SimFlyer GPX-SX For FS2004/FSX

ow many times have you stared at a panel and thought, 'I wish the developers had stuck a VOR/GPS/extra doodad in there, because if they had, I would be able to find out where I am right now!' and then hit map mode and figured out that if you hung a left and held on for ten minutes, you would probably be near where you wanted to be? I am sure that if you have more than the most casual acquaintance with Flight Simulator, this thought will have occurred to you not once, but many times, and you may even have looked around for spare doodads, of which there are more than a few.

Like me, most of you will have got no further than that, because once you have found a doodad, there is the question of installing it in a panel, and only then do you discover that it doesn't work quite as advertised and looks like it was designed in a different century and when it is resized it doesn't fit properly in the panel and then you give up. Map mode has its strengths, even it is is tricky flying an ILS in the Cub using it.

A few developers have noticed this niche, the best known of them perhaps being Reality-XP, which was launched against a background of widespread scepticism about its chances and proceeded to go from strength to strength, thanks to some great gauge design, a ladle-full of strategic thinking and a commitment by the developer to making its products as user-friendly as possible. Reality-XP products have automatic installation routines and are well supported, with an active forum and have been very popular as a result.

If you have an interest in addon gauges, I am sure you will have seen SimFlyer's products in the Pilot Shop and wondered what they are like - well, so have I, so let's take a look. There are various packages on offer at prices to suit every pocket, the one I selected being GPX-SX, which includes a panel full of avionics that looked just right for upgrading the default 172 panel. I did the review on a 2.66 Ghz Core2Duo system with 4 Gb of RAM and a 768 Mb GeForce 8800GTX, running Vista and FSX SP1/FS9.1 (aka FS2004 with the patch applied).

The download is tiny, a mere 3.25 megs, so it came down faster than it takes to describe the process. Installation was easy, although you have to install it into each version of the sim you wish to use it in - so I installed the package once for FSX and once for FS2004. Having done a brief check to establish that the gauges worked in FSX (I only used one at a time) I did the testing in FS2004.

When the installation is complete, you will find a SimFlyer program group under the Start menu, with a link to a 29 page pdf manual. All the gauges are copied over into the chosen FS version, ready for use, but there aren't any automatic installation routines and you are expected to add the gauges to panels yourself. You get a Bendix KLN 94 GPS; a KLN90B GPS; a KLX135A; a KLN89; a KMD550 multifunction display (MFD), which only works if one of the GPS is also installed; a KMA28 audio panel; a KX155 Nav/Com radio that can be installed to provide paired units; a KT70 transponder; a KR87 ADF; a KN62 DME; a KFC225 autopilot; two different VOR heads, which can be installed as paired units and various hole covers and spacers. The KLX135A and the KLN89 are simulations of first generation panel mount GPS units that you still see around, but are mainly included for their retro appeal, I suspect. Most of the manual is devoted to explaing how the more fully functional GPS work, the best way of describing them being that they can do everything the default unit can do, plus a bit. If you include any of the rack-mount GPS units in a panel and add the KMD 550, the latter unit acts as a repeater with an attractive moving map display; weather and traffic modes are inoperative on this unit, but the manual says that they will become available when the KMD850 upgrade is released, so SimFlyer are clearly working to enhance the package.

The last six pages of the manual give a brief run down on how to install the gauges and at this point most simmers will run a mile, because putting gauges in panels involves editing the least sympathetic bit of the panel.cfg file, which describes gauge placement like this:

[Window01]
BACKGROUND_COLOR=2,2,2
size_mm=156,308
position=8
visible=0
ident=RADIO_STACK_PANEL

gauge00=Bendix_King_Radio!Bendix-King Radio Audio, 0, 0
gauge01=Bendix_King_Radio!Bendix-King Radio Nav-Comm 1, 0, 29
gauge02=Bendix_King_Radio!Bendix-King Radio Nav-Comm 2, 0, 86
gauge03=Bendix_King_Radio!Bendix-King Radio ADF, 0, 142
gauge04=Bendix_King_Radio!Bendix-King Radio DME, 0, 180
gauge05=Bendix_King_Radio!Bendix-King Radio Xpndr, 0, 217
gauge06=Bendix_King_Radio!Bendix-King Radio AP, 0, 262

