I really need to know!

[hubbabubba]

Hi guys and gals!

I've hit 60 and I'm still kicking. But it looks like CFS1 is not, so I need to know.

I am in the process of re-building from my Dell machine frying Power Supply, my main problem being that I have now too many PC for the place I have.

One of my brothers gave me his old laptop (HP Pavillon dv7) on the same evening that I lost my Dell (Dimension 5150). I also bought a Dell Dimension E521, practically a clone of the other apart from a few details, and a Dell Dimension 8200.

My fried Dell was repaired with a more powerful PS and a video card. So, if you count the "washing machine" Compaq Presario and the old "by the curb" other Compaq Presario, I went from rags to riches... sorta...

My problem is now to get all these to fit on a desk. I've decided to build my own furniture, basically two 2X4ft tables with a four-stages 2X2ft column holding the towers. It will be on the opposite wall of my actual rig.

But for now, I'm simply maintaining the Laptop and the Dimension 5150 (both under W7 SP1 64 bits Premium Home Edition French) active. The Dimension E521 is maintained daily by switching the video, kb, mouse, audio cables and doing maintenance and updates. That last machine has W7 SP1 32 bits Professionnal Edition English on it.

And here comes my question; playing CFS1 on the 64 bits machines, it goes well until I go, for example, to map view (other views may do that too) - the screen goes black. In 2d cockpit mode, the boards and instrument are still visible and functionnal (I can fly on instruments only), but all other views are totally black.

So far, only the 32 bits Dimension E521 looks OK. But as I just told you, this is only on episodically.

So, if you have W7 64 bits, W8 or 8.1, or W10, I would really, really, I MEAN REALLY, need to know about your personal experience. Your feedback will decide which machine will have priority on my new playground and, since I bought a genuine XP license, which will be "downgraded".

If you have found other problems and, let us be optimistic, solutions, do tell here. Would you, please?

Have a nice and safe 4th of July!

[No Dice]

Hello Hubba,
I no nothing about 64 bit machines But I have learned from the forums above that:
From Windows 7 to 10 it is NOT a good idea to put CFS1, 2 or any FS into C:\Program Files(86)\. MS has things too locked down in C:\Program Files(86)\ now.
Install directly into C:/

Good Luck Sir,

Dave

[hubbabubba]

Thanks No Dice, I'll give it a try.

[hubbabubba]

Just to know, No Dice, do you speak from experience or are you simply relating third-party information?

As for 32 or 64 bit operation, this LINK to Wikipedia could tell you a bit more (or not...). It is basically, from what I can gather, the size of allocated addresses. I have 16 bit (no "s", in English, contrary to French...) programs that are simply ignored by W7; they are no longer "recognized" (like old acquaintance), even under the 32 bit machine, but they're still welcomed under XP.

One thing I have found is that a special "rundll32.exe" runs when "combatsFS.exe" starts, and it is hidden at C:\Windows\SysWOW64 sub-folder. By the name, it would imply that a special library of libraries for 32 bit programs is run by this gizmo. But with M$, nothing is ever certain.

Will have to test on other machines...

[No Dice]

No Sir,
My Xp crashed but I found a company that sells rebuilt XP comps,Not sure if they export?

Want to keep running WindowXP pro, they have them
Mine looked brand new out of the box w/a 1 TB hardrive
All preloaded and ready to go......."Big YES" from No Dice
http://thefreeflightsite.com/Links.htm

The info I posted was from the CFS2 forums above.

Just finished reloading everything, but did run into a small required fix:
posted it on the FFS

VB Run Times V6
http://thefreeflightsite.com/Design.htm

Dave

[hubbabubba]

Thanks again, No Dice.

I'm typing from my W7 32 bit machine and, as I suspected, rundll32.exe is located and running under «C:\Windows\System32\». combatfs.exe is under a different partition altogether!

On the two other W7 64 bit machines, the rundll32.exe is located also at «C:\Windows\System32\», but it is also located at «C:\Windows\SysWOW64\» and, as both combatfs.exeare on the same C: partition (in and out of Program Files (x86)).

