How To...Install New Panels In FS2004

By Andrew Herd

f you have been around FlightSim.Com for any length of time, you will have heard people going on endlessly about installing new panels, and you may have wondered what on earth they were talking about. This article will make you a member of that group, because it will show you how to find a new panel for the default 747 and how to install it.

First of all, just to clear up some terminology. It used to beat me what people were talking about when they were raving on about how good some "panel" or other was. But by sticking around and asking stupid questions, I eventually figured out that what they were talking about were instrument panels and the mists cleared. As a matter of fact, the term is used to mean not only the instrument panel, but also 2D views within and outside the cockpit. Panel packages vary - many freeware ones have just one forward view, the main instrument panel itself, others come with subsidiary panels, overheads, pedestals, you name it. What you do not get as part of a panel package is any virtual cockpit views, because the virtual cockpit is part of the aircraft model itself.

But why install 2D panels at all if virtual cockpits are around? After all, you can pan and even work the instruments in FS2004 VCs? Well, sure, that's right, but 2D panels are fast, very flexible, and best of all, there are a lot of them around.

We are going to go a step further than we did last time, because we are going to look at the configuration files that are part of the guts of FS2004. FS uses config files to set up everything from the way the scenery looks to the way aircraft fly. If you know how to edit these files safely, then the program is defenseless before you. So back things up before you change them!

This tutorial relies on you having WinZip installed - check out the first article in the series to see where to get it. Yes, I know that Windows XP has its own zip reader, but WinZip is better if you handle a lot of archives.

For now, I want you to start up Windows Explorer and take a look at the folder structure of the default 747. Assuming you used the default setup for FS2004, the aircraft is installed in C:\Program files\Microsoft games\Flight Simulator 9\aircraft\b747_400. What a mouthful. You can go straight to it by left clicking on the plus sign next to C: - then the plus sign next to Program files - then the plus sign next to Microsoft games and so on until you finally click the plus sign next to "b747_400" and expand that folder. If you look, you will see several sub-folders including model, panel, sound and textures. The sub folder called model contains information about the way the aircraft appears in FS2004; while texture folders contain the graphics which 'skin' the plane and give it different liveries. The panel and sound sub folders are pretty self explanatory. Let's take a look in the panel sub folder by clicking on the word panel in the left hand pane of Windows explorer. You will see a number of files, one of which will be called panel, or panel.cfg, depending on which options you have turned on in Explorer.

What I would like you to do is to double-click on that file. You will get a dialog called 'Open with,' and the purpose of this dialog is to let you associate an application with a particular file type. In this case, we are going to associate Notepad with files which have names ending in .cfg. You will see why in a minute. Use the slider to scroll down the list in the bottom box until you see Notepad, then left click on the Notepad icon and click the OK button at the bottom of the 'Open with' dialog.

Some people will find that this dialog won't appear, by the way. This sometimes happens because of a Windoze bug, and the only way around it, short of finding out which app is associated with Notepad files and fixing it, is to open Notepad manually and do things the long way around. You can do this by clicking on the Start button, then clicking on "Run" and typing notepad in the dialog that appears. That gets Notepad up and running - but you will have to step through the folder structure using notepad to get to C:\Program files\Microsoft games\Flight Simulator 9\aircraft\b747_400 and you will also have to select "files of all types" on the "files of type" drop down that appear when you hit file\open on the Notepad menu.

Whichever method you end up using, the panel file should open in Notepad and it should have reams of text in it, which sets up the panel for the default 747. Shut down Notepad and swap to Windows Explorer, because what we are going to do is to rename that file to 'panel.cfg.old'. This lets us back the file up while leaving it in the panel folder - we are only installing the 747-200 panel as an example and you may want to change back to the default panel later.

Basically, what the panel.cfg file does is to point at one of the default instrument panels folders stored in FS2004. When you select the Boeing 747 aircraft in FS2004, it does a quick read of the panel.cfg file and loads whichever panel it is told to. In the default 747 setup, the panel.cfg says 'use the bitmaps in this folder and get the following gauges from the \gauges folder and stick 'em in the places I tell you' but you could set it up to load the Cessna 172 panel if you wanted - this is called making an "alias".

The point of all this fiddling about is to point up the fact that the modular nature of Flight Simulator makes it possible for an aircraft to load with just about any panel you want - so if it pleases you to fly a 747 with the default Cessna 182 panel, you can, just by altering the panel.cfg to look like this:

[fltsim]
alias=c182\panel

Which redirects FS2004 to the Cessna 182 panel folder, where it reads another panel.cfg file and does whatever that tell it to put on screen.

