Frasca 131 to work with FSX

[Miltiadis Parcharidis]

MOVED FROM "USER CONTRIBUTIONS" SUB0FORUM (A REFERENCE SECTION) TO
THE SUPPORT FORUM< SO IT CAN BE ANSWERED.
 

Hello everyone!

There is an inactive Frasca 131 simulator in our aeroclub with fully functional panels/instruments but unfortunately the "old times" computer with DOS has fallen apart along with its ISA graphics accelerator. I believe that the drivers of Frasca software are specific for this ISA card but I can't find it anywhere to buy it. Therefore, I have the physical instruments and hardware of Frasca 131 but I can't display anything on the screen with the software.

Soooo, I came up with the idea to connect the Frasca 131 's serial port to a modern computer which will run the FSX and have the FSUIPC being the connection bridge between the serial data transmitted from the Frasca and the FSX simulator.

 

Do you have any ideas if this is even possible or how to make it happen? I presume that there has to be a program (written in any language) with no graphics that will run before the FSX and read all the traffic from the serial port and afterwards push it to the FSUIPC and then to the simulator. And probably vice versa in order to have the instruments displaying the actual measurements.

Any help is very welcome

Thanks!

[Pete Dowson]

2 hours ago, Miltiadis Parcharidis said:

Soooo, I came up with the idea to connect the Frasca 131 's serial port to a modern computer which will run the FSX and have the FSUIPC being the connection bridge between the serial data transmitted from the Frasca and the FSX simulator.

Do you have any ideas if this is even possible or how to make it happen? I presume that there has to be a program (written in any language) with no graphics that will run before the FSX and read all the traffic from the serial port and afterwards push it to the FSUIPC and then to the simulator. And probably vice versa in order to have the instruments displaying the actual measurements.

I found this question placed in the User Contributions subforum where it could easily have been ignored. The subforums are generally repositiories of reference information, not for support (except for Paul Henty's .NET DLL support forum).  I've move it to this, the Support Forum itself, so it can be answered.

Yes, you are correct in that you'd need to write a program which interfaced to your equipment via the serial port, and to FSUIPC using FSUIPC's defined interface (in its SDK). There is no native serial port data access in FSUIPC or FSX.

But you don't need to run such a program before the simulator -- best to have it starting at the same time, or when FSX is actually ready.  FSUIPC includes facilities to run programs when FSX is ready.

It would be possible, also, to write such a program as a Lua plug-in for FSUIPC. The Lua facilities provided by FSUIPC are documented in the FSUIPC Documents sub-folder, but for more help with the Lua language and libraries you'd need to refer to the Lua website.

Pete

[Miltiadis Parcharidis]

Thank you very much dear Mr. Dowson! If by any chance there is a willing person to help, he/she could revive and old but gold equipment!

Edited February 9, 2020 by Miltiadis Parcharidis