BAW019

Aha! Just spotted something. If you have a second take a look at http://www.ianniblo.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/homepage/fsuipc.wmv, it's a 10 sec vid of me using FSUIPC in FSX. I'm exclusivley using joystick #2 and you can see that having gone into the FSUIPC dialog the first time each stick axis is used it invokes the originally assigned control (throttles in this case) as well as the intended dual control assignment. I then reset the throttle and you can see that the stick appears to operate fine after that - no throttle action. It seems to be repeatable and you don't even need to go to the Joystick Calibration tab or indeed click OK. Even just opening FSUIPCs form and clicking Cancel will reproduce the behaviour. Ok well that's a solution I think - I just need to remember to 'prime' each axis of the dual controls if I visit the FSUIPC dialog (using one axis doesn't 'clear the board' for the other axiis. You need to do one at a time to clear the behaviour for each) All the best Ian

Maybe so but if it was clear I wouldn't need to ask! I'm asking the question from experience. Having re-checked it seems to be doing just that - sending the joystick signal to both axis. To clarify: In FSX's controls dialog I've assigned joystick #2 axiis to Throttle 3 and Throttle 4. In the FSUIPC.INI file I've added the lines AileronB=66426 and ElevatorB=66429 to the [JoystickCalibration] section(s). Having restarted FSX I find that joystick #1 works just as before (ailerons and elevators) but if I watch the throttle quadrant joystick #2 clearly opens the two throttles as well as operating the ailerons and elevators. Which is why I asked for help. I don't think I missed a step from the instructions - where did I go wrong? Cheers Ian

Pete, Can you clarify something for me. I've set up dual controls and they seem to work fine. Having read the stuff in the Advanced User guide I decided to assign Axis Prop 3 and 4 to my second yoke but I'm bothered by the fact that if I want to fly a 4 engine prop plane the second yoke will play havoc with it's props. My second set of rudder pedals are on their way so 'll need to borrow even more axiis when they arrive but there really aren't that many axiis to steal !! When the guide says to assign an unused control that FSUIPC later "pinches" I'm assuming you mean an axis control, is that correct (as opposed to any of the other control types)? The guide says to assigin them in FSX is that correct? Even without doing so FSUPIC display the axis inputs in the Joystick calibration tab, even if it doesn't do the "max value wins"thing. I tested this earlier on today with brake axiis -assigning them in FSX then adding the axis control codes to the Joystick Calibraion sections in the FSUIPC ini (I have several for different planes). But in a taxiing test moving the second yoke caused the brakes to be applied. It's always possible that I goofed somewhere (as usual!). When you say FSUIPC "pinches" the axis, is it supposed to prevent the original assingment being sent to FSX or would you expect both the original and the FSUIPC dual control axiis to be sent simultaneously? Like I said it's working now but only because I'm using prop 3 and 4. I used the King Air 350 quite a bit so I can't afford to use props 1 or 2 when my pedals arrive and I haven't started to think yet about how to implement the toe brakes on the CH Pro Pedals - is it simlpy another axis to be pinched? Thanks for anything you can add to clarify how it all works, Ian

Hi Peter, I think I stirred up my my own pond by talking about the wheel speed. Forget the wheels - I'm interested in degraded brake performance which I guess needs to be simulated inside FSUIPC - not something us users can realistically implement. Where I was heading with this was that in FS you can hit the ground hard and fast and in the wet but so long as you're lined up you'll stop as if the ground was dry tarmac. If the braking force passed to FS was reduced by simplified environmental factors (runway surface, rain or ice) then if we stand on the brakes FSUIPC may only pass on say 5% of the applied braking force to FS, which would result in a much longer roll out, simulating skidding or aquaplaning. I'm not too interested in sliding sideways - rather contrarily FS simulates that already if you hit the ground too fast in a crab - but it would be great to land in a tropical storm, hit the brakes and find that the plane's stopping power is seriously degraded by the conditions. Best! Ian

Hi Peter, I was just looking at a posting over on the VATSIM forums about braking in the wet. It made me wonder it's possible to add new offsets to FSUIPC to simulate the ground speed of the left, right and centre wheels. There don't seem to be any currently and by comparing these to the aircraft's ground speed and 'On The Ground' flag we could detect skidding and get our cockpits to react accordingly. The all-important bit would be to have the wheel's gound speed reduced by braking, precipitation type and rate, runway surface (ice?) so that in really cruddy conditions we skid right off the runway!! Just a thought, hope you don't mind! All the best Ian

Welcome!