This sounds totally wacky, but there is method in Microsoft's madness - for once. While it is rare for aircraft files to get seriously big, panels can trespass well over the 10 Mb mark these days (don't laugh if you are reading this in 2010 and panels are a minimum of 1.4 Gb, remember I was writing this a long time ago). So if you are into 747s and you find one panel you really like or want to get familiar with, you can load up the panel once, install six different aircraft, point the alias in every aircraft's panel.cfg file at your favourite panel, and when you are flying no one will know you are cheating (-: Makes sense now, huh? Incidentally, you can do the same thing with sound, but that will be the subject of the next article in this series. What we are going to do right now is to find a new panel for our 747 and make FS2004 load it instead of the default one when we run the plane.

So rename the panel.cfg file you find in the \b747_400\panel folder to panel.cfg.old. That way, if you want to change back, all you have to do is delete the alias file we are going to make and rename panel.cfg.old back to panel.cfg and everything will be back the way it was.

If you aren't connected to the Internet already, fire up your connection and point your web browser at FlightSim.Com. I want you to log on, and then go to the 'search file libraries' page from the Main Menu, just like we did last time. Pull down the slider in the 'search only file section' drop down until you can select 'FS2002 panels' by left clicking it, then type '747' (without the quotes) in the 'search for text' box. Now left click the 'start search button.'

Why are we searching FS2002 panels and not FS2004 ones? Well, at the time I wrote this, there weren't any panels built specifically for FS2004, so I didn't have much choice in the matter, but if an FS2004 panel section exists when you come to do this, be my guest and use it. However, for the purposes of this tutorial, we are going to use an FS2002 panel, which seems to install pretty much OK.

You will get a list of panels to choose from, each with its own description and picture. Browse through the list using the right hand scroll bar and if necessary use the 'next 10 files' link down at the bottom of the web page.

We are after a particular file, so I want you to go back to the search page (use the back arrow, or the 'exit list files' link on the web page. Once you are at the search page again, make sure that the 'search for text' box is empty by deleting '747' and type 'b7474az2.zip' in the file name box. Check that 'FS2002 panels' is still selected and then click the 'start search' button.

You should get a one file search result, showing a 5.3 Mb panel for a 747-200. I want you to download this to the download folder you created in the last session, by clicking the download link above the file description, then clicking 'I accept, start download' on the download copyright page, and selecting your download folder as the destination. Once the download is complete, close your web browser and shut down your Internet link.

If you take a look in your download folder now, you should see the file in there. If you can't see b7474az2.zip there, you downloaded it to the wrong directory and will you need to use the finder to locate it.

Next I want you to go to your 'Junk' folder and delete everything in it (that's why we call it 'junk'). Then go back to b7474az2.zip and double click on the icon. WinZip should show the contents of the file. There should be many files, in there as shown in the illustration.

I have chosen this particular panel because it illustrates more or less everything you might have to do when installing a 2D panel - with the majority of packages there is usually less to do, so take comfort in the fact that this is as bad as it is likely to get.

A couple of things while I think of them. First, make sure you check the included list of files out carefully. Many panels include a utility called FSUIPC.dll, which works fine in FS2002, but doesn't work at all in FS2004 (it may actually crash the program) unless you have an updated, payware version. I haven't got any firm details about the payware FSUIPC yet, but I will add them in here as soon as I know. But for now, the message is - don't install panels which use FSUIPC.dll, unless you already have the payware version installed somewhere and even then, be careful you don't let the panel installation overwrite a more recent version of FSUIPC, so check out the file dates when you get the 'File overwrite?' dialog.

Second, you may find other dll files such as FSSound in the zip. It is more than possible that if these are installed, they will generate error messages early on in FS2004's load routine, but in the case of FSSound, you can answer yes to the 'Do you want to load this dll?' prompt. If you get tired of seeing the prompt, check out the FS2004 FAQ for instructions on how to get rid of the dialog.

Make sure you have 'use folder names' checked in WinZip or the files will decompress in an unholy mess which even I will not be able to sort out. Hit the 'extract' button and unzip everything into your Junk folder. If you are not certain how to do this, go back and work through the first tutorial.

Now go check out Junk. All the files should be there. Depending on how you have set up Windows Explorer they may appear in a different order to the illustration. The first thing to do in these circumstances is to RTFM (this being a family web site I can only reveal what this means by private email, as long as you can guarantee to me that you are over the age of 35. In general, this means being familiar with the early works of groups like Fleetwood Mac) by double clicking the file labelled ReadmeFirst742.txt. This panel was written by I. D'Attomo and not only is it a terrific piece of freeware, the readme actually tells you what you need to do to install it, but just for the purposes of this tutorial, we are going to ignore it and I am going to walk you through.

