Nick M

Ah, glad to hear you seem to have found the cause too Dave. Your 4080 will be 2-3 cm's wider than my 4070 I believe, so can quite see how the power connecter could impinge on the side panel. I wonder if a few dabs of dielectric grease would help in your case too?

Hello Dave, Just dropped in to find out how you're faring with this issue, and with a small update from my end, and realised I overlooked your last post. Sorry about that. No, it's a Gigabyte MB I've got, as well as the GPU. For me the issue seemed to be increasing in frequency, and I was also able to reproduce it fairly consistent by stress testing the GPU. Typically after just a few minutes at 100% utilization (just over 200 watts in my case) the dreaded black screen with fans going to max would result. I experimented with undervolting too, but this didn't resolve the issue. Being a bit reluctant to go through the hassle of a RTM and not being too confident it would even resolve the situation, I decided to replace the power cable instead. This was based on some comments I read somewhere and 'only' set me back £18 (though I really thing something like this should have been included with the GPU itself). Although I'm hesitant to jinx things, this does seem to have fixed the issue. I've been able to run the GPU at max for over and hour on a few occasions and it's remained stable. For info, this is the replacement cable I purchased and it's a much neater solution than the NVIDIA adaptor going into for my PSU cable. 12VHPWR Cable | 600W PCIe 5.0 Power Adapter Cable (corsair.com) When the cable arrived, the box also contained a little sachet of dielectric grease which may also have helped. Anyway, will let you know if I'm celebrating too soon. I'll also stick with the undervolt for now too, at it reduces power usage by around 30-40W and seems pretty stable. Cheers, Nick

Unfortunately I haven't been able to diagnose or resolve the issue yet @regis9. It's very sporadic, sometimes the PC will run GPU-intensive software like MSFS happily all day and on other days, the lockup will occur at least once in the space of an hour. I had a little hunch it had something to do with the fan controller side of the software rather than a hardware fault (in general, I'd say Gigabyte's software is pretty diabolical) but I've been away from home a fair bit with the day job recently, so this has limited the amount of time I've been able to spend tinkering with my sim PC. Hoping I'll have a bit more time at the end of the month to investigate properly.

Thanks for confirming Dave. Yes, I've found a few other discussion relating to this issue such as this one. New RTX 4070 Ti will stop displaying and go full fan speed out of nowhere. HELP : r/gigabyte (reddit.com) I haven't contacted support yet, but an RMA may be on the card. However, I am going to experiment with undervolting the card beforehand.

Hello Dave, I'm having exactly the same issue with my 4070 GPU: fans run up to full speed and the video display is lost forcing a hard restart. (Resetting the GPU with Ctrl + Shift + Start + B doesn't work.) No apparent pattern as to when it happens, sometimes when the card isn't under load, although on other occasions it will happen when running MSFS or other games. Anyway, as you'll have discovered, it's rather annoying! Mine is a Gigagbyte GeForce RTX 4070 GAMING OC 12GB which was purchased around 6 months ago. I'm curious if Gigabyte is the manufacturer in your case too? For what it's worth, I've tried replugging/changing power cables, updating drivers, and most recently updating the GPU bios. Not sure yet if the latter will make any difference but we'll see. Cheers, Nick

The updater shortcut should already be in the Windows start menu guys, in the "A2A Simulations" folder so usually pretty close to the top. Howard, if you're having trouble running the update, you can just uninstall the Comanche and then redownload the new v1.2 installer from your account on the A2A store instead. You may need to manually remove the "a2a-aircraft-pa24" folder from the Community directory before reinstalling. A few of our customers who have the MS Store edition seem to have run into the issue, and as far as I can tell, it's because the Xbox app or something is protecting or encrypting files in their Community folder, so once they've been installed, the installer is then blocked from uninstalling them. Windows sure can be mean sometimes! 😅 Thanks, Nick - A2A Simulations Edit: oh, by the way, we increased the number of store downloads to 25 with the v1.1 update, but if anyone feels like they're running out (usually as a result of using a download accelerator) then please just drop us a line on our forum.