YOu need to open Windows Explorer and go to the Tools/Folder Options menu. When the panel opens click the View tab and you'll see a load of check boxes. Scroll down and uncheck "Hide Extensions For Known File Types" and you should see the .ini file extension in Explorer. Ian

I'd check your FSUIPC ini file if I were you. Uninstalling FSUIPC may not remove the INI (if you re-install you may want to keep your old settings). If that's the case you may find an old, rogue entry you've long forgetten about is giving you problems. Open the INI file (in the modules directory of FSX) and have a good look for anything that looks supicisouly like Reverser or Throttle settings/assignments and chop them out. TAKE A BACKUP OF THE INI FILE BEFORE YOU MAKE ANY CHANGES. I really can't emphasise that enough (and I've tried!). Before you make any changes to files you should always take a copy of the original and put it somewhere safe. Believe me you'll be glad you did if it all goes wrong and you want to go back to the good old days when your only problem was a duff thrust reverser :P Good luck! Ian

There was a known hardware fault with the early batches of Saitek Yokes and Throttles. I was one of the victims but mine's been perfect since I sent it back for repair (took a couple of weeks, I think they replaced a dodgy chip or something, they were very vague!). Check to see if it goes crazy when it's plugged directly into FlightSim (in other words forget about FSUIPC for now and map the throttle and joystick using the FSX controls dialog). If you still get the problem I suggest you check out the Saitek forums and phone their tech support line. Between those two you should find everything you need to solve your problem. Good luck! Ian

Harsh but fair :oops: Worth noting! Thanks for the info - I'll get back to him about how it's being read, All the best Ian

Hi all - open question (not just to Pete) I noticed two offsets that can be read to get the flap handle position 0BDC and 0BFC, These work fine for me but I'm using FSX with FSUIPC 4.264. Can anyone out there tell me when they came into use? I'm comparing notes with someone who's using FS9 with FSUIPC 3.80 and he get's nothing useful back. e'd be interested to know if it's an FS9 thing or an FSUIPC version thing? Thanks for any help/info, All the best Ian

Yep that's done the job. Thanks Peter, I'll tell the developers at Ellie you've sorted it, Thanks again for looking into this! All the best Ian

Hi Peter, from what you've said I think it makes very little sense to risk a stable version of FSUIPC. The maths behind deriving the correct IAS for a given MACH/Altitude is relatively quick and easy and I'd imagine it would be more prudent to change the rendering program (Ellie) than mess with the data by changing FSUIPC. If you've other things to do (!) I wouldn't spend any time on it but I'd be happy to beta test anything you may decide to do! Thanks for looking into it, All the best Ian

I'd be happy with that - I'm a paying customer :wink: It's an interesting idea about the tweaking - I haven't tried doing so programmatically but I'll give it a bash after work tonight. Cheers Peter, Ian

Hi Peter, I'm using the new (and frankly excellent) Ellie Systems EADI and we've noticed something a bit odd with the AP speed offsets. Not sure if it's something you can deal with or not but I thought it was probably worth asking, espcially since it made us realise that the behaviour also shows itself in the PFD of the default FSX aircraft. As you know, Mach numbers have equivalent airpseeds that change with altitude. If I were to set my AP to maintain 250KIAS the plane would do exactly that, and as my altitude increased the airspeed would stay at 250KIAS while the ground speed slowly built up. On the speed strip my magenta speed bug would be stuck to 250 because I'm in SPD mode. However if I select MACH and set 0.72 on the autopilot, the quivalent airspeed changes with altitude. Although the aircraft obediently maintains that MACH speed it's groundspeed and airspeed both change with altitude. So when I'm using MACH to command my autopilot the magenta speed bug should slowly drift along the speed strip of the PFD, reflecting changes in the IAS at different altitudes but it doesn't - it stays put until you tweak the AP's mach knob. Then it jumps to the correct position on the strip. There's obvously something inside FSX that can calculate airspeeds from mach speeds correctly - like I said it corrects itself if you move the MACH knob - but it doesn't do this constantly which means the PFD shows the wrong infomation most of the time. I guess my question for you is this: is there any code you could (and would be willing to) add to FSUIPC to spot that the autopilot is in MACH mode and get it to automatically populate the AP IAS offset with the correct value for the altitude? (I posted a couple of equations over on the Ellie Systems forum that appear to do this if you're interested). Quite understand if you can't or don't want to touch this but it would be a nice fix for a curious bug in FSX, All the best Ian

I have this with FSInn. I can fly for ages with out any problem then wham! my plane falls out of the sky with my controls showing crazy values. It's happened a few times but one time I did get a message box from the FSCopilot module and since it only happens with FSInn running against FSX I rarely fly online nowadays and the problem is circumvented. Don't know if that's your problem but it's worth checking.