To add to the mystery, both rundll32.exe have the same version number... but different length!

I already bought a XP Pro license and will use it on a fitting machine. It probably cost less (especially in delivery fees) than the whole machine, but drivers are for me to get.

A lot of other investigations to follow...

... and stop calling me "Sir", buddy, your only three years behind me !

[No Dice]

Yes Sir, Sir, I will stop calling you Sir.

Reminds me of very many years ago;I was called into a teacher parent meeting,
We had relocated from Mississippi to New Jersey, my son..about 8 years old, kept
saying "Yes Mam" to the teacher...she thought that was an insult....I attempted
to "teach" her that , that is how he, me and everyone in the South is brought up.

It is a matter of respect, I will leave my story, after he was given detention I
began legal proceedings..........The teacher found herself no longer employed
and the school district paid for my sons private school tuition until I came back
to Mississippi 3 years later.

You have always taken the time to help when I needed you, Sir

Be safe Hubba and I will start calling you the "Guy" from Canada

Dave

[hubbabubba]

I do understand, Sir. Our education is pretty much on the same line.

When I hear second grade students calling their teacher by their first name, my ears cringe. In French, it is even worse as we have the "tu" and "vous" as pronouns for the single and plural of your "you", plural being also a sign of respect. At least my daughter is known as "Madame Lucie" and does not tolerate "tutoiement" (action of using the "tu" instead of the "vous") in her classes. But many teachers, alas, do.

But we also, at least in my generation, consider the "Sir" as superfluous between friends.

Do I need to say more?

[No Dice]

Hello Sir Guy from Canada,

Did it all work out in the end ??

Luv ya dude,

Dave

[hubbabubba]

Hello Sir Guy from Canada,

Did it all work out in the end ??

Luv ya dude,

Dave

Well, NoDice, WYSHIWIG (What You See Here Is What I Got).

And here lies the problem. I know that many people are using CFS1 on W7, W8 and W8.1, even W10, thanks in no small part from the thanking notes you kindly pass along to me when they use the fix I provided.

But how well does CFS1 works on these OS will basically determine if I gear toward continuing building for the whole siming community or for the "pre-64 bit" gamers. As much as I want to build a large workspace for my rigs, priority will be given to the machines most frequently used on my 15 amps outlet.

So far, I'm "winging it", which is pretty fitting for a flight sim enthusiast like you and me...

Take care, Sir Dave from USA.

[aleatorylamp]

Hello, Dear Sirs!

I hope you have had good luck in eliminating the Windows10 CFS problems.

My question is related, in the sense that I am wondering how I could make the old 16-bit AF99 work on Windows10 64-bit.
Perhaps by using the OS Emmulator "Virtual Box 5.1", this could be done?

This way, instead of buying a 10-year-old WinXP laptop, which might die any day of spontaneous anihilation of any of its components, perhaps my money would be better spent were I to buy a new laptop, and with the emmulator installed, have a Windows XP or 98 partition, which would then allow AF99 to run.

How well this would work, is the question. I wonder if anyone has already tried this?

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[hubbabubba]

I was not even aware that AF99 was a 16 bit program, ouch!

I'm already missing my good old "A-10 Cuba" (my first combat flight sim, btw...). geee

As a preventive measure, I bought two XP machines and a XP OS to be installed in a machine "worthy" of it.

If we could "upgrade" old 16-32 bit programs to 64 bit......(i know, but one could dream, can't he?)

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Hubbabbuba and NoDice,

I conducted some experiments related to the subject in this thread, and thought of opening another thread for it, which will probably be unnecessary. Then I thought of mentioning it in another thread, but as it would be totally off-topic, the best will be to use this thread, so here goes!:

Just in case anyone could be interested, there is a rather convenient freeware programme called "VMware Workstation 12 Player" ("VM" for Virtual Machine), with which older operating systems can be installed in 64-bit Operating Systems, the main objective in this case being the use of the 16-bit programme AF99, to be able to make aircraft for CFS on modern computers with modern OS.