Close the readme file for now and stop talking in the back there, you are ruining my concentration.

Some panel files unzip to show folders, others contain folders and zips (that's right, you can put a zip inside a zip), but in either case, the principles are the same. Now and again, you discover zips within zips within zips within zips, which always makes me wonder if the developer enjoyed pass the parcel as a kid.

First step, I want you to open the zip called "Gauges747.zip". Double click on it to open (apologies again to everyone with single click set-ups, it's my age, you know). You should see something like the illustration. Use the scroll bar on the right just to show how many files are in there, if you are curious. What you are looking at are the files which create the gauges you see on the panel - if they aren't copied into the right folder in your FS2004 setup, your panel will have holes in it where the gauges should have been.

If you come across a panel where the gauges are in a folder rather than a zip, don't panic, just open the folder called "gauges" and follow the instructions below. If the gauges are just dumped in the junk folder with everything else, select all the files ending in .gau or .cab and then carry on as below.

Now we need to find the folder where FS2004's gauges live. Assuming you have a standard setup, this means left clicking the little plus sign next to C:, then using the scrollbar to find program files and clicking the plus sign next to that, then scrolling down again to find Microsoft Games and clicking the plus sign next to that, then clicking the plus sign next to Flight Simulator 9, and then left clicking on the folder you see called 'gauges'. Resist the urge to click the plus sign next to gauges, or it will become a habit.

Incidentally, I realise that I am being inconsistently referring to FS2004 all the time, when the folder is called Flight Simulator 9, but you try calling it FS9 out in the forums and see how many people understand what you are talking about.

Take a second to look at the left hand pane, which shows the FS2004 folder tree expanded, the gauges folder circled about halfway down. This is where FS2004 expects to find its gauges, when it loads a panel.

With WinZip showing the contents of the gauges zip, you can either choose "actions" then "select all" from the WinZip menu, then left click on one of the files in the right hand pane, hold the button down, and drag the files across to the left pane until the highlight is over the \Flight Simulator 9\gauges folder - and release the button... or you can use the 'Extract to' dialog that pops up when you hit the 'Extract' icon to navigate through the folder structure and find \Flight Simulator 9\gauges. The advantage of using this second method, as shown in the screen shot, is that WinZip keeps a recent extract folder list, which makes it easy to select frequently used folders.

If the gauges are in a folder, then the procedure is to use 'edit' on the Explorer menu, then 'select all', left click on one of the files in the right hand pane, hold the button down, and drag the files across to the left pane until the highlight is over the \Flight Simulator 9\gauges folder - and release the button.

In all probability, WinZip will quietly extract all the files and then go about its business, but you may see a message asking about a file overwrite, if you have installed any other panels besides the Microsoft default set. If you get asked this, you will have to weigh it up yourself. In general, I look at the dates and press no if the file I am overwriting is newer than the one in the downloaded panel.

But as I say, hopefully this won't happen to you. When WinZip is done all the extract dialogs will disappear and the green light will come on again at the bottom right of the WinZip window. You can close WinZip and breath again.

You may be wondering why we have installed the gauges first. Well, in my experience the most common problem people face when installing new panels is forgetting to put the gauges in the \Flight Simulator 9\Gauges directory, with the result that when the panel loads for the first time they are faced with a bitmap with a series of black holes where the instruments should be. If you install the gauges first you won't forget them.

Now the next step is to install the rest of the panel files. This is a little more complicated than installing the gauges as we are going to have to make a new folder to put them in, deep within the folder structure of FS2004 - but if you have already worked your way through the first article in this series, you should have done this once already. Just make sure you read this carefully, and keep double-checking.

Find your Flight Simulator 9 directory using Explorer (it should still be open from when you last used it). I want you to click on the plus sign next to the 'aircraft' subfolder in Flight Simulator 9 - OK, I've had it with saying 'click the plus sign,' from now on I'm going to say 'open' or 'expand,' right?

Within the aircraft folder you should find a folder called fsfsconv. Every version of Flight Simulator except FS2002 has an fsfsconv folder and it is where most of the panels lurk

What we need to do next is to create a folder inside of the Fsfsconv folder called 'panel.747.200' excluding the quotes of course (and from now on, I'm not going to remind you about that anymore, either!)