Just a little note to let everyone know that we've just released the v1.2 update for the Comanche. 🙂 To install version 1.2, please click the "Comanche Check For Updates MSFS" shortcut in the "A2A Simulations" folder in the Windows start menu. Thanks Nick - A2A Simulations

Hi All, If you find the input configurator won't launch after the recent update to v1.1 of the Comanche, simply rerunning the new installer you downloaded should fix the issue (there's no need to redownload it, just a rerun should suffice). This is because a .dll file needed by the configurator isn't replaced during the automated uninstall/reinstall sequence due to a file versioning conflict. Apologies for the inconvenience. Thanks, Nick - A2A Simulation

These are Virtual-Key codes (the 'VK' bit), so basically Left Shift + 1 in this case. Thanks, Nick - A2A Simulations

You're welcome George and hope you enjoy the Comanche. 🙂

Hello, Running the DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer should fix this issue. It should already be running 'silently' with our installer (in other words, only showing if it detects that the libraries need updating) but this doesn't always seem to be working for some reason. https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=35 Thanks, Nick - A2A Simulations

Yes, just to confirm that we are aware of a bug where a sudden, huge spike in engine torque can, very, very, very occasionally flip the entire plane the plane in the air when using the starter or when towing (the prop is actually rotated a bit when you attach the tow bar, so it doesn't make contact with it). This has resulted in one or two funny moments on livestreams, and we would like to particularly apologise to any VR simmers who have been traumatized as a result. 😁 It's been hard to reproduce, but should be fixed with the first Comanche update which we'll get out as soon as we can. Thanks, Nick - A2A Simulations

Hello, We've created a troubleshooting topic on our forum for anyone who isn't hearing the internal sound effects. https://a2asimulations.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=151&t=74873 In most cases, the culprit seem to be a another add-on or combination of add-ons causing invalid entries in the EXE.xml which is preventing our installer from writing to it. However, in some cases updating the Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2022 Redistributable seem to do the trick too. Thanks, Nick - A2A Simulations

Hello guys, I replied to Pat's post asking the same question on our forums, and I'll add the info here too for the befit of anyone who is interested. Yes, if you've installed P3Dv5 but you don't have P3Dv4 on your system, the existing installer won't be able to detect a compatible version of the sim. Although the P-40 itself will—broadly-speaking—work in v5, there are a few issues which we'll need to address before we release a new P3Dv5 installer. In the meantime, if you're really keen to try the P3Dv4 version in v5, a simple Windows registry edit can be used to redirect the installer. To do this, add a registry key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v4" containing a string with name "SetupPath" and value "C:\Program Files\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v5" (or whatever your P3Dv5 installation path is). If you're using this default installation path you can use this registry script to make the edit instead. You can also edit the script in Notepad via its right click context menu if you wish to customise it for your own P3Dv5 install path, rather than editing the registry direct. In this case, it's the section highlighted in blue which you'll need to modify. To run the script, just double click it. Thanks, Nick

Hello Guys, Since we made the Accu-Sim P-40 available as a free gift to the flight sim community a few days ago (see this topic), the traffic on our website has seen a huge surge. Although we expected a lot of demand and we've since brought in an additional file hosting service, we're still seeing intermittent SSL handshake issues on the site that we didn't anticipate. All joking about handshakes being an obvious source of trouble at this time of social distancing aside, the COVID-19 pandemic is actually frustrating attempts to fully resolve the issue. This is because the onsite support provided by our web hosting company (i.e techs able to access and reset servers) is under pressure too at this time. However, if you refresh your browser a few times as mentioned above, you should be able to load the site and it seems to be pretty fast at present once it loads. Similarly, it may take a few attempts to get the online updaters for our P3Dv4 products to connect. Apologies to anyone who is finding access tricky, but we hope you understand. 🙂 Thanks, Nick

Hi All, We've brought in some external file hosting capacity on our website, so hopefully the timeouts and SSL handshake failures that many of you have been experiencing over the past two days should be less likely. Not surprisingly, traffic on the site over this period has dramatically exceeded anything we've seen before, but you should all be able to download the P-40 now. Thanks for bearing with us. 🙂 All the best,Nick

