lzamm

At the risk of offending some people, would those weights qualify as "dumb belles"?

Linking is a much neater solution than moving. Thankfully it's no longer a Unix/Linux only thing but has been available on Windows for quite some time. If you really want to do it manually, have a look at Link Shell Extension. But for MSFS I prefer the Addon Linker, it may be a full-blown manager but all I use it for is linking/unlinking what I want in the Community folder - the GUI format and the various checks available are so useful. Linking does need the disks where the files are physically kept to be reasonably fast, though.

Although I had dabbled in flight simulation before, FS9 was the first one I spent any serious time upon. I just loved the Dreamfleet 727 and criss-crossed the world with it, enjoying every second on the ground and in the air. I held on to FS9 for an unconscionable time even after FSX came out, mostly because of that model (the fact that my PC wasn't very good helped), but eventually made the jump, and then to X-plane and latterly MSFS. I still have FS9 installed on my old machine and occasionally give it (and the 727) a spin, but I find the lack of a proper virtual cockpit and the clunky controls off-putting and quickly return to the modern world. So yes, I miss FS9 - like I miss most of my beloved childhood memories, that are better off for remaining memories and not being revisited.

Have a shot at X-plane! Freeware heaven at the moment, too.

It has nothing to do with virtual or physical memory. It has to do with the way the program is compiled into its executable form. At the lowest level, each memory location is identified by an address that the processor has to store in a "register" in order to do things with it. At the time FSX was compiled, most processors had 32-bit registers and, like a calculator with a fixed number of digits, there is a limit to the largest number you can store in a 32-bit register - 2^32 (-1 for the purists) which is around 4 gigs. So 32-bit program can only access 4GB of RAM, physical or virtual. In addition Windows reserves around 1GB for its own use which is why you only have 3GB. Virtual memory lets the operating system play about with the physical memory allocated to any program. In terms of availability, it only improves things, not makes them worse. Without it, 32-bit programs could not run on 64-bit OS's - or at most they would all only see the first 4GB of physical memory and compete for that.

My bad, just checked and Plan-G does not have slew for X-plane, only FSX. Still recommend it though!

I believe Plan-G has an option "slew aircraft to here" when you right-click on the map, though I don't recall using it myself. Anyway, Plan-G is highly recommended as it provides much better mapping features than X-plane's internal map view.

There's a program called "aired" for editing MSFS .air files. It's in the library.

IIRC if you do not have CIVA installed the LNAV switch defaults to the standard NAV/GPS function. So temporarily renaming the CIVA folder (easier than editing the panel config) will let the Tinmouse follow the MSFS GPS. Been quite a time though so I may be wrong. Oh and you won't be able to play with the INS during the flight either Long time ago I wrote a small gauge that displays your FS flightplan with lat/lon coordinates to make data entry into CIVA easier; it also lists nearby VOR's for the same purpose. If you're interested I'll try and dig it up.

No. (1) I've got to finish this first, which may be never (2) Didn't buy another Carenado....

Yes, the feelThere Phenom has a working FLC mode. It also has CSC (Cruise speed control) and TCS (Touch Control Steering). I find the autopilot quite complete, only the VNV mode is a hard-wired three-degree descent rather than a path descent between waypoints. As you say, it has a FADEC which works as well. It's not as drop-dead gorgeous as the Carenado model, but I find the graphics adequate and for me the autopilot more than makes up for it. After all, its quite an old model (FS9 conversion?) and shows it with several 2D popups and a configurator which runs outside FSX. On the other hand it has a good manual with detailed system descriptions and a tutorial flight, which you can find online if you google "feelthere phenom manual". Also on the minus side the displays are less functional than the Carenado's, with no inset map or backup engine page on the PFD, no system synoptics, TAWS or weather radar on the MFD. While both FMS's are skins for the default FSX GPS, the Carenado lets you modify the flight plan (add or remove waypoints) while the feelThere does not. You can of course go DTO on both. Basically its swings and roundabouts, but I personally find the feelThere version more satisfying to fly, mostly because all the systems you really need work as expected. I'm working on and off on a replacement autopilot for the Carenado which would give the best of both worlds, but that's another story!

Sure you didn't activate the Alpha Floor high AOA protection mode? - it should have been indicated on in the FMA, top left of the PFD. You said you were slow on the approach. Alpha Floor engages TOGA regardless of thrust lever position and can only be turned off by turning off the autothrust system (which can then be turned on again).

Are you using the FSX default airport for Alghero? Because if so, the LOC frequency is 109.3 (go to the FSX map screen and check it out). No matter what your FMS database says, FSX will only tune in to what it "really" has. Solution is to get an updated afcad for the airport, in the meantime just tune it manually!