Using Windows 7 64-bit, I installed VMware and its tools. This was quite straight forward.

At first I tried out virtualizing Windows 98 to test the results with AF99, the Flight Simulator and Aircraft Animator. It seemed to go quite well in general, except for the lack of sound (which wasn´t really very worrying as we don´t need sound in AF99) and quite a haphazard USB mouse, which made AF99 difficult to use.

There seemed to be some kind of USB issue that also only allowed a very old, slow 64-Mb memory stick to carry over the aircraft from the Virtual Windows 98 SE to the "real" Windows-7 environment, although the simulator did work in Virtual Win-98, but display was not quite as good.

The plan was to build with AF99 and then carry over the aircraft to a normal CFS installation in the Windows-7 environment, but with Windows 98 the results were a bit limited.

After this, I decided to make a virtual installatioin of Windows XP SP2, and the results were perfect! The sound worked perfectly, the USB mouse was no longer erratic, and a faster and larger memory stick was allowed.
A shared folder can also be created, to be used by both the real and the virtual installation, which makes it easier to move aircraft around.

So, the present set-up now allows the user to move between Windows-7 64-bit and Virtual Windows XP. Aircraft can be built with AF99 in Windows XP and then either flown there or moved over to Windows-7.

CFS seems to manage very well in all its screens in Windows 7 64-bit. Then, Aircraft Animator, Panel Config Editor, and AirEd also work directly there. The only one which isn´t accepted by Win7-64bit is Texture Converter 1.0, but that isn´t really too inconvenient.

Anyway, I thought perhaps that this could be of interest to some people!
Cheers,
Aleatorylamp


P.S.
The programme I´d mentioned in my previous post, "Virtual Box 5.1", unfortunately didn´t work for me, most probably because my present system (a 4-year-old AMD QuadCore) is incompatible with it, and I didn´t try out an older version, because I had also found VMware Player, which worked right away.

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Hubbabubba,

I wasn´t lucky enough to have seen "A-10 Cuba". At that time I must have been on a Spectrum+ with its wire-frame simulators - the F16 one and a Tomahawk Helicopter one, and later on an Amiga 500 with Flight Simulator 2!

Well, now you mention it, come to think of it... is AF99 16 or 32bit? Maybe you got me there!

I´m not really sure myself now. I´d just assumed it was 16-bit as these programmes are rejected automatically by modern OS. I really don´t know enough about how software is made so as to check that out!

What I do know, is that AF99 will definitely not work under anything newer than Windows XP, so I was quite pleased to see that it worked in a virtualized Win-XP environment within a 64-bit OS. ...and perhaps, what will be more pleasing for some, is that CFS did very well under Win-7 64bit!

Incidentally, I have also secured a number of Windows-XP towers just in case, ranging from a Pentium III at 800 Mhz to two Pentium 4´s at 2400 and 2600 Mhz - but I only have one Pentium 4 (1.7 Mhz) laptop left - apart from the two old dual-core towers my daughters have stashed away in their cupboards.

But then... I wonder how far this could also be interpreted as a "Diogenes" syndrome...

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[aleatorylamp]

Hello again,

I had made the virtual WinXP installation for AF99 using FS98 as the reference simulator, because FS98 allows a minimum-size, scenery-free installation. CFS was only on the real Win-7 64bit installation, working fine.

Just to complete the test, I tried out installing CFS in the Virtual XP section, where FS98 was already working quite acceptably.

However, this time I got blacked out views of the scenery, both from inside and outside, just like was reported earlier in this thread. I am looking into it, why in Virtual Windows XP mode, FS98 has OK hardware accelleration but CFS gives black screens. I still have to test it without hardware accelleration.

Anyway, it is not really important, because the intention behind the Virtualization of Windows XP was for building with AF99 and then to transport the planes into the proper Win-7 CFS, which was completely successful.

