David Chester

I'll certainly agree with you there. My favourite aircraft of all time. David

Hi Bob,Hopefully you got my email in response to your support request.You can download the Pitts here:http://www.abacus.org/Pitts/PittsSetup.exe2 things everyone... you need a serial number so please don't download it if you haven't bought it, and no, not THAT Abacus! :)I hope that you managed to get it OK. Unfortunately some people are experiencing dropped packets presumably due to demand.Kind regardsDavid Chester

Hi Jonathan,I know you have this sorted out now but I just thought I would post my email reply to you for others who experience these weird kinds of problems with Flight Simulator.Glad to see you are still flying my VC10 anyway :)Kind regardsDavidAddictive SimulationsInitial response:Initially this does sound like it could be a pitot problem doesn't it? That wouldn't explain you being kicked out of FS though. Could be a live weather problem where the weather is updated at regular intervals and FS is getting the wrong information suddenly which will throw it completely. We used to get this sometimes with Active Sky and FSUIPC but it could normally be fixed by setting the weather transitions to slow. Even then it could be quite a rough transition sometimes. I remember one flight I had saved myself on approach to EDDH and every time it would throw me violently sideways on finals which doesn't help much! It is possible that this would also occur with the built-in live weather system. This can also happen because the weather is very different between the day when you saved the flight and the day when you load the flight and fly it again. The next thing I would do would be to completely rule out the possibility of a saved flight file issue. This is a common problem where something corrupt gets saved and then every time you load that flight the same problem occurs. To do this, start FS wth the default aircraft and location. If you have changed your default aircraft and location you should reset this. When in the default aircraft change location to the airport of your choice and aircraft of your choice. Now load the flight plan and save the flight before you begin it. Begin the flight and carry on as normal. Make descent saves as you wish and when the flight is over, go back to one of the saved flights and see if it works correctly.

Hi AVGAS,I am Addictive Simulations and I can confirm that my Trident is nothing whatever to do with David Maltby and his team of freeware designers.Firstly I would like to wish everyone - especially David Maltby - a very Happy Christmas. I've only seen a few screenshots of David's new One-Eleven but they make it look very good. I look forward to the challenge of making a One-Eleven myself sometime in the future. The Addictive Trident is made entirely by myself from scratch except for the extremely realistic sound set which was made almost entirely by Mike Hambly as I ran out of time to do this myself. I do have some real Trident sounds myself both inside and out and I travelled on them very many times until my mid teens. The sounds are extremely good. My publishers and I wanted to get the Trident in the shops in time for Christmas which we managed by the skin of our teeth due to me working 14 to 16 hour days on it in the preceding 2 or 3 weeks! (Amazingly, my wife is still talking to me ;) ) If it was not distributed by November 26th it would have been put back to February so the deadline was important. I am happy to say that my publishers sold over 1000 copies in the last week of November alone! I don't yet know how well it is doing this month but like the Addictive VC10 there have been practically no support calls.Our Vickers VC10 simulation has been around for some time now and has also been selling successfully in shops since August. I am absolutely thrilled to announce that this aircraft has just won the FlightSim.com Product Of The Year Award 2005 which they informed me of on Christmas Eve. This was the best Christmas present anyone could possibly have given me. This is for Best Vintage Airliner and the coveted award goes only to those considered to be above and beyond their regular Gold and Platinum awards and take into account customer care and the shopping experience as well as the aircraft itself. I am sure you can imagine how thrilled my family and I are. http://www.abacus.org/vc10/award2005small.jpgNow with the Trident I have tried to take things to another level. This aircraft as you pointed out has a virtual cabin. This is for those ActiveCamera junkies who have the freedom to stroll down the cabin and sit in a wing-view seat or read the in-flight brochures provided on the tables :) It also has glass windows and a very realistic flight model. The Trident was notoriously difficult to get off the ground and the Addictive Trident accurately models this. It wasn't called the "Gripper" for nothing! :) I hear that pilots joked it only got airborn because of the curvature of the Earth :) Interestingly the Trident had a very good safety record. This was almost certainly due to it being so hard to get airborn that pilots always treated it with the respect required. They knew everything had to be done exactly right or they would likely kill everyone on board! Customers seem very happy with our Trident and apart from some texture problems in the initial release there have been no issues with it. Like our VC10, the Trident was pirated within 24 hours of release. The pirate was stupid enough not to wait a few days so we knew his identity and were able to shut it down! A recent update has fixed the texturing problem. Updates will be free for the life of the aircraft. I have several things I will be improving over the next few months and there are a couple of liveries to add including Bruce's BKS Trident 1 which will now receive priority treatment :)I have kept my next project under my hat but as British aircraft, especially jets, are where my roots lie and I stated above that I will be making a One-Eleven some time in the future it probably doesn't take a genius to work out that my next project, on the request of customers and my publishers, will be the 4 engined Comet jetliner. I am currently working on a software project for a business customer but as soon that that is complete I will be diving headlong into the Comet. After that will probably be a single seater if I get my way although for commercial reasons I have to listen to my publishers!I would like to thank all of my customers for their support and kind comments and wish everyone a Happy, Prosperous and Peaceful New Year. David ChesterAddictive Simulationswww.addictive.ithttp://www.abacus.org/vc10/vc10.jpg

You are unlikely to get much benefit from having swap files etc on a different partition.... They must be on a different physical hard disk. On the same partition the heads are still thrashing around writing different data to different places and in fact you may make matters worse doing this.If you have Windows on one phisical disk, the swap file on another and a third just for the flight sim data you should get a noticable increase in performance. This is not rocket science it has been done for decades. Programs on one disk and data on another.A big hard disk, therefore, does not help you and may make matters worse because it has to switch continually between different places on the disk surface. You need a FAST hard disk preferably SCSI or even Serial ATA (SATA) if you can't afford SCSI. Most important: You need more than one!You also need a fast graphics card. Sorry but an FX5200 is not fast. That's entry level these days. You should be looking at FX5600 or better. An older GeForce 4 Ti4600 is better than a 5600. I know I have both and then some.You need 1Gb of RAM with Windows XP. That makes a world of difference. Pro is better than Home. In the old days if we wanted out PCs to fly we would simply stick some more RAM in and then turn off the swap file. With the larger amount of memory Windows went like a rocket! It's quite a lot bigger now though so you would probably need 6Gb of RAM or so in order to make it work but it definitely improves substantially when you increase from 512k to 1Gb of RAM and again at 2Gb. CPU power. CPU power. CPU power. Secondary to graphics card but very important.Finally what a lot of people don't understand is that the motherboard is VITAL. Different chipsets can make a vast difference in performance. I have 2 identical machines here except for the motherboard. I won't name the slow one but the fast one is Asus and it is SO much faster that I spent a long time trying to sort out the slow one. I gave up. Gigabyte also make fast motherboards as do SuperMicro and ABit. I don't buy or sell any other manufacturers boards these days if I can help it.I hope this helps someone somewhere. Fiddling with your Windows settings can be very dangerous if you don't know what you are doing. There is no substitute for power. If there was then Windows would be delivered with all these magical settings pre-configured.Oh..... Get Service Pack 2 for XP!David