Hans_Petter

Great article Chris! FU III (with SanFran added) is still on my hard drive. As you know, the X-Plane world is where I spend most of my sim time these days. The water reflections are prettier but the ground handling (lateral friction) still suffers. Hans Petter

A belated reply--I have the Saitek / yoke combo, CH rudder pedals and a Logitech stick. For X-Plane or FS they can all be plugged in: FU III, however, goes haywire whenever the Saitek composite unit is plugged in. All assignments are mixed up. Evidently, a simple yoke would've been OK but the throttle quadrant linked to a yoke creates conflicts. FU III works fine with a basic stick / yoke and rudder pedals. The latter needs to be entered as a few text strings into a CFG to work. best regards, Hans

I checked. It's a DME (look it up). Basically, it can be used to assess the approximate distance to a VOR.

A heading indicator? Got to check.

I just dropped by and noticed this real world versus sim world comparison. You have certainly made Switzerland look like the real thing :rolleyes:

We'll look into the northern region again. I'm quite busy for the summer but I haven't given up on FU3. It's a great flight simulator, especially for fixed wing GA aircraft. ("Fixed wing" excludes helicopters). I still find FU3 to be superior in terms of ground handling--it's got the real world lateral friction that makes wheels roll forward and skid sideways. So, "ground handling" goes far beyond being a taxiing issue since it's directly relevant to take-offs and landings, especially so for crosswind landings. With rudder pedals or a twist stick for rudder FU3 is a great sim for practicing challenging landings. I have, however, found FU3 to be lacking outside of the normal flight envelope--planes don't enter an unrecoverable stall no matter how far you push it. Thus, we've got a sim from the late 90's that's quite forgiving when you abuse an aircraft, yet it's simulating proper flight better than recent sims, at least the moment the wheels touch or leave the tarmac.

Well, if we could set it up to process flight3.exe (add it to the list) we could try the values that are provided for the various Thief versions. These are contemporary EA games and are likely to share similar rendering engines. I hooked up a secondary monitor yesterday, an older 19 inch monitor that is closer to the 4:3 aspect ratio. When I choose this one as my primary monitor I can use it for running FU3. For other computer actives I use the widescreen monitor as my primary one and use the secondary one to achieve a larger work space whenever several applications are running at the same time. I'd still be very interested in making FU3 look good on a widescreen monitor though, since that's what we'll all end up with eventually.

This looks like something that might work. However, it's designed to patch the main exe of the following games only,SHOCK2.EXETHIEF.EXE THIEF.EXE (Gold) THIEF2.EXE DROMED.EXE (SS2) DROMED.EXE (T1) DROMED.EXE (T2) The program is looking for these and aborts when none are found. I tried to rename Flight3.exe into thief.exe and thief2.exe but there's more to it than changing the name. Thus, we'd need to tailor this program to look for and modify Flight3.exe. It could be as simple as entering Flight3.exe (with a hex editor) and instruct the program to treat it as it would treat Thief or Thief2. Does anyone know if there's a perfect match in terms of rendering engine?

I've spent my sim time today looking into ways to make this work. There are a few applications (loaders, hacks) that are reported to work for most vintage games. The only one that seems to (sort of) work for FU3 is D3DWindower. I managed to make the sim run in an 800 x 600 window but the colors were awful. I might have been able to tweak the configuration if it weren't for the fact that the interface is written in Japanese. All the "English" downloads that I found were actually the same Japanese version as far as I can tell. Since I haven't installed Japanese fonts all of the menus look like hex code. Provided somebody comes across a version in some kind of Western language version this application may seem to be a promising approach.

I tried it and it works to some extent. 1920 x 1080 does not work while 1024 x 768 does work. However, the monitor size ratio is still 1.33 with this one while my monitor is 1.78. Result, I lose a lot in panel sharpness as well as losing terrain texture quality. It would be better if ddfix could force a windowed mode that retains the original aspect ratio of 1.33. I know that other older games can be run in windowed mode but it may require native support of windowed mode. If everything fails I can hook up my old monitor before running FU3.

I bought a 24 inch monitor yesterday. Its native resolution is 1920 x 1080. While more recent sims can be set up with a graphics resolution that will fit my screen FU III gets badly distorted. Evidently, the reason is that there are no resolution alternatives that provide widescreen proportions. So, I figured a windowed mode might do. I realize this has been discussed before (FU3 on wide screen monitor---s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d) but it doesn't hurt to look into it again. The thing is, if you buy a monitor these days you're likely to get widescreen proportions while FU III was created in the days 800 x 600. How do we go about setting up a windowed mode that will retain the correct proportions?Hans Petter

Here's the flt3.cfg I've been using for years. However, the joystick setup will certainly not work unless you have a stick and rudder pedals. By the same token, joystick.cfg commands will bind to different buttons with different control devices. If so, just swap the numbers (joy_1 etc) until you get it the way you want it.Note: I had to rename flt3.cfg into flt3.txt to make the uploader accept it. CFGs as well as ZIPs aren't allowed here.

I remember that it wasn't just browser specific (Internet Explorer) but even IE version specific. For this reason I ignored it at the time. I'll look into the "open" version.

Naji or anyone else, it seems that I'll have to admit that I've never got IFR flying right in FU III. Specifically, while I've used APR to capture an ILS in FS and X-Plane I've used nothing but ALT and heading hold in FU III. Now I tried and I can't make it work. The frequencies for the airport of the departure are set automatically so it should be easy to do a circuit and make an ILS landing. However, the ILS beam seems to be off-center as the runway is concerned and APR doesn't trigger an ILS capture. A simple test--put your plane on the runway in the direction of the ILS runway heading. The course must be set correctly, eg rwy 17 = course 170. Then the lines should center and point straight ahead. Then if you park to the left of the runway the middle segment of the line should be off-center to the right and vice versa. I just tried Tacoma Narrows ILS rwy 17 and was unable to get everything lined up. Please point me to a location that works for an ILS landing and I'll try it there. I may very well doing something fundamentally wrong.

I checked the latest nHancer as well and found that it didn't work. It installs all right but when I launch it it just quits without placing a tray icon. That's exactly what my previous version did after I got an Nvidia GForce GT 430 card. I'll stick to the Nvidia Inspector.