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Old 23rd Apr 2005, 10:47
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Irish Steve
 
Join Date: Mar 1999
Location: Ashbourne Co Meath Ireland
Age: 73
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Can't help with the operation of the program for finding airfields, but on the engine controls scenario, you're up against ancient history, and the problems of compatability.

A long time ago, back when computers only needed 3 floppies to load an operating system called DOS, ( and they worked well on CPU intensive flight sim packages) game ports were the only way to get data from the joystick into the computer.

Unless you were prepared to spend mega bucks to get alternative solutions, ( and there were some), that meant you had elevators, rudder ailerons and one "throttle", but no multi engine capability, or things like prop or mixture controls, so any form of accurate multi engine operation just wasn't possible.

Now, USB devices have come along, and it is possible to get external devices that will allow multi engine operation, but they're not standard, and for the vast majority of "flight sim" users, they would add a level of complexity that would probably result in most flights ending with a crash

(And don't even start me on the subject of if FS is a flight simulation or a scenery simulation that has a few sort of working aircraft to be able to move around the scenery )

So, most sim writers end up making the product work to the "lowest common denominator", and if you want to make it work to any sort of level of competence, you're into some serious work within the software parameters, and with some external and probably expensive hardware.

That may not be the answer you were looking for, but it's about as close as it's going to get for now.

Hope it helps
Irish Steve is offline