them using 3rd party software as part of their driver suite that they are not licensed to as well, but don't accept that on face value as I have no proof of it. However the hardware is generally of reasonable or good quality and it does work fine in all the sims I have tried it in (X-Plane, Flight Unlimited 3, Fly!II and the MSFS series, mainly). If you follow the instructions in the FSUIPC documentation to assign and calibrate controls, you should be fine. Cheers, Ian P.

I'm just using my Saitek Cyborg X, Paul. My FS budget is currently £0.00, so I really can't afford any hardware and wouldn't have anywhere to put it if I could. :) Ian P.

I think that's no longer an issue with the FSX version, Andy, although it definitely was with the FS9 one. I never have to do it, let's put it that way. Worth trying though, if it still doesn't work... What works for one person doesn't always work for the next (dratted PCs.) Ian P.

One thing I did have to do, Paul, is that before starting to engine - as you should anyway - I "exercised" all the controls, moving the throttle, collective and cyclic through all extremes. I may be wrong on this, but I thin I remember hearing the throttle "click" through the idle gate during that initial movement of all the controls. Is it possible that you're not fully initialising the aircraft's panel code before flying? Try just moving all the controls through all extents before starting the engine. Ian P.

The Dodosim helo is a highly modified aircraft, Pete - pretty much everything on it is hard-coded to the panel and VC model. It ignores huge amounts of FS code and pretty much rewrites the helicopter flight model in gauge form. However, as detailed in the Dodosim manual, all of the extra controls that the Dodo 206 uses are mapped to FSX functions - for instance the idle release latch is "Smoke system on/off". One of the features is that closing the helicopter's throttle using your hardware (it's assigned to the pitch control axis, the same as the default helicopter models) should stop at an idle gate, about 6% throttle, rather than just shutting down the engine. Pressing an "idle release latch" on the collective lever clicks the throttle through from the idle stop to shutdown. I would assume from the post you quoted that Paul's hardware lever, when closed, is ignoring this idle gate and clicking straight through to shut the engine down. In the Dodosim, that's bad as shutting down the engine without allowing it to cool at idle setting will break it and cause a lot of virtual money's damage. I'll calibrate my stick using FSUIPC a bit later and see how it behaves regarding the idle stop. I normally have my stick assigned to the the throttle and pitch axes using FSX default assignments and they work fine (I use a Saitek Cyborg X, without the Saitek software installed, for "general purpose" FS use). Edit: I just assigned my prop pitch and calibrated it using FSUIPC and took the Utility Dodo on floats out for a spin in the dark. The engine throttle and idle stop functionality worked exactly as per FS default settings and calibration. Ian P.

Correct, you can enter the key on a different PC than you used to pay for the license - that's exactly how I obtained my license (which has now been transferred to its third PC in turn!) All the best, Ian P.

I've just tried it and the download worked first time, so it's not a link problem per se - probably an issue between your ISP and simFlight. Can you try clearing your cache (it's different depending on which browser you use) and attempting the download again? That's a long shot, but the solution may be as simple as just trying at a different time of day? Ian P.

Yes, you can. That's exactly how I make most of my "aircraft specific" profiles. It's also worth making the change as described in the manual to allow only part of the aircraft name to be used for the profile in the ini file - that means that you can call it ".737" and anything with "737" in the aircraft title line will be used. This is of particular use when you get one aircraft entitled "B-737" and another labelled "B737". Another option is to add a section to the title of every aircraft that you want to use a certain configuration (say "ip2eng", "ip4eng", etc.) but that's very time consuming and I only ever tried it once. Cheers! Ian P.

Moved to Pete's support forum. Ian P.

When I have my full rig installed (rare these days), I have a Saitek yoke with its own throttle quadrant, plus two stand-alone, identical, extra throttle quads at the side. All of the buttons and levers on these yokes are assigned individually (I use FSUIPC, but FSX recognises them individually as well) so that will not be your problem. You can most certainly allocate the buttons on each device separately, as Windows (and thus FS) will recognise them as different devices. The only problem you might face is if you try and connect both yokes simultaneously. FS really objects quite strongly to receiving multiple identical inputs at any one time (e.g. two different pitch or roll axes) so that can cause big problems. If, as you describe, you will be connecting them physically and thus the flight control inputs will only be from a single yoke, then you'll be fine. Something else you may wish to try - in order to retain your current settings while playing with new ones - is to create two different "profiles" for FSX. There are a number of ways of doing this, but the most reliable one I have found is as follows: Copy fsx.exe and rename the copy to fsx-test.exe (or whatever you prefer) - create a shortcut to this so you can run it directly from your desktop or wherever. This will, when you first run it, create a new fsx-text.cfg file so you will have to assign everything from scratch, or you can simply copy your existing fsx.cfg as fsx-test.cfg and that'll work as well. Copy your key file for FSUIPC and rename this to fsuipc4-test.key as well. Once more, FSUIPC will generate a new ini file, so you'll need to assign everything from scratch, or you can copy your existing ini file and rename it to FSUIPC4-test.ini which will once more give you exactly the functionality that you already have as a starting point. There are other ways of doing this, but that's the one I use and I know it works, giving you two totally individual control systems on a single installation where changes made to one (apart from scenery library, which remains a single file) do not affect the other. I have "fsx", which uses only my stick and rudder pedals with nothing assigned/calibrated using FSUIPC, and fsx-yoke which uses the full rig and is all assigned and calibrated through FSUIPC. Hope that helps? Ian P.