Thanks for the kind words guys, and apologies to anyone who is struggling to load our site at the moment to download their free copy of the P-40. We'd hoped our web hosting company would be up to the extra demand, but looks like the surge was way bigger than expected. Anyway, please don't panic if you can get get into our store at present: the P-40 will be free for a while to come. 🙂 Best wishes, and hope you all stay healthy and cheerful! Nick

Great stuff Stan. Thanks and look forward to seeing you there. Nick

Okay, just manually activated you in that case Stan, so you should be able to post if you have any other issues or just fancy dropping by. The first post needs manual approval, but once that's done, you can post at will. Thanks, Nick

Thanks Stan. There's an new member called 'stash' who isn't activated. Is this you? Nick

Hi Stan, Good to hear you've resolved the issue with the autopilot. Yes, the directional gyro will need to be aligned for it to work correctly. In some NAV modes, it's also necessary to set the heading bug to the desired course. I don't see a pending post from you on our forums, but you should get an automated confirmation email when you register which is a common measure to try and keep the spambots at bay. If you haven't received it, please check your junk mail folder. If it's not there, drop me a line here and I should be able to sort things from our end. Thanks, Nick

Thanks for the comments everyone. The PBR implementation in P3Dv4 does indeed have its limitations, although I suppose there's always the chance it will be tweaked with future updates from Lockheed Martin. However, it's not possible to control the colour appearance of reflected light that's rendered on PBR surfaces via changes to the materials, just how metallic the surface is. We'll keep an eye on feedback, but for now, if you wish to revert any or all of the original C172 liveries back to their old, non-PBR, models and textures this is easy to do as the original files are still present in the installation. Just open the aircraft.cfg file and find the "model=pbr" entries in the "[fltsim.0]", "[fltsim.1]" and "[fltsim.2]" sections, and change them to just "model=". Note that you can't do this for the new N346CP livery "[fltsim.3]" as it doesn't include the legacy textures. Best regards, Nick

Thanks Tim - there are a few additional screenshots of the free PBR update in this post on our forums. Harry - I think I answered you on our forum, but for the benefit of anyone else who's wondering the same thing, all the great existing repaints for the 172 are still supported because we've kept the old non-PBR models and textures in place. However, the update replaces the aircraft.cfg so any installed repaints won't show once you've installed it. Upon updating, your existing aircraft.cfg file is backed-up in the same folder as "aircraft.cfg.bak" so you can copy and paste any repaint entries from this file into the new copy of the aircraft.cfg. Just bear in mind that you may have to adjust numbers for the "[fltsim.x]" entries as we added one extra livery. Best regards, Nick

Hi Andreas, It sounds like you're using pretty-much the correct technique for our 172R. It's a fuel injected model, so is started with the mixture lever in the idle/cutoff position to prevent over priming. In fact, I'd say that over priming is the most common reason why customers sometimes have difficulty starting. Sometimes what is judged to be 3-5 seconds of priming with the fuel pump on and mixture pushed in, turns out to be at least 10 seconds once a video of unsuccessful starting attempts is shown! However, once the engine starts, you need to push the mixture lever in pretty smartly to prevent the engine from dying. There quite a bit to do in short time, so with mouse controls only, it can be a bit tricky until you become used to it. It's not just sim pilots who struggle with this though, and Cessna produced this video specifically to help operators of fuel injected 172s and 182s avoid over priming. If you have a watch and then apply the principals shown in the sim, you should be good. Finally, although we try to keep an eye on forums elsewhere, if you have any questions specific to A2A products, you're welcome to post on our forums too. Kind regards, Nick

Hello Steve, The internal sound files for the Accu-Sim B-17 are stored in a separate directory to the main "sounds" folder that you mention. By default, this is "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\A2A\B17\Sounds". If you're having some difficulties with the product, I'd recommend that you drop us a line on our forums where we can help get you sorted out. If you can let us know as much info about your OS and installation as possible, it should make it quicker to troubleshoot the issue. Thanks, Nick