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rambow

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About rambow

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    MAAM-SIM Chief Bottle Washer

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    Laurel, Maryland

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  1. Check out the fourth pinned topic on this forum and all the clucking will be made clear.
  2. The long overdue patch for the missing altimeters has been uploaded. Mea culpa. To be perfectly honest, I have been more concerned with my duties as the volunteer webmaster and on-line store admin for the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum than my responsibilities as the sole survivor among the MAAM-SIM team. As many members of this forum will know, the "AWOL Altimeter Bug" was discovered and a solution formulated by savvy customers here quite some time ago. Alas, this was all after the retirement of the MAAM-SIM development team and the release of the final version, v10, of the R4D/DC-3/C-47 package for FSX, so it was never incorporated into the installer. The solution required editing the panel.cfg files of the DC-3 Passenger version and the C-47A Cargo version models from which many of the other aircraft panels are aliased. Only the R4D and those planes using its panel were unaffected. In a nutshell, a missing 1 in the altimeter gauge name in three locations in both defective panel.cfg files caused the altimeters to go missing from the VC and mini-panel of all the affected aircraft. The patch will save you the tedium of hunting down and doing the edits by replacing the two faulty files with fixed ones. Download the patch here: http://www.maam.org/downloads/R4D_FSX_Missing_Alt_Patch.zip Simply unzip, then follow the direction in the included patch_readme.txt NOTE: Customers who purchase and download the FSX R4D/DC-3/C-47 package after May 2, 2016 will find the patch included in their download archive. Thanks for your patience and understanding, and of most of all for supporting the historic aircraft restoration programs of the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum by your purchase.
  3. That was Jan's decision, based on his desire to become more famiiar with the new design software he was jus starting to use. He wanted a simpler aircraft as a test bed for this before taking on the very complex,all singing and dancing Dakota. The now moribund "Yellow Peril" Project was this guinea pig. The FSX Dakota was next in the wings, but as we all know now, our "Dutch Master" finally ran out of gas and had to bail out. The old girl continues to sell, though, as do her hangar-mates, the B-25 and TBM, for which the Museum is ever grateful. The only new thing I do hope to accomplish (no promises!) is to produce a new installer for the DC-3 of the sort that the v7 B-25 already has. My incentive, aside from making it easier for the customers, is that it will save me a lot of work and time trying to help new users navigate the peculiarities of moving to a new 64bit system for the first time - that Program Files (x86) shambles. The B-25's installer will automatically locate your FSX or FS9 location and install to that directory, where the old DC-3 installer requires you to change the install path to yours, if it's not a default 32bit path. I'll do that the next time I'm faced with burning another batch of CDRs. In the meantime, I guess I'll try to find time to put up a little tutorial post here to explain it. Too many people still don't read read-me files!
  4. Sorry, Harry. I've been having endless computer issues of late, but here it is in a nutshell: There is zero possibilty that anyhting new will be coming out of the MAAM-SIM team, as it has ceased to exist, with the lone exception of this old goat who soldiers on as the museum's webmaster. The Mid-Atlantic Air Museum does still sell the old products - still for the benefit of the museum's ongoing restoration programs, but that, and what little help I can offer on this forum or by e-mail, and sometimes even on the phone, is the extent of the FS operation. Jan's retirement was the team's death knell, but another original member, our genius programmer Fred Banting, had already bowed out of future projects, and Rob Young, although standing by for future projects, was fully engaged in RealAir, trying to make a living . That just leaves me here, and although I founded the team, almost 15 years ago, I am by far the least technically saavy of the group by a long chalk! Our original quartet are all in the second half of our 60's, and considering none of us have ever made a dime off the endeavor, I hope our customers will understand that it is time to back away. Please also forgive me if I don't get to this forum as often as I should. I'm pretty busy at a couple other projects that actually do make me a bit of much needed money to supplement my pension. I'm the author of a couple novels, loosely based on my own experiences as an Infantryman in Vietnam, and producer of a line of apparel and other gear for combat veterans of all wars from Vietnam to the present day. www.CIBtheBook.com www.Mech-Grunt.com, in case anyone is interested. My absences are likely to get even longer, as my wife is retiring this summer and we will be going on the road in our motorhome along with our two Golden Retrievers, and sometimes our young grand-children. In fact, this afternoon we head out to Charleston, SC, for the birth of our fourth, Connor Russell Rambow, due any day now. We'll be staying down there, helping out and escaping the latest, rapidly approaching winter storm. Wish us luck!
  5. Hey Jeff, full power, or nearly so, is not only OK for takeoff, it's S.O.P. Hence the METO - Maximum EXCEPT Take-Off number. Just reduce on climb-out and the foul fowl will remain silent.
