IFR flight in MSFS '98 questions

"Sydney Hoeltzli" wrote in message
...
1)
Are there any settings I'm missing which could "tweak" this?
Any advice about setting the yoke controls to minimize this?

Use the trim, if you aren't already. Also, I think you ought to be able to
adjust the control sensitivity somewhere in the game settings (sorry I'm not
more specific...'98 was a while ago ).

2)
We are missing many local airports from our database (St. Louis
area). The big Class D and B airports are there, but the smaller
GA airports aren't. Is there a freeware or shareware source for
smaller airports for FS '98

Don't know. FS2002 has all US airports though.

3)
I would like to look at my ground track and flight profile to
see how it compares to the track of the instrument approach.
I found the "flight analysis" "course tracking", which is a
start. But is there a way to scan back along the course?

Don't know exactly. The flight recorder in FS2000/2002 (again, can't recall
if it's in FS98) allows you to go forward and backward on the flight. I
think it might also show a route that was entered in the GPS, for comparison
to a specific ground track.

4) Slewing. Often where I want to be is a couple miles from a
ground-based navaid which I can specify easily as a lat-long.
But when I type "y" for slewing, the plane just spins around and
around. Doesn't seem to respond to keyboard controls specified
for slewing in different directions. Anyone else have this problem
and what's the cure?

I haven't seen this. Slewing works as advertised for me. Have you
double-checked your key assignments to make sure they didn't get munged
somehow?

Basically one thing all these questions might amount to is, should
we upgrade? We skipped FS 2000 because we heard it was such a
system hog. We have a pretty fast, large-memory system now, we
just haven't bothered to upgrade.

FS2000 *was* a huge system hog. FS2002 is much better.

We could upgrade to MSFS 2002 or 2004 but I'd hate to do it if it
would mean more airports and better scenery, but the same flight
model inaccuracies. The VSI (pitch excursion) aspect of the flight
modeling in particular is driving me fairly wild.

Not knowing exactly what problems you're having, I can't tell you whether
you'll see the same thing in FS2002/04. However, while the airplanes
certainly aren't exactly like the real thing, I have not noticed either of
the problems you've seen. What does the altimeter show you when the VSI is
acting up? Maybe the VSI is just inaccurately simulated (shouldn't be using
it as your primary reference anyway, due to the lag in the instrument).

The one caveat I can think of is that there are often hassles getting planes
made for older versions of MSFS to work with newer versions. You should
probably try to verify that you know of a working Cheetah/Tiger model before
you bother upgrading.

I guess all of the above isn't really that much help. Sorry I didn't have
better...

Pete