Another interesting thing with the virtualization, is that only one of the four 2.7 Mhz CPU Cores is used, so this is fast enough for AF99, but possibly hampers CFS in virtual mode, specially as fas ar hardware accelleration is concerned. It is obviously much better with all four cores working in Win-7!

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[aleatorylamp]

Hello again,

Here´s the result on the last step of the virtualization test, although the aim was not to use CFS in a virtualized environment, just AF99:

The display drivers offered by VMware Workstation 12 Player for WinXP seem only to cope with FS98 hardware accelleration, not CFS. Hence, for a virtualized CFS to work correctly, this feature must be turned off. Of course, the scenery will not be so nicely smoothed out, but at least it´s visible!

On my tower, in WIN-7 64bit, CFS runs very nicely with hardware accelleration, and FS98 won´t run at all! So, my deduction is that the scenery black-out some people seem to get could depend on the graphics card and/or its drivers.

Well then, I hope this Aircraft Factory 99 plus Flight Simulator experiment in a VMware Player virtualization has been interesting and/or useful for some enthusiasts!

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[hubbabubba]

Lot to think about, alatorylamp, I will copy n' paste for further reading.

As for deciding if something is worthy or not of a new thread, go read my new one. BTW; this is in no way, shape or form, to be interpreted as a personal reproach, we're all guilty of doing it.

I don't know if AF99 works on 16-32 or 64 bit under W7 because I haven't installed it yet. As I said previously, my only concern right now is to keep my three W7 running smoothly and updated. Before installing the rest of my machines I will have to clear some space for the installation of the "still to be self-made" furniture that I intend to use. For now, three old canaries and an even older trunk are occupying the spot.

CFS1 - W7 64 bit: good news! It must be something specific to my own machines then.

Virtual Machines: that's the part that I want to ponder about. As you may, or may not, know, I started building models with AF99 (the Taifun was built that way) but eventually used it only for preliminary drawings (the Jeep) and could do pretty much without it later on. But many other programs, like Trevor de Stigter's assembler and SCASM, do concern me more. I will probably end up using both virtual and real machines.

I'm a "belt n' breeches" kind of guy...

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Hubbabubba,

Yes, Trevor de Stigter's assembler and SCASM is indeed a fantastic programme, a feat in itself! With it, thanks to you and Ivan, I can at least manage to correct virtual cabins! Every time I manage to do so, I get a tremendous sense of accomplishment! Perhaps I can slowly get into it a bit further to add extra parts, and mainly, to improve some bleedthrough issues impossible to avoid with AF99. Apparently it allows different display sequences to be implemented.

Anyway, any venture for an AF99 installation directly into Win7-64 won´t work, and a 64-bit version of the programme is demanded from the user! Then, how AF99 would behave under Win7-32 I can´t say, because I haven´t got a computer with that OS.

Incidentally, and strangely enough, the scenery-building programme Airport 2.60, installed successfully directly under Win7-64!
One sometimes has the impression that the computer is making fun of the user...

Anyway, I wish you success with your self-made custom furniture for your computers. I´m sure that will be quite a lot easier than some of the hardware/software issues that often have to be dealt with. Wood is less irreverent!

BTW: I was curious about your Taifun but didn´t find it - is it available anywhere?

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Hubbabubba, again,

This message is just to confirm that AF99 will indeed work directly on Win-7 32bit, as was to be expected.
I remembered my daughter´s Windows-7 32bit P-4 tower from her high-school computer-study times, and I was able to install CFS and AF99 on it. In principle, everything worked, but... of course (typical), I forgot your comments about avoiding default installations!
How awful! I´ve never seen such stupidity as far as file access rights are concerned!

Anyway... Cheers!
Aleatorylamp

[aleatorylamp]

Hello, Hubbabubba,
I just found the Taifun, in the most obvious place! - I´d only looked in the SOH library.
It looks very promising. Have to do the shopping now, so I will have to install it later when we get back.
Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[hubbabubba]

Sounds like Edgar Allan Poe's "The Letter" novel.

