Project Magenta

A lot of flightsim programmers would have run a mile from a project which was dedicated to the production of a set of components designed not only to be completely faithful copies of the originals, but also to be portable between different simulators - but not Mr. Schiratti. "The current instruments were developed while I was in Greece, over the last two years in my spare time," he told me. "The real spark for the large instruments came from Stamatis Vellis and Constantinos Pitsos who were building a cockpit in Athens. I owe very much to their ideas and support. Being so close to the cockpit project simply made me work in a concentrated way on the Glass Cockpit and the other systems. Seeing the work that was put into the cockpit simply incited me to give my best with my part of the work as well."

The core of Project Magenta is a set of displays which encompass the Primary Flight Display, the Navigation Display, an Engine Management Display/EICAS, MCP/enhanced autopilot and the Smith's Central Display Unit/Flight Management Computer. The thing that makes Magenta quite different to anything else you are likely to have seen is that these components are not gathered together in a single panel, because they are designed to work on several different computers, using data (either generated by the CDU and MCP, or captured from flight simulator) passing between them on a network. So in short, you cannot buy a Project Magenta panel. This factor alone means that Project Magenta will never have a mass market, and this is reflected in the cost, a minimum of $250 for a complete working setup. The price may sound steep, but if you are interested in building the ultimate simulator, it is a paltry sum, considering the level of personal support that comes with the package. So if your interest is in downloading complete panel packages designed to run on a single PC, hit the "back" key...but if you are curious about what it would be like to build your own 737 or 747 simulator at home, read on, because Magenta is not for the casual flight simmer, this is software for the obsessed.

The realistic minimum setup for a full project Magenta installation is two networked PCs, although it could at a pinch be run on a single powerful machine with dual display and a few users manage somehow with a single screen. The optimum setup would be a three screen display, and if you wanted to go for broke, six screens wouldn't be unreasonable. If you don't believe me, go look at Enrico's site, because people like James Price not only have six screens, but they have also gone out and bought the nose sections of dead aeroplanes to install them in. That being said, some users have settled for buying the PFD/ND/engine display package and use this on a second screen to back up the instruments on their favorite panel.

After downloading the Project Magenta components, I set to installing them, confident that I would have a working system up and running in an afternoon. After all, I got Dai Griffiths' Shorts SD3-60 installed and off the runway in four hours; nothing Enrico could throw at me was going to be as tough as that? Wrong. It took four days.

If you have gained the impression that installing the Project Magenta software is not for the faint-hearted, you are right. While you don't actually have to buy nose sections of old aeroplanes to set up your own Magenta cockpit, you do need to have a certain amount of technical skill. To get my modest review setup running, I had to connect a third PC to my home network. My daughter refused to let me deprive her of her own computer, so I borrowed an old 200 MHz Dell from work. Between the jigs and the reels, I ended up reformatting the hard disk of this machine, reinstalling Windows 98, and getting the IPX/SPX networking that Magenta needs up and running. Then I installed the FMC and the FD on my main machine, and the PFD/ND/engine combination display on the slower machine (stay with me, I'll explain how all these work together in a minute). I installed the PFD 747 captain's view panel from the Magenta project in a spare FS2000 747 I had lying around and fired everything up. With the throttles wide open, I was baffled to find that the PFD and the engine display on the Dell were as dead as doornails. So I stayed up late and read the documentation for the first, but very definitely not the last, time. The following morning I downloaded Peter Dowson's WideFS software, and after a very trying afternoon at the end of which I suddenly realised that I hadn't installed his WideClient software on the 200 MHz machine, I was sitting at LAX with the proverbial four burning, four turning. I was so pleased I just took off there and then and flew around northern California, watching the PFD do its stuff, admiring Eddie Denney's mesh scenery and breaking every rule in creation, but who says you can't do VFR flights in 747s, anyway?