So let's go. With fsfsconv selected, click on 'file' in Windows Explorer, then highlight 'new' and finally, slide the pointer over to 'folder' and click on that just like you did to create the Convair aircraft folder in the previous article.

A new folder will duly appear and I want you to rename it 'panel.747.200' as shown in the illustration.

The next thing we need to do is to go back to the Junk folder, and select the panel zip. I want you to select all the contents of this folder and copy it into C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator 9\aircraft\fsfsconv\panel.747.200.

I can hear some sharp intakes of breath out there, so I'd better do some explaining. Flight Simulator 9 is simply the full 'path' name of the folder you just created, the one called panel.747.200.

If you imagine that every single one of those backslashes represents a plus sign you have to click on in Windows Explorer, you can see that this is just a shorthand way of referring you to a particular folder, without saying 'click the little plus sign' six times.

So using whichever method you favor for Winzip extracts, extract all the files in panel.zip to the \fsfsconv\panel.747.200 folder. Incidentally, the screen shot here shows exactly what a panel looks like if you forget to copy the gauges across. Once seen, never forgotten!

If you are installing a different panel and the gauges are in a folder, use 'edit' and then 'select all' and then left click and hold and drag 'em across just the way you did before. We'll go through it one more time in detail, expand by left clicking the little plus sign next to C:, then using the scrollbar to find program files expand that, then scrolling down again to find Microsoft Games and expand that, then expand Flight Simulator 9, then expand 'aircraft', then expand 'fsfsconv' and finally, left click on the folder called 'panel.747.200' so that it is highlighted and then do the select all the files thing and drag 'em out of hiding in the junk folder and into panel.747.200. You will almost certainly find that you need to use the horizontal slider to see what you are doing at some stage, because FS2004 has a deeply nested folder structure.

There are still a couple more things we have to do, one of which is to extract the sound zip. The destination folder is \Flight Simulator 9\Sound and not the aircraft sound folder. This is a potential source of confusion and one very good reason why it always pays to check out readmes before doing anything with downloaded files.

The reason for not putting these particular files in the sound folder is that in general, the sound files that come with panels relate to sounds made by the panel and heard in the cockpit, rather than sounds made by the plane. So in the absence of instructions to the contrary, you can assume that any sound files included in a panel distribution should be placed in the main Flight Simulator sound folder and not the aircraft folder.

One final bit of file moving you have to do is to extract FSSound.dll from the zip and put it in the \Flight Simulator 9\Modules folder like this.

FSSound allows the panel to do some clever stuff and is a neat little freeware utility. At the time of writing there isn't a native FS2004 version, so it may generate a dialog when Flight Simulator boots, as I mentioned above.

We are very nearly there, except that our Boeing 747 is still blissfully unaware that we are going to all this trouble on its behalf. We need to edit its panel.cfg file to let it know about the new panel it is going to use.

So open Notepad on a clean page and type:

[fltsim]
alias=\fsfsconv\panel.747.200

Make sure that it looks exactly the way it does in the screen shot and also that you definitely renamed the original 747_400 panel.cfg file to panel.cfg.old.

Then save the notepad page as a file called 'panel.cfg' in the default Boeing 747 panel folder. It is essential that you get this in the right folder, or nothing will happen - if you get a file overwrite message you have either selected the wrong folder or you failed to rename the original panel.cfg file.

If you have check everything is OK and have the text done, click file on the Notepad menu, then save, then navigate all the way through the folders until you reach \Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator 9\aircraft\b747_200\panel and then click the down chevron next to 'file save as type' and select 'all files'. Then enter 'panel.cfg' (no quotes) in the file name box and hit save.

Now double check. In the \Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator 9\aircraft\b747_200\panel folder, you should have several files including one you renamed earlier to panel.cfg.old and the one you have just created, called panel.cfg. The reason I keep emphasising this is that panel aliasing like this is incredibly powerful and recreating the original 747 panel.cfg is not an easy task, hence our renaming of it. But should you lose it, there is a replacement one here. See how we look after you.

We should have the show on the road now, so start up FS2004, select the Boeing 747 and… was it worth it, or what? Well if you don't like the result, there are plenty of other panels out there. Be my guest and try 'em all!

If you get tired of the 200 series panel, all you have to do is go back to the \Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator 9\aircraft\b747_200\panel folder, rename the panel.cfg file to panel.cfg.bak, rename the panel.cfg.old file to panel.cfg and you will get the default panel back - just make sure that you don't have the 747 loaded when you do this, as FS2004 may crash.