alanmerry

I am building an overhead panel for FS2004. I have a zero delay arcade USB encoder, connected 12 on/off switches and plugged in the USB. The switches work straight away both through options-controls-assignments or through FSUIPC. No problem, except, for example:

To switch on the landing lights I switch the allocated switch on. So far so good. But to switch the lights off I have to switch the switch off then on again to send the necessary signal to the sim. Obviously I would like that when the switch was on the lights are on and off when the switch is off. I think I could place two switches close together, one upside down to the other and some sort of handle across the two to make one switch to achieve the required result. But does anyone have any experience, suggestions, ideas? Thanks.

Judging by visitors to FS exhibitions at Cosford and Lleystad, most simmers are in the grey-haired age range. Noticeably, the professional developers are usually somewhat younger.

I had this problem for some time. I would click on the icon for FS9 and apparently nothing would happen, then clicking on the icon again and FS9 would run without any problem. Looking at task manager (Shift-Ctrl-Esc) there would be 2 instances of FS9 one of which would show 0 under CPU. This could be ended or not with no effect on the operating FS9. Like you, any subsequent loading of FS( during the same session would be no problem. I found the following solution somewhere on the internet, which has worked for me:

Run regedit.

Delete this entry S-1-5-21-1380981980-2726883197-928252028-1000 under:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\GameUX\

Your registry entry may have a different number, but delete it and just leave the Games and MachineSettings subfolders in the GameUX folder

As always when in regedit, be careful!

There are plenty of flight plan files, for a vast variety of airlines, on flightsim.com

The default stock AI flight plan that CRJ_simpilot refers to is FS9/scenery/World/scenery/traffic030528.bgl

Delete this and put any number of flightplan folders into the same location. You will need the appropriate AI aircraft in your aircraft folder, but the flightplan downloads will usually tell you where to find them.

Although there are some more recent programs, I still use Lee Swordy's Traffic Tools (ttool202.zip) to compile flight plans which I have put together using Wordpad. Basically, you need a flight plan file, an aircraft file and an airport file. You can see the format of these by opening downloaded flightplans with Wordpad. Two things to note, the aircraft name in the Aircraft file must exactly match the 'title' in the aircraft.cfg file and all times in the Flightplans folder must be GMT/zulu.

Not too difficult to get into and you can make your AI flights as accurate (or fanciful ?) as you like and appropriate to the area that you fly in.

You may find that the dds file is 2048x2048 pixels when your aircraft requires a 1024x1024 file, so you will need to use picture editing software to reduce the size before using DXTBMP to save the file as a dxt3 file. The L.bmp file is just used to apply night time lighting. You may find that you can just copy the equivalent file from another texture folder for the same aircraft. If there is no L.bmp file you will still get the aircraft, but with no lights through the windows.

Impressive scenery and aircraft. But I notice that you are using a HDD. When I switched from two hard drives (1 for scenery + 1 for the rest of FS2004) I noticed a frame rate improvement when I put all of FS2004 on a SSD.

May I add my fourpenoth? I ran FS2004 under XP for several years with two hard disks. I found that putting all of the scenery folders on one disk and the rest of FS9 on the other gave a small improvement in frame rates. Since then I have installed all of FS9, including scenery, onto a SSD and the performance is improved further. And for the last couple of years, the same SSD but under Windows7 (64-bit) and again slightly improved.

Max50, thanks for starting a civil discussion on the merits of different sims. I am flying FS9, but I am sometimes tempted to start again with FSX or P3D, or, I am told X-plane is very good. So it always useful to get other people's opinions. As things stand, I think I'll wait and see what MS come up with, but it will have to be very impressive if it is to replace 15 years of add-on aircraft and scenery!

David, like you I flew FS2004 for over 10 years using XP. I regularly backup all my files, including FS2004 onto an external drive for security.

So when installing FS2004 all you need to do is

Use the original CDs to install FS2004 onto your new machine.

- incidentally at the install stage I install to C:\FS9 rather than C:\Games\Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator 9, it makes it easier when editing or moving files within FS2004

Then copy the whole FS2004 folder from the backup onto the new machine, overwriting all files and you will be back where you were, except that you will be at Seattle in the Cessna!

 

I should say that I have done this to move from XP to Windows7(64bit) with no trouble, but I have no experience of Windows10.

Like many others, because of the large amount of addons, (totalling about half of a 240GB SSD) I continue to run FS9. I have improved its performance over the last couple of years by replacing HDDs with SSDs, a GTX960 video card and Windows 7.

I have downloaded LOTS of files from Flightsim over several years. But often the files do not include the developer's email and so it has not been possible to thank them.

I have also uploaded several repaints and the occasional scenery and it is gratifying to see the number of downloads. I am not too concerned if the downloaders do not contact me, but take it as a compliment if someone asks me for a repaint having seen my work.

So, to repeat what I have said on this site several times, Thanks to all those who have made FS9 much, much more than Microsoft ever envisaged.