Oh yes, we are not in Kansas any more. If this kind of thing is your bread and butter, you probably shouldn't be reading this review, but if not, a world of new discovery, not to mention hurt, lies in those innocuous-looking lines. You are looking at the spec for placement of the gauges in the pop-up avionics stack for the FS2004 Cessna 172 and each line beginning with 'gaugexx' calls a particular instrument and places it in the pop-up. If you are doing things the hard way, the easiest way to put new gauges in a panel is to swap them in place of the old ones, by pasting the name of the new gauge over the old gauge, but this can lead to problems depending on the default size of the gauges concerned. If you are using Windows Vista, it will also introduce you to a new problem, which is User Access Control (UAC) which you will need to disable before you start playing around editing inside the program files folder structure - to do this, you will have to visit the control panel.

Even if you are familiar with editing panel.cfg, there is another problem, which is that in order to see your edits, you have to keep swapping aircraft back and forth in order to reload the panel you are interested in, and even with a fast system, this is tedious, so I took a short cut and used the rather wonderful FS Panel Studio, which is also available in the Pilot Shop and will be the subject of a future review. As it happens, SimFlyer recommend it for modifying panels to incorporate their gauges and since it is a nice app and lacks any serious rivals, I am 100% behind their advice.

The beauty of FS Panel Studio is that it lets you edit panels visually, by dragging and resizing gauges, and you get a good idea of what you are going to get when you load the plane in Flight Simulator the next time - the app also backs up every time you do an edit, so that 'roll-backs' aren't a problem if things go wrong. Anyway, suffice it to say for now that I found it incredibly useful and this review would taken three times as long without it.

The first thing I did was to replace all the gauges in the pop-up stack with SimFlyer units, which worked fine and brings with it the advantage of much more realistic radios than FS2004 offers by default. The graphics are better quality than the FS2004 units and because they are based on large graphics they resize nicely. At normal size however, the gauges ran fine and although they did everything that was asked of them, including load an FS2004 flight plan, some of the units lack the full range of operational modes you find in the real world instruments.

SimFlyer include some new VOR heads, so my next step was to include these in the panel. Not a problem using FS Panel Studio, but it revealed a new issue, which was that the 172 panel has gauge shadows incorporated into its background graphic and while these are correct for the default gauges, they don't 'fit' the SimFlyer units, the result looking distinctly odd. So it was out with Photoshop and half an hour's editing (mostly) fixed the shadows so that the gauges looked as if they belonged where they had been put. I mention this not because it reflects on any problem with SimFlyer's package, but because it shows the kind of problems you will find yourself into if you want to install their gauges. Panel editing is not for everyone and it requires a wide range of skills that take time to acquire.

The VOR heads are in place in the top right-hand shot, in which the 'bezel' units are fitted. If you look at the lower left hand shot, I have altered the stack to include the MFD, which was where I began to run into another problem, which was that it became increasingly clear during the review that FS2004 wasn't running that well on Vista. This appears to be something to do with Vista, rather than SimFlyer's gauges, because when I installed the package on a system running FS2004 under XP, everything was fine, apart from the fact the every time I dragged the popup stack to a larger size, the GPS units disappeared. In the lower right hand shot, I have fitted the alternate VOR heads, which lack the bezel.

Verdict? Neat set of gauges that could lend a new lease of life to a lot of planes, but GPX-SX is not for the beginner, as there isn't enough hand-holding to get the instruments installed easily. However, if you have a copy of FS Panel Studio, adding the gauges isn't too difficult as long as you have a reasonable understanding of the FS folder structure and don't mind experimenting - just make sure that you have a complete backup of the aircraft you are modifying before you get started, because in my experience, panel editing can cause all kinds of unexepected side-effects. Technical support is available by email from SimFlyer's website.

Andrew Herd
andy@flightsim.com

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