FlyingGoblin

When I learned VHDL in a master's class, I implemented the 6502 in an FPGA. It wasn't a complete implementation, but it did a majority of the instruction set. I don't remember how many pages of design I had, but it worked. You could assemble code and it would run it. I felt pretty good about it, until the instructor showed his implementation on the last day of class. It was unbelievably simple; I suddenly felt like a two year old with a fat crayon making pretty pictures.

It's crashing on me. I had the Navstax radio selected then saw your post and switched to the default WX - still crashing. Tried to switch to the Flight1 GTN750, but that's not supported yet. Which radio did you switch to? Thanks. EDIT: Doh!! Nevermind. switched to default got it working, but I miss the Navstax radios...

Hi Wilhelm, I appreciate you're trying to help. I do not disagree with you. The problem could be in my setup and I'm open to suggestions. Note that in my original post I've also been trying to use the Yoke in X-Plane as well. The only thing between the sim and the yoke in that case is the windows driver. Also, I tried to use the yoke in P3D v4 with no FSUIPC as well, and I get the same poor performance. I wish I had had a good experience with PFC as you did, but I did not. They have not been eager to make me happy with the yoke. For a $1,200 purchase, I expected better support.

Mark, that sounds very reasonable. I don't have any PFC drivers installed, I was just letting the windows HID driver do everything. I didn't know I had access to such a thing in FSUIPC. Will definitely take a look when I get a chance. Ross, I did tell the PFC tech my experience, but after he went through the cal routine, he saw that the cross hairs were going through full deflection and that was good enough for him. He didn't seem to care that there were obvious discrete steps. He made it my problem by saying, "that's how it's supposed to work and I'm sorry if it doesn't meet your expectations." And that was the end of that. I think I'll send another email to them and describe the problem again and cc sales as you suggest.

Hi Ross, Thanks for posting what you are seeing in FSUIPC. I was wondering if other people were just accepting what they were getting and not really looking. On the other hand, I didn't have to look at any numbers to tell me something was wrong. I rarely look at the windows cal dialog too. My first stop, after getting poor results flying, was the axis calibration tab in FSUIPC. While the numbers had been scaled up, it just resulted in much larger step sizes. I considered returning the yoke, but that would be another $60 shipping, so I decided to just mod what I have. As I said previously, the yoke looks and feels awesome. To bad it wasn't "precision" out of the box. I've ordered a couple of aftermarket joystick boards and plane to rip the PFC yoke open and use one to replace whatever is in there. The website says they are using Hall-effect position sensors, so I'll be looking at what the sensors are and how they are connected. I may end up replacing those as well. To answer your question, "How is the yoke performing in the sim?", I'm not using it. Messed around with it for a few flights but landing was...sloppy. I'm used to making very small adjustments and getting a response. With this thing, I just can't make precise changes. I was trying to fly touch and goes in the A2A-182 at LOWI and ended up just letting go of the yoke and flying with my HOTAB. Hands on Throttle and Beer: steering with the rudder and pitch control with the throttle. Cheers, Mike

So, I just got off the phone with PFC support. They ran through the calibration procedure (as did I) remotely and said everything was fine. I'm having a hard time believing that the resolution is really this poor. I plugged my Warthog stick back in and it simply blows this thing out of the water in terms of precision. Seriously disappointed.

Well, I'll see how it goes. I sent an email to PFC support yesterday just before I posted my initial experience and I've not heard anything back yet. I also tried to call yesterday, but the phone just rang with no answer. I get 313 discrete counts between full left and full right deflection. That's slightly better than 8-bits. Not what I would call "Precision". And it's not the numbers that bother me, it's the fact that I can move the yoke for a very small adjustment and nothing happens. Maybe I'm just being picky and need to spend more time with a yoke. I really, really like the feel of this thing!

I finally decided to go ahead and get a high end yoke to increase my immersion in the simulator. The yoke feels great. Plenty of mass and very smooth movement. I'm running windows 10, P3D and XP11. I calibrated the yoke in windows and noticed that the behavior was a little odd. Pitch seems to smoothly go to the extents, but when centered, the cross hair would not be centered in the window. The roll, wouldn't even reach the extents of the window until clicking through the calibration routine and going to "test". There I could see roll through the entire range -- although turning the yoke very slowly, I could see the cross-hair incrementing across the window. When I look at the raw values they go from about 500 to about 1500 in steps of 5 or six -- which makes me think I'm looking at an 8-bit digitizer. In X-Plane, before clicking "accept axis" the roll again does not reach the extents of the range and never automatically turns blue like other axes. If I click accept axis, then the indicator turns blue and fills the extents of the bar. Starting up the '172 and looking at the ailerons, I can see the ailerons incrementing through the range in noticeable discrete steps. In P3D it's basically the same thing. I use FSUIPC, and still see large increments in the "raw" value of the roll axis. I've been using thrustmaster sticks since the early '90s. Often moded with various aftermarket offerings. I'm strong believer in the control device enhancing immersion -- I fly with a side-stick when flying a aircraft that has that in real life and center mount when that is called for. I've only recently gotten into aircraft with yokes and want to fly like the real thing. Ultimately, if I cant get the yoke to calibrate properly, I'll rip the box open and stuff in an aftermarket board, but for $1,000 I wasn't expecting the need.

I agree, with XP11, my work is focused on flight planning and flying the sim. And it looks great right out of the box!

Yep. I'm not sure if you're grouping P3D in the FSX platform, but at this point I'm putting all P3D upgrades and add-ons on hold as well. I had only been dabbling in XPlane since version 9 on rare occasions and usually returned to FSX. Not this time. I'm all in with XPlane now and hope developers will see it as the excellent platform that it has become. Seems to me, if Lockheed wants to stay in the game class room, they had better step it up.

Very nice! And that stock C172 is pretty nice too. I wish I could convert my extensive FSX/P3D hanger over to XPlane...

I had the same problem. I had CP installed on a windows 7 machine before building a windows 10 machine and migrating everything over to the new PC. This would be the very first transfer of the license. I got the same error that said I had reached the limit. Anyway, they responded to a help request very quickly and reset my license. But that did not work. When I tried to install, it said I had reached the limit of installations. I asked for help again and got a response very quickly -- my license was reset again. I attempted to install and failed with the same error. During this time I rolled my Thrustmaster USB driver back to an older version AND updated my BIOS. I asked for help again and my license was reset again. This time, I un-installed VFX Central (just because I wanted to completely clean it out) and re-installed, before trying to install CP and it finally worked. All through this time Oldprop support was very responsive. They thought that it might have been me changing the USB driver or updating the BIOS. But I am suspicious that VFX Central was the culprit...

TrackIR is working pretty good now with CP, but when I disable CP, TrackIR is unresponsive. The "in TrackIR enabled game" LED goes out and I cannot manipulate the view with TrackIR. The Tracking LED remains lit and is tracking in the TrackIR window. How can I use the CP disable/enable and still use TrackIR in the sim? Thanks!

I have the same issue in P3D. But it seems to happen to me ONLY when I'm using the mouse. I will try activating the wide aspect view.

O.K. Many thanks to Michael for putting up with me as I worked through this. Possibly, an update to my BIOS and some other driver additions made VFXCentral think it was on a different computer. In the end Michael kindly reset my license (again) and I completely uninstalled VFXCentral before re-installing and then installing ChasePlane.