Here's how it was done at 160 knots.... https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=590981414282282

There will always be UFO's. However, be aware that once you know they're alien, they're no longer "unidentified".

You have to put "panel=GTN750" not "panel=panel.GTN750" in the aircraft.cfg for the aircraft to access the folder "panel.GTN750" (hope I've explained it well).

Silverheel2's suggestion above is the best way to go about doing what you want to do; however if you prefer to have two completely separate aircraft folders, to distinguish the entries in the selection menu you also have to change the "ui_type" and "ui_variation" entries in aircraft.cfg.

Try the free "unlocker" tool, it will attempt to free up any file handles on the file and if that doesn't work it will schedule the file to be deleted on the next reboot, which is usually effective.

No one mentioned the QW BAe146 series? They have a pretty functional FMS (actually two different models, for the 146 and the RJ) which are clickable in the VC as well as in a 2D popup. Great fun to fly, too!

Default GPS (or one of its look-alikes) will give you that for a full route, on the FPL page. Also on the FPL page, if you hit the cursor button (right knob centre) you can scroll down to the waypoint you want to go to and activate the leg by pressing MENU. There are reasons to fly DTO (in my case, mostly related to laziness), but sorry these aren't!

Don't forget that if AI traffic is bothering you and you want to remove it temporarily, all you have to do is change the time, even by just 1 second...

Can't remember for sure, but I seem to recall seeing this while developing autopilot code and the internal FSX variables aren't in sync with what the gauge expects them to be. Try loading a default aircraft and ensure that the autopilot and flight director are off before loading this plane.

Well the original FMS also came in for quite a lot of stick, and I suppose people expected more from a (paid!) upgrade. If it looks like an FMS people expect it to behave like an FMS, if Carenado go further and say it's a UNS FMS (do they actually?) people have every right to expect it to behave like a UNS FMS. I don't think we'd be having this discussion if Carenado had opted to add Navigraph support to their G1000. But would anyone have bought it?

Hi guys, I'm writing this not because I have this FMS or the S550 - which I don't - but because your experiences seem to eerily mirror mine while trying to code a replacement for the Razbam Metroliner's Trimble GPS. I ran into so many brick walls that I put that project on hold, so I'm not defending Carenado's release of an apparently half-baked product, but highlighting some of the technical issues involved may help you get some use of this product. First off, you can code a nav system either completely separate from the FS GPS or to inject coordinates into it. If you go down the first route, the GPS map functions won't display the routes or the waypoints so you also have to code a separate EHSI. Also the autopilot NAV function won't know about it so you have to use the heading function to follow the route. Users of the ISG and similar systems will recognise what I'm talking about. The second route, which is what I took and what Carenado seem to have taken, looks great on the surface because you can use the standard functions for the EHSI map and autopilot. Reading external nav data from text files isn't all that hard with the excellent XMLTOOLS package (Francois Dore over on the Gauge Design forum seems to be doing something similar). The problems arise, as always, when you try to get the standard FS systems to do what you, not they, want to do. If you keep in mind that all Carenado's FMS is (probably) doing is injecting lat/lon waypoints into the standard FS GPS system, its idiosyncracies may become somewhat clearer. The FS GPS does not let you change the departure and arrival airports in a flight plan: you can either modify an existing (flight-planner) flight plan or create a direct-to flight plan and then modify that. The direct-to flight plan has no knowledge of arrival and departure airports, which is probably why Carenado opted to enter them separately. On the other hand neither does the UNS FMS, other than as the first and last waypoints in the plan, so I'm not sure I would have done it this way. As regards approaches, the MS GPS is modelled on the Garmin units where the approach is a separate set of waypoints from the main flight plan, which have to be "loaded" and "activated". The Trimble uses a similar system. On the other hand, the UNS and other FMS's treat the approach (and departure) as a seamless part of the flight plan, once confirmed by deleting the route discontinuity. Modifying these segments therefore means keeping careful track of what has to be deleted: Carenado have apparently opted to delete the entire flight plan. Not excusable, but understandable! The MS GPS does not have a DTO waypoint function, only a "join leg". So when you "DTO" a flightplan waypoint, the GPS plots a course to intercept that between the selected waypoint and the previous one. From what I read, this is what the Carenado FSM does. This is a problem I have actually solved for the Trimble, by inserting a dummy waypoint (called T-P a la Airbus) at the current location; however ensuring that this waypoint gets deleted when no longer needed is not a trivial matter. So apologies for a long post but I hope that this goes some way to explaining why the Carenado FMS (probably) behaves as it does, and may give some indications on how to use it better.

Seriously thinking of getting this despite saying "never again" a while back. I note that the mods available are for the GTN or ISG suites, I don't have either and am perfectly happy with the default navigation functions. Are the autopilot and system mods available for the vanilla S550, indeed are they necessary after SP2?