Just a quicky, offset 0C4E (Nav1 OBS setting) is documented* as read-only but seems to be quite happily writable, All the best! Ian (* in FSUIPC4 Offsets Status.pdf)

Don't know if this helps at all but when I got my Saitek Yoke I tried it before I installed the drivers. It worked fine and the mode switch showed up as three separate switches in the Windows Game Controller interface. It was only when I installed the Saitek drivers that the mode switch vanished or became a dedicated (and hidden) mode switch. You could try un-installing the Saitek drivers to see if it's reversible but I've no idea if that would work. All the best Ian

Have to say I'm a bit baffled at the amount of code sloshing around here. My VB6 program uses the following lines of code to succesfully return Altitiude (ASL) and Radio Altitude (AGL) from two offsets (obviously I've hidden lot of interim lines of code. These are the relevant bits, the only bits that you really need to know) ' Plane's altitude in feet above sea level Private pdRC As Long Private mAltitude As Long FSUIPC_Read &H3324, Len(mAltitude), VarPtr(mAltitude), pdRC ' Planes height above ground (converted from meters. Data is stored as a factor of 65535) Private mRadioAlt As Long FSUIPC_Read &H31E4, Len(mRadioAlt), VarPtr(mRadioAlt), pdRC mRadioAlt = (mRadioAlt / 65535!) * 3.28084 Hope this helps - Merry Christmas to all! Ian

Thanks for the help Peter, I reinstalled 4.20 and replaced it with 4.205 and the problems vanished. I've done a completely cold re-start and it's all back up and running again, including my Addons menu and all my hardware interfaces. Cheers! Ian

I just installed FS Acceleration and the Add-ons menu has vanished. Having jumped through hoops* all last night I've finally managed to persuade the thing to un-install and having rebooted, checked that the Add-ons menu is still missing (yes) I've re-installed FSAcceleration. Although it appears to install a new version of Simconnect I still have no Add-ons menu. I deliberately didn't re-install SP1 as I wanted to see if Simconnect is upgraded by FSAcceleration and whether re-installing it would fix the problem. I'm loathe to waste much more time on this as it's a pig to un-install but I desperately need my Simconnect to work - all my hardware is mute without it. If we can't figure out the cause I'll have to bin the Acceleration pack and revert to good old SP1 - big shame but can't say I'm suprised - sounds like Simconnect's been the runt of the litter since Microsoft had that particular stupipheny. Anyhow, enough sighing. The logs from FSUIPC and Simconnect follow - if you think any extra info might help I'd be glad to post it, just let me know what you need. Incidently the logs represent a full session of starting FSX and closing it down. Am I missing something - I'd expect a ton more info? (email addy's been editted to foil the spam trawlers) === Later ==== Just installed the SDK that comes with FSAcceleration, turned off McAfee, installed it then ran ..\SDK\SDK\Core Utilities Kit\SimConnect SDK\lib\Simconnect.msi. Still no Add-ons menu. :cry: === Later still === It occurs to me you may need to see my dll.xml file so here it is. As you can see I've disabled everything but FSUIPC to try to isolate the problem. This file worked fine with everything enabled until FSAcceleration was installed ============= Thanks to anyone who can help me resolve this. Commiserations to anyone in a similar position. All the best Ian AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 4GB RAM SATA2 GLAN motherboard nVidia 7950 GT (512mb - PCI Express) graphics card Windows XP Home Edition SP2 Creative SBLive! soundcard * For the record I noticed people in other forums have also reported a problem un-installing or repairing FSAcceleration. It keeps reporting that another program's already running setup and refuses to continue. I've thrown it at Microsoft, maybe they'll issue a service pack...

Getting this too. Just installed FS Acceleration and it's no longer working. Will post a new topic....

I couldn't figure this out either but it turned out to be un-necessary. I only use it when I fly online and I do that using FSInn. Fortunately the FSInn menu in FSX contains 'Settings' which lets to configure buttons to various things, including Squawk. I've set up Transponder Standby, Mode C and Ident using the FSInn Settings panel and I use GoFlight to set the frequency but I could just as easily set it but tweaking the 2 bytes at offset &h0354 (4 digits in BCD format: 0x1200 means 1200 on the dials. To quote the manual). Hope this helps Ian

It shouldn't matter what you change with the Rotary Encoders - so long as there's an FSUIPC control you should be able to adjust FS using the FSUIPC interface. I've 'hijacked' once of my GoFlight rotary encoders to change the zoom level in the GPS panel and I know it will work for Decision Height as I change that the same way but through my own hardware interface. You use the FS menu to launch FSUIPC, click on the Buttons/Switches tab and turn the encoder in one direction. The info on the FSUIPC tab should tell you it' recognised a button push (even though we all know it's an encoder - FSUIPC doesn't need to care). As soon as you see that click the 'FS Control' tick box and select the item you want to change in the drop down box beneath it (eg GPS Increase Zoom or whatever). Once you OK that you should find each one of those soft little clicks will change send that command - zoom in a little in my case - and you just repeat the process by clicking the Rescan button and turning the encoder the other way before you pick a new itme to control (eg GPS Decrease zoom). May have the details a little awry here - I'm writing this from memory at wort but it should help you get it working. All the best Ian

Great tip, thanks Pete - works a treat! Best Ian