If you are seriously considering joining the select band of Project Magneta users, I should stress that the glass cockpit is under continuous development, and in that sense every part of it is beta software. New releases are very frequent and registered users have the choice of downloading point versions of the software (which tend to be reliable) or intermediate builds (which come with a health warning.) Four people are available to provide email support, not only on the glass cockpit, but also on the network side too. On the whole, as long as you stick to point releases and don't try to do anything too tricky, everything works fine, but some of the instruments are further down the line than the others. For example, the PFD, ND and engine display are rock solid, but the FMC and the FD are less reliable, since they are the focus of the most intense development, and the odd problem is to be expected with them (for example, VNAV is not properly implemented in the current MCP). However, even at this early stage, the CDU and the FD outclass their rivals, to the extent that the handbook Enrico recommends for the CDU is a manual written by Bill Bulfer and Skeet Gifford for professional pilots [ http://www.firstnethou.com/fmcman/].

You can fly a Magenta equipped plane equipped the same way you would fly any other aircraft in FS2000, the difference being that you don't have a "panel" as such, unless you choose to use the PFD 747 captain's view, which offers a stripped down cockpit limited to radios, throttle and flap controls and a "repeater" unit for the Magenta enhanced autopilot. On a three screen display you would load the FMC and the autopilot on a second screen and the PFD/ND/engine display on the third. With five monitors you could run the PFD, ND and engine display/EICAS fully expanded on their own screens. The one thing you can't do is run all the components on a single monitor, not if you want to stay sane, given the amount of hot-keying back and forth you would have to do on approach.

As you can see from the screen shots of the glass displays, they completely duplicate all the functions of the originals, which makes the PFD, for example, considerably more complex than the displays most flight simmers are used to. One of the most appealing features of the glass cockpit is that with the exception of the autopilot, the display graphics are built in OpenGL, which means that they can be expanded to any size you like. On a 19 inch monitor, the EICAS really shouts at you. Despite the visual appeal of the PFD, the star of the show in my opinion at least, is the FMC/autopilot combination. The FMC is the current focus of the development cycle, and VNAV was in the process of being implemented when I did the review, so the intermediate release software I was running bombed out once or twice, but this instrument is a real peach. When Enrico has put the finishing touches to it (be warned, this may take a long while) it will be such a good copy of the original that people who want to set up twin FMCs, the way the real 747 cockpits are equipped, will be able to have a fully functioning setup. When you bear in mind that the real Smith's FMC is the product of hundreds of man-years programming time, it is possible to put Enrico's achievement in perspective.

The FD/enhanced autopilot is no less well done, with the 737 and 747 instruments selectable from the same binary, and this worked perfectly, my only criticism being that the selectors for altitude and speed were a bit small and too lowly geared to work comfortably in 1280 x 1024 resolution. Setting up a flight plan with the FMC is an experience in itself, and I wouldn't advise tackling it without some prior knowledge, because the pace of development means that like everything else in Project Magenta, the manual is exceeding brief. Fortunately, with the aid of Bill Bulfer's excellent guide I was able to setup my own plans in a relatively short space of time. Right from hitting the init/ref key check and setting the aircraft's position, through loading SIDs and STARs, the flight computer behaves exactly the way it should, and it includes all the smart functions like conditional waypoints. The more experience I have gained of this instrument, the more I have come to respect it and I am certain there won't be anything to touch it when it is finished, not even the famous EFIS98. You will know by now if you are a potential Magenta user. As Enrico says, this one is for "Marlboro smoking, espresso drinking, unshaven flight simmers!" So if you dream about converting the spare room into a Boeing cockpit, if you are already scanning through the dealerships for a hub and a couple of reconditioned PCs, if you live, eat and breathe flight simulation, then this is for you. Because the one thing Magenta is never going to be, is a toy.

Andrew Herd
andrew.herd@btinternet.com

Visit the official Project Magenta Web site

James Price's Cockpit Setup

         

For more information, visit James Price's Web site at:
http://www.bigfoot.com/~b737simguy