HELP! No clue what I'm doing!

[matt_saunders]

Hello all,

I am new to this forum and am having some issues with Control Manager
(4.51) and getting it to make my TQ do what I want it to do. I am trying to set up a 4 engine jet map where the left lever is for spoilers, the next 4 are for throttles (also dont understand how to get it to recognize the thrust reverse beyond the detent), and the last lever is for flaps. For whatever reason, the quadrant will not show any movement in the throttles when i bring it up in FSX. Any ideas/help/how-to would be GREATLY appreciated!

Thank You,
Matt

[Bob Church]

Hi Matt,

It's a confusing thing at first, but there are a couple of ways to handle it. You can't really get analog reverse thrust without using FSUIPC, FS simply doesn't support it, so you need to do it like you would with the F1..F4 keys. If you've got FSUIPC (Registered) then you can get analog out of it. You can also modify the standard.xml file to give some assignments to the TQ, it won't normally do that for the "Control Manager Device" that the map creates and FSX sees when it's running. Prior to FSX, it didn't recognize them at all and just assigned it like a 4-axis stick.

Start the map before you start FSX, otherwise it will "Reset Defaults" on your FS Control Assignments when it sees the change from "CH Throttle Quadrant" to "CH Control Manager Device". It also has a tendency to default the Sensitivity on at least one of the axes to 0% in FSX. FSX still responds in the assignment screen, but the 0% setting prevents the axis from actually doing anything. Check all six Sensitivity and Null Zone settings in FSX, again make sure the map is running before you start it.

I don't know how far all that will get you and there are a lot of variables in the thing. I did a document that talked about setting it up in FS9 using just the Control Manager and character, it would probably be better to use buttons and use the separate throttle commands in FSX but you might have a look to get some background. It's on the "File Downloads" page of my website, a PDF zipped up in "CMNote02.zip". There's also document in a "sticky" in Peter Dowson's forum over on simFlight.com, and sometime back Michael posted a modified standard.xml file that set some reasonable defaults without a map running that you might look for.

In any case, check the assignments. Make sure all the sensitivities are fully to the right and all the null zones fully to the left for all 6 levers in FSX itself and it will probably start to respond a little more as you'd expect. The two documents will give you a lot of the background and save several initial exchanges, if they don't get you all the way there then come on back and I can help you work out the lumps. Peter Hayes is around here too, he may drop in and help out, too. Anyway, it's not really difficult, it's just confusing at first until you understand how FSX, the CM, maybe FSUIPC, and Windows itself need to play together.

Let me know how it goes and we can go from there!

Best regards,

- Bob

The StickWorks
http://www.stickworks.com