  6. Hi Jeff, Shame on you. You blew up two perfectly good Pratt & Whitneys! Those are going to cost you something north of $60K - each, to rebuild. :-) You are correct that this sound was the result of "programmers with a sense of humour!", but the code-writing comics were not the MS guys. The idea originated with our our gauge guru, Fred Banting, demonstrating the sense of humor that Canadians are famous for (many of the great comedians working in the U.S. are actually Canucks). When we decided to incorporate an engine failure feature in our TMB Avenger, Fred found a funny chicken clucking sound to use in place of the more conventional bang noise found in other planes when you blow up a mill. But since it was for the TBM "Turkey", i located the turkey gobble sound for the TBM. The engine failure mod was subsequently incorporated into the R4D/DC-3/C-47 the B-25 packages, and we put the chicken sound you heard in these planes as the engine failure.wav. So, you must have been a bad boy and were not paying attention to your gauges while climbing out. The engine failure mod is activated when you exceed the redlines for too long. Specifically, as Manifold Pressure exceeds the Maximum Continuous Power Rating, the Cylinder Head Temperature will gradually begin to rise. As the MP increases the CHT rises faster. You will see the needles of both the Cylinder Temp and Oil Temp gauges climb toward their redlines. If corrective action is not taken, the engines will fail and you will hear the dreaded outraged chicken!. The METO (Maximum Except Takeoff) numbers for the R4D, which has the more powerful,1350 BHP, P&W 1830-94 engines, and all other repaints based on it, are Manifold Pressure 43.5 inches and an RPM of 2600 at 105 knots. The DC-3 and C-47 aircraft in this package equipped with the 1830-92 of 1200 BHP METO has numbers of 42 MP and 2550 RPM. Check your kneeboard to see which engines you have in your particular Douglas. So remember to reduce your throttles and props to the correct settings and avoid the "buck-buck-buck-buGAWK of shame". If you forget and do suffer the failure, you will need to reload the aircraft to "repair" the engines. If you are a realism nut, feather those props and start looking for a flat place to put her down for a dead-stick landing. If you pull it off, reloading the plane from the Aircraft Menu will set you right. I hope you remembered to pull back on the "go sticks", though, otherwise you'll find yourself on a takeoff roll, ready or not! You can cheat and do this in-flight without interrupting your present trip by using the key shortcut: Alt, A, A, Enter. Your wounded Gooney Bird will be magicallly healed,engines running. Now pull back those levers or you're going to waste a couple more P&Ws!
  7. Erik, just when I think this thing can't get any more inexpicable, something like this pops up! So now to the peculiar "Missing Gauge Mystery" we can add the equally weird "Case of the Magically Appearing Gauges". We need a latter day, computer-code savvy, Sherlock Holmes to deduce his way through this puzzle! Seriously, the security essentials update you mention would seem to point back to the original theme of this thread - that it has something to do with the DLL Trust Policy which sounds like a security issue to me. But Sherlock Holmes I ain't, so it will be interesting to see if anyone else finds their missing Gooney Bird gauges suddenly installing themselves in a previously blank panel after this WIndows update. Thanks for reporting this phenomenon and I hope you can now enjoy your Douglas in its fully functional glory.
  8. Hi Erik. That, along with your experience with the other computer with the same OS but a different video card seems to strengthen the case that it is related to suspect this may be related to the G-Force 8800 GTS card. I would like to hear what cards other missing gauge sufferers are using before forming a conclusion on this. Please, let's have that information from anyone reading this post.
  9. Hi Erik, Did you ever see the FSX DLL Trust Policy window appear after installing the DC-3, before or after you made the change to FSX.cfg? Do any of you other sufferers have this same video card.
  10. Hi Lincoln, I hate to tell you, but when it comes to this sort of thing I'm one of those "older dim bulbs", myself. I usually get my son-in-law, Tan, who owns and operates an IT company, to do this sort of arcane stuff for me. That whole post was a quote from a PMDG Support page. Here'e the link. http://support.precisionmanuals.com/KB/a5/fixing-the-fsx-dll-trust-policy.aspx I would suggest checking it out and perhaps asking them to explain the instructions. I would be afraid to try..
  11. Some DC-3 users have reported missing gauges after installing the DC-3 package. I’ve been stumped by this, suspecting it had to be something in the OS, but not sure what. I just did a Google search and came up with this on the PMDG website. It sounds like this is the problem. Credit to them. Fixing the FSX DLL Trust Policy Overview: When you load an FSX add-on aircraft for the first time, FSX should ask you if you trust the dlls (gauge files) when the airplane is first loaded. This should only happen the first time, or after a patch is applied to the add-on aircraft. Occasionally, FSX will forget to ask you to authorize the dlls, and this can create an undesirable circumstances where the dlls (gauge files) are not loaded with the rest of the airplane. The end result is an unusable simulation. Correcting the Problem: The first step to correcting this problem is to open the FSX.CFG file and delete all references to your product that can be found under the [TRUSTED] section of the FSX.CFG. Next, you must eliminate a troublesome registry setting that Windows uses for third party DLL trust policy selection. Check if the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WinTrust\Trust Providers\Software Publishing registry key is set to 0x63c00. This value is Microsoft's WinTrust policy selection flags, as described here. The 0x40000 flag means "Allow only items in personal trust database" and apparently, this clashes with FSX's ability to allow manual authorization of unrecognized DLLs, telling it instead to never trust anything outside the user's personal trust. Unsetting this flag (putting it back to its default 0x23c00 value) returns all operations to normal and Flight Simulator X will once again be able to ask the user to designate the PMDG DLL modules as 'Trusted' software. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Please report if this solves the problem.
  12. Uncheck the Preview Dx10 box in the FSX Options Display menu and the ghostly fleet of Mitchells will appear properly clad.
  13. Hi Craig. We're very interested in what you have discovered. Please shoot me an e-mail with the details. maam-sim@maam.orgCheers, Bill
  14. No, Mike. As I said in the pinned topic "BT and R4D FSX Issues" at the top, we have decided to defer any further patches and go for a complete FSX version this summer. We'll begin working on the Douglas as soon as the TBM is released. That is expected in about a month. Then we'll follow up with the B-25.Bill RambowMAAM-SIMhttp://www.fssupport.com/maam/hgrsm_blkani.gif
  15. Well, you are ahead of me, anyway. I'm glad you are getting some help from other users. Vista is still the great unknown around here. Eventually we will tackle it.Bill RambowMAAM-SIM http://www.fssupport.com/maam/hgrsm_blkani.gif
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