SB and FS2002

[Guest]

Good day to everyone.Well, it has been several months indeed since I have been able and had time to look at flying around the continent with Flight Simulator. I returned to the VATSIM scene after an upgrade to FS2002, but am a little confused at what I have found.First, I installed FS2002, and got that working to my satisfaction. Then I downloaded Squawkbox, and this is where my annoyance begins. It would seem, if I understand the situation correctly, that it is necessary to launch the SB Host program, which then docks the SB window inside itself. SB then connects to the multiplyaer session, and sends incoming messages to the regular FS chat window. There are a few problems with this.1. The FS chat window is laid out in such a way that I must keep it open quite wide to catch all the messages. (i.e. if they put the callsign on the same line as the text it wouldn't be so bad, and/or allowed the font to be changed).2. The so-called chat window fix included with SB doesn't seem tow ork for me at all. It scrolls the window some, but not to the bottom, so its rather redundant.3. So that I could have access to SB directly (for FMS/ATC purposes), I ran SB on another system along with WideClient. This worked fine, using the SB Host program, except that SB seemed incapable of generating sounds in that environment, so I never had any warning aobut incoming messages. (they of course went across my screen in Flight Sim but I wouldn't always notice that, particularly on approach when my instruments were of greater importance than the outside view).Is there any way around this? I know some people didn't like it, but I really, really much preferred having SB docked into the main FS window before. It could be a littl ecramped at times, but it was far easier to use that way. The problem with the FS2002 chat box is that with my colour scheme, it ends up being black-on-black text, since FS is too dumb to use my window foreground colour. I would like to get on VATSIM more often, but right now its been far too cumbersome. Is there something I'm missing here?

[Vulcan 14]

You mention that you ran SB on a second system, if that means the second system is no longer available then disregard the rest of this msg :-) If you still have the second system read on. :-) To me, using 2 PCs is the only way to fly VATSIM.It seems you already have both PCs working correctly with Widefs so SB will run OK on the second PC.What you need is the earlier version of SB (V2.3.4) and not the later FS2k2 version.Install SB and RW on the second PC, assuming this is the one connected to the Internet. This way the SB window does not clutter up your cockpit view as well.That's the way I run and I get the 'Bing-Bong' (or whatever) when a new msg arrives in SB.Hope this helps.