I have a strange problem that I hope someone can help me with. I have
downloaded and installed dozens of aircraft into CFS and they almost always
show up the first time I check them. However, the next time I start CFS and go
to the a/c selection menu, several planes have disappeared. I also have a
second copy of CFS installed, mainly for WWI aircraft, and the same thing
happens. I have no problem with MSFS 98, but have a second installation of it
for Golden Wings and the same thing happens. This only started recently and I
am at a loss to figure it out. I have a Gateway P-II 450 Mhz machine with 98
megs of RAM, an Nvidia TNT video card and a Voodoo 2 secondary card and I run
WIN 98. I have two hard drives totalling about 30 GBs of space with almost 7
GBs free. Anyone have any ideas?
Don Monroe
You have not only been installing planes, you have also deleted some, right?
Problem is that many planes share bits and pieces, especially panels and
sounds. Try and look in the panel folder of one of the planes that give you
problems. Open the panel.cfg file in notepad, there may be an entry that looks
like this: alias=sopcamel\panel ... so this plane (the one that I clipped the
entry from) uses the panel from the sopcamel, but if I then delete the sopcamel
(or put it in my mothball folder), CFS cant find the panel, and the imported
plane vanishes from the plane selection menu. So what to do? Either reinstall
the missing plane or edit the panel.cfg to alias to some other plane. Same
thing can happen with sound.

Oh, and your hardware seems adequate. For CFS and FS98, you dont get much extra
benefit from your graphics card, but it should run fine. Next upgrade could be
extra memeory, seems any increases up to 256megs are beneficial, especially if
you have a lot of planes in your selection menu; first time you open it, it
will still be slow, but ig you have enough memory, CFS will put it in RAM and
for the rest of the session, it will open fast.

Hans Egebo
http://home5.inet.tele.dk/egebo/