drivers

Saitek Instrument Panels and Prepar3D

itmustbesid Software , , , , ,

I tried out a Saitek Flight Instrument Panel (FIP) with Prepar3D 2.5 yesterday, and despite various claims that it should just work out of the box, it did not. It wasn’t hard to fix the problems, so I thought I’d post here for reference.

First, I downloaded the drivers from saitek.com, and installed those before plugging the panel in to any USB port. No problems there.

Then, plugged in the FIP; it came to life and showed a few ads for other Saitkek products. So far so good.

According to the documentation, all I had to do then was start up P3D, perhaps click “OK” to accept the driver, and the FIP would start showing some default instrument. However, nothing happened.

(1) Looking at P3D’s C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v2\exe.xml file, I can see the installation of the FIP driver added a section to launch SaiFlightSimX.exe on startup of the simulator:

<Launch.Addon>
  <Name>Saitek Panel(s) Plugin for FSX</Name>
  <Disabled>False</Disabled>
  <Path>C:\Program Files (x86)\Saitek\DirectOutput\SaiFlightSimX.exe</Path>
  <CommandLine>-run</CommandLine>
</Launch.Addon>

(2) I made sure that file existed, and it did. So, I tried to run SaiFlightSimX.exe manually by double-clicking it — it failed with some “side-by-side configuration” error. A ha! Luckily for us, the manifest file for SaiFlightSimX.exe is right there in the same folder, so I could see what dependencies it had; just open SaiFlightSimX.exe.manifest in any old text editor:

<dependentAssembly>
  <assemblyIdentity type='win32' name='Microsoft.FlightSimulator.SimConnect' version='10.0.61259.0' processorArchitecture='x86' publicKeyToken='67c7c14424d61b5b' />
</dependentAssembly>

Seems that SaiFlightSimX.exe depends on SimConnect version 10.0.61259.0. Looking at the “Add/Remove Programs” control panel showed that I had 10.0.60905.0 installed. So, I needed to find 10.0.61259.0 from somewhere…

(3) Luckily for us, Lockheed Martin includes all the flavors of SimConnect with P3D; they are all located under C:\Program Files (x86)\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v2\redist\Interface\<FSXVERSION>\retail\lib — the SimConnect.msi files are the installers I needed. After some web searches, I found that version 10.0.61259.0 corresponds to “FSX-SP2-XPACK”.

I installed SimConnect.msi using that package, and then checked the “Add/Remove Programs” control panel again to make sure I now have both 10.0.60905.0 and 10.0.61259.0 installed. Then, I tried to run SaiFlightSimX.exe manually again — this time there was no error, although nothing happened. But that’s OK, at least the .exe file starts without errors…

(4) Finally, I went back to P3D — bingo! This time, the FIP came to life showing an altimeter, and after that worked just perfectly.

Hopefully these instructions might be useful to someone else, although I’m sure the same or similar instructions are posted elsewhere.