greetings Does anyone know if it would be possible to remove the outer frame (for the lack of a better word) around the default garmin 500. I am using a usb num keypad instead of the mouse and I really just want to use the display only on a separate monitor. ThanksEric

It can be done. This is what I did in a few steps, it would take a little more work to get where you want it I think... Here is how to do it. 1) open your ...\FSX\Gauges folder 2) you now want to extract fs9gps.cab to your desktop. I used WinRAR to do this, the Windows zip tool will work also 3) in the fs9gps folder now on your desktop will be a bunch of .bmp files and 2 .xml files 4) now you want to paint all the .bmp files for the GPS 500 parts that you do not want to see, solid black. To get the above, I painted gps_500_background.bmp, and if you fly at night, gps_500_background_night.bmp Each of the buttons has 4 .bmp files, one each for in or out, day or night that would all have to be painted. You would not need any painting program more complex than MSPaint to do this. After your done... You can copy the fs9gps folder to any panel folder you want and the default GPS will still work in any plane you don't. Or you could copy the fs9gps folder into ...\FSX\Gauges and it will work in any plane that uses the GPS500. You can leave the fs9gps.cab in the Gauges folder because FSX will use the fs9gps folder before it uses fs9gps.cab. Hope this helps, if it doesn't or confuses you, feel free to ask more questions. regards,Joe

outstanding! thanks for your help. I wont be able to have time until the weekend to try this out but will let you know if I have any trouble. Thanks again.

A bit late reply, but if you're still looking for a button-less version of the 500W, I just finished my overhaul of that gauge, and one of the enhancements is a "full-screen" version.More information and the download link here: http://kronzky.info/fs/500wx

Very nicely done revisions on the 500W. I just d/l'ed it to take a look later today, but did you include the 3d terrain shadowing tweak (undocumented) while you were at it? (http://www.flightsim...rrain-Shadowing)

   ..............   <CustomDraw>    	<!-- snipped out for brevity -->    	<LayerVehicles>1</LayerVehicles>   	<TerrainShadow>True</TerrainShadow>  </CustomDraw>

[...]did you include the 3d terrain shadowing tweak (undocumented) while you were at it?

I had tried to, but it messed up the color interpolation between levels: And it was even worse in relative terrain mode... BTW - I just uploaded the (for now) final version, which contains some additional full-screen features (switching between "track-up" & "north-up" orientation, and switching into and utilizing panning mode), so you might want to get a last-minute update. ;) One last thing I noticed that seems to be wrong on the original unit, and is now on the list of things to do, is the map scale (the e.g. "500nm" scale underneath the "Zoom" tag). That value is supposed to be the distance from the top of the screen to the bottom, but is totally off (by about a factor 2) in the FSX version. But other than that, it contains pretty much all the features for now that I was looking for — so the daily updates should be over for a while now...

Been a crazy couple of weeks and our power has been restored after Irene! I just dl and will give this a shot. thanks