It's also still an FS9 aircraft, Pete - they fixed the things that crashed in FSX, but didn't update it. I'm fairly successfully using it (not very often, because you have to use the 2d panels to actually do anything!) on Windows 7 64-bit, complete with dll helpers, which are installed for all Wilco aircraft. It certainly isn't a specific bug that applies to all installations of the software, but if you didn't do your original install as administrator, that could well be at least part of the problem. It's definitely worth trying. Right now, the only FSX native B737NG on the market is from a company who would have to pay me to use their software, not vice versa. As you can guess, I'm on the waiting list for a PMDG 73NG, too! Ian P.

Just out of interest, Pete, as I got caught out by this one when I first saw the post, I think swanfly is referring to the F1 Cessna Citation Mustang, rather than the P-51D. I'm not sure if that counts as a clever bit of marketing or not, on the part of Raytheon, but it is full glass cockpit. ;) On topic, I believe from what others have said that the autopilot on the aircraft is custom built, so probably LUA (which I don't claim to understand yet...) or Key2Mouse are the way forward. Unfortunately I don't have it, so can't confirm this. Ian P.

No, but I think I have access to poke and prod and see what happens... Miguel is the only one so far, to have set up sub-forums, for Burkhard. I shall investigate. Can you give me an idea of what sub-forum headings might be useful (eg. WideFS, FSUIPC, LUA...) please? Ian P.

I don't know how Pete wants the forum set up, but as Andy says, there is a possibility to create sub-forums which, with somewhere as busy as this one, is probably not a bad idea. Someone (I have an idea who that'll be! :rolleyes: ;) ) will need to talk to Pete about what he wants done when he gets back. Ian P.

Problem noted. Not sure of a fix yet - we'll need to talk to Pete. Ian P.

What type of throttle quad are you using, Tim? If it is a Saitek quad, then the "reverse" arc is actually only a button, not moving on the potentiometer, so the numbers won't change when you are in that area. In direct answer to your question, just calibrating the device again using FSUIPC will clear the settings you have already stored. Ian P.

Sorry, I'm not Pete, but I can answer your question - the answer is yes. FSUIPC for FS9 and FSX are different products that require different registration keys to be purchased. A full license for the FS9 product, FSUPIC3, is available here: http://secure.simmarket.com/pete-dowson-fsuipc3.phtml Ian P.

I'll do the honours... ;) Moved to FSUIPC forum.

Posting in the forum for a long dead piece of software won't help... Moved it to the FSUIPC forum. Ian P.

Moved to FSUIPC Support forum - possibly a better place for this thread! Ian P.

I was reading somewhere the other day that the Saitek panel sends the default control code for the functions to FSX, which is why the buttons are not reprogrammable to do other functions. Is it perhaps that you have changed the default commands for any of these functions? Might it be worth renaming fsx.cfg to fsx.bak, allowing FSX to rebuild a new one and seeing what happens then? Ian P.

Moved to the FSUIPC support forum. Ian P.

Do you have "Pause on Task Switch" clicked in the FSX options? If you do, try turning it off. Ian P.

Moved to a more appropriate location. I'm not sure whether a hardware trim will overrule the autopilot commands... Does it? It's not something I've ever tried to comment. Ian P.

What may be of interest to you is that "heur" normally refers to "heuristics", which are used by AV software (not just AVG - they all use some form of the technique) to try and spot viruses that are not yet included in the virus database by looking for "virus like behaviour". Not always, but most often, when I have seen a heuristics detection of a virus, it's been a false positive where the AV software was unilaterally decided a file is a virus as a "better safe than sorry" option. One of the reasons I stopped using AVG was because their heuristic routines got a bit trigger happy and started flagging up a lot of false positives. That was about a year ago. Ian P.