Panel Trouble.............

[Guest hawaiian_flyer]

Hi all. I have had this problem lately. I downloaded 2 different MD-80 panels. One by Andrea Abate Monzaand another by Paul Golding. All were patched and when used, they caused problems. when I accessed the overhead panels........the aircaft automatically shut-down. when tried to restar the plane.......my computer will go into wild spazzes! giving me that Error Blue screen. Any advice? Is anyone developing a new panel that works?Aloha!

[Guest]

Devin,Others may be developing new MD80 panels and may comment on that part of your question but I can't. If you want to try to fix the old for the interim, here is a procedure...Most likely the cause of your problem is one or more incompatible gauge files. The procedure to fix this is rather labor intensive so you may only want to do it for the particular panel you like the most. Since your problem description mentions only the overhead panel, concentrate your actions on that.Edit the panel.cfg file for the panel in question and locate the section pertaining to the overhead panel. You can identify it by its reference to the overhead panel bitmap (bmp) filename. Underneath that reference in the panel.cfg file, you will see a potentially lengthy list of gauge references, each of which has the form "gaugexx= etc., etc.". Starting with the first one in the list, place a semicolon (;) before the statement, save the file, and retry the simulator. If it still crashes, edit the file again and place a semicolon in front of the next gauge statement, leaving the preceding semicolon in place. Save the file and try the simulator again. Eventually, you will find the simulator will not crash when you try it. That means that every one of the incompatible gauge file references have a semicolon in front of them. However, at this point, you probably also will have semicolons in front of some that are not incompatible. To find those, edit the panel.cfg files and start removing the semicolons one by one. If the simulator works leave that semicolon removed. If it doesn't, put the semicolon back in place and remove the next one. Eventually, only the incompatible gauges will have semicolons in front of their references. Finally, you will have to hunt around using panels from other downloads to find similiar gauges that are compatible in appearance and function to the gauge(s) that don't work. Substitute their references for your bad ones, making sure to carry over the same position and size parameters as your originals. At that point, you are done.Good luck,Stan V.

[Guest hawaiian_flyer]

Wow!Thanks a whole bunch Stan. I will try that praying it works. So i put a semicolon (;) in front to make it work. So lets say it dont crash anymore anfter doing that, do i still need to find the bad one?Funny how designers put incompatible gauges and says it Fs2k2 compatible. or " FS2002" only. Thanks again!Aloha!

[Guest]

Devin,Once you have the file working without a crash, then you are done - unless you have more than one semicolon in your panel.cfg overhead file section. The last gauge file you put a semicolon in front of is incompatible for sure but there may be others that didn't clear up the crash until you inactivated the last one you did. You want to keep as many of the originals as you can to minimize the task of replacing them. That's why in my first post, I said to then go back and start taking off semicolons one at a time. If taking off a semicolon doesn't result in a crash, that gauge file is okay and you can leave off the semicolon and go on to the rest. Does that make sense to you?Stan V.

[Guest hawaiian_flyer]

ok. sounds good. Thanks again for your help and quick responses.Aloha!