Fix Missing FSX FA-18 and EH101 HUD and Gauges and FSX Stuttering While Flying

Fix Missing FSX FA-18 and EH101 HUD and Gauges

After building a new computer and migrating all of the software from the old computer over to it, I discovered that when running FSX Acceleration and flying the F/A-18 fighter or the EH101 helicopter I no longer had a HUD or any of the glass panel gauges. I later noticed that I had also lost the HUD and glass panel gauges in other aircraft using the same gauges.

Base Computer is:

Intel DX58SO2 motherboard
Intel I7-980X CPU
3GB memory
4 1TB drives
ATI Radeon HD-5870 1GB video card
XP -SP3

After checking that the fa-18.dll and eh101.dll files were present in the FSX gauge subdirectory, I first tried a reinstall and used the 'repair' feature of both FSX and Acceleration to no avail - the problem remained.

I removed and reinstalled all versions of .net, no luck. I removed and reinstalled Simconnect, nada. I copied all of the files from my working backup system, including registry entries - the problem remained.

After really watching all of the messages during the reinstall of FSX Acceleration I noticed that parts of the installation were not being done. Digging further it seemed as though FSX was acting as if SP1 had not been installed but Acceleration was thinking it was.

I checked the Acceleration DVD and the SP1 file was there and should have been installed if it was missing from the FSX installation. The only thing I could conclude was that the SP1 install had been corrupted to the point that FSX thought is was not installed and Acceleration thought it was.

I finally resolved my problem by:

1 - Uninstalled FSX Acceleration

2 - Reinstalled FSX SP1 (can be downloaded from MS)

3 - Reinstalled FSX Acceleration

The HUD and glass panel gauges are now working correctly.

FSX Stuttering While Flying

I also had a problem with FSX 'stuttering' (short pauses) while flying. I added two sections to the FSX.CFG file.

The first section, [JOBSCHEDULER], is for my I7-980X cpu which causes FSX to leave three of the six processors free to work on processes other than rendering. I placed this one at the top of the FSX.CFG file.

This is a binary switch that uses a binary 'mask'. By that I mean you have to know the number of actual processors, not hyperthreaded processors, your cpu has and then set the mask to a value of one to three less. I found that three less worked best with my setup.

Binary is represented as zeros and one's. Each position, starting from the right to the left, is double the value of the prior position excepting the 0 to 1, so you would count 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 for a I7-980X which has 6 actual processors.

Entering a value of 7 would leave the last three positions at a zero telling FSX not to use those processors for rendering. If you have a quad processor you would assign a value of 3 and if you have a dual processor you would assign a value of 1.

The following table shows the binary representation of the number entered and the 'mask' for the relative number of processors enabled indicated by the number of 1's or disabled by the number of 0's.

000000 = 0
000001 = 1
000011 = 3
000111 = 7
001111 = 15
011111 = 31
111111 = 63

The second section, [BUFFERPOOLS], greatly sped up the loading and processing of FSX. I placed this one at the bottom of the FSX.CFG file but FSX moved it to just below the [GRAPHICS] section of the FSX.CFG file.

Please note that the 30000000 (30GB) is for a video card with 1GB of memory, if your card has less memory you will have to reduce the number to between 5000000 and 10000000 (5-10GB).

This is how the entries in my FSX.CFG file look with a I7-980X and a 1GB video card:

[JOBSCHEDULER]
AffinityMask=7

[BUFFERPOOLS]
Poolsize=30000000

This combination almost totally eliminated the 'stuttering' and made the loading of FSX and aircraft selection changes much much faster on my system. Note that I have most FSX options set to 'Ultra'.