Most of my work can be found at SOH (but you know that now...) or at NoDice place The Freeflightsite .

On FlightSim, search with "Guy Gauvreau" or simply "Gauvreau", my real name. Incidentally, those made by "Andre Gauvreau" are from my younger brother!

Foraging Simviation, you may find a few of mine here and there.

Once I get to it, I will look into your stuff; hope you don't mind ----

[aleatorylamp]

Hello, Hubbabubba,

I haven ´t read Poe´s "The Letter", but the plot summary refers to substituting a real letter for a false one... so I guess I get it!

Anyway, the best solution as far as I can see for AF99 in new computers, is using it in a virtualized Win-XP on Win-7/64-bit, because Win7/32bits seems like some resentful programmer´s revenge, misdirected to ordinary people who use computers...

No hurry for any feedback on the old FS software in new hardware stuff - at any rate, the experiment occurred because your comments had triggered my curiosity, as to how CFS1 would work in more modern environments, and then I extended it a bit further to the building software I like using.

The reasoning behind that being, I may buy a new cheap AMD Quadcore laptop insted of a used old Dual Core one, so I HAD to find out more about this issue! I´ll see.

Incidentally, I found your description of the limited use of AF99 for the Taifun, and then mainly doing the rest with SCASM, rather intriguing.

I´ve installed your Taifun, and the model is remarkably clean and bleedthrough-free, I must say. Also, the FD allow nice and precise flying - very enjoyable indeed!

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[hubbabubba]

"The Purloined Letter" (I went to Wikipedia for the exact title) is about a letter that the police search in all places while it is simply in plain sight (as I remember it).

The Taifun Bf-108 was build with AF99, and is so far the only a/c I ever build for public release. Thank Ivan for the very few bleeds, especially for his "Conga".

The jeep is basically SCASMed from bumper to bumper, AF99 was only use as a CAD. I was working on a canvas top for the jeep when my W98SE machine went dead.

I miss that old geezer... blue screens and all!

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Hubbabubba,

OK, now it makes more sense, thanks! I find some of Edgar Alan Poe´s work excellent, especially a couple of his poems, even if emotionally devastating - as was his life...

On the Taifun you managed very neatly with all the moving parts too!

With old hardware it´s like with old cars: They last longer than the modern stuff, but get increasingly more difficult or expensive to maintain.

Unlike old cars, however, any second-hand laptop fast enough to be of any use nowadays is still surprisingly expensive. If a new mid-range AMD Quad-Core one goes for about 450 dollars, I wonder if an old Dual-Core one for 150 dollars is worthwhile... Anyway, we´ll see.

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Hubbabubba,

This thread started out with the topic of CFS1 running on 64 bit machines with 64 bit OS, and I´d commented on how AF99 can run under Windows 7 64bit with a WinXP virtualization.

Well, now I can expand this information related to CFS1 and AF99 under Windows 8.1 64bit:

I recently got a new AMD A10 QuadCore with 4Gb RAM that runs Windows 8.1, and set up my Aircraft Factory and CFS1 in there.

Interestingly enough, the graphics of this laptop render CFS1 useless, so it can´t run directly, and of course AF99 won´t run directly either, so I installed Virtual Machine Player and set up Windows XP 32 bit in it quite easily.

In this virtualized environment I installed AF99, Aircraft Animator, Texture Converter, etc., and all the tools work perfectly. Finally, I installed CFS1, and it works, but without the hardware accelleration. At least it´s enough to build and test aircraft.

So, the A10 Laptop has ample power to run everything simultaneously, virtualizing Windows XP within Windows 8.1, which is quite pleasing. I´ve heard that the slightly slower A8 also copes very well, but lower range QuadCores like the A4 and A6 do not have enough power to do the job.

Anyway, this finalizes my little contribution to this thread on CFS1 simming and building within 64bit environments.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Cheers,
Aleatorylamp