ASA On Top 9?

In article ,
Ron Natalie wrote:

Peter Clark wrote:
]

According to ASA's site they now have the RealityXP GNS430 and a 182
with G1000 option in v9. Course, since Windows Vista breaks the
RealityXP gauges (at least it does with FS9 - Microsoft has completely
munged IPC for 16bit applications) this is another package which will
break if one upgrades Windows. It'll be interesting to see if they
manage to make their stuff work with Vista. Looks like a lot of
rewriting is coming.

Don't hold your breath. They never got Version 7 to work reliably
on the direct X (or anything else on a NT or later OS). Customer
support is non-existant. My full price purchase of OnTop and IPTrainer
was the biggest collosal waste of money I have ever spent in aviation.
(Don't even get me started on the crap PREPWARE they sold me at the
same time, at least that was only $75 not the close to $500 I blew
on the rest of their crap). ASA has never responded (other than
with lies) to my complaints. I wouldn't go near them. Perhaps the
later versions are better, but they never offered them to me (nor
a refund) to the fact that the stuff they sold me never had a prayer
of working (and they knew that at the time, but the stooges they
had manning the booth at Oshkosh were all too happy, to lie and
say it would work).

On Top7 always worked flawlessly for me, and it was a great help for me
while getting my instrument rating, but then what would I know...

Hamish

Ron has had spectacularly bad luck with ASA products. Apparently no one else
has.

Bob Gardner

"Hamish Reid" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Ron Natalie wrote:

Peter Clark wrote:
]

According to ASA's site they now have the RealityXP GNS430 and a 182
with G1000 option in v9. Course, since Windows Vista breaks the
RealityXP gauges (at least it does with FS9 - Microsoft has completely
munged IPC for 16bit applications) this is another package which will
break if one upgrades Windows. It'll be interesting to see if they
manage to make their stuff work with Vista. Looks like a lot of
rewriting is coming.

Don't hold your breath. They never got Version 7 to work reliably
on the direct X (or anything else on a NT or later OS). Customer
support is non-existant. My full price purchase of OnTop and IPTrainer
was the biggest collosal waste of money I have ever spent in aviation.
(Don't even get me started on the crap PREPWARE they sold me at the
same time, at least that was only $75 not the close to $500 I blew
on the rest of their crap). ASA has never responded (other than
with lies) to my complaints. I wouldn't go near them. Perhaps the
later versions are better, but they never offered them to me (nor
a refund) to the fact that the stuff they sold me never had a prayer
of working (and they knew that at the time, but the stooges they
had manning the booth at Oshkosh were all too happy, to lie and
say it would work).

On Top7 always worked flawlessly for me, and it was a great help for me
while getting my instrument rating, but then what would I know...

Hamish

Bob Gardner wrote:
Ron has had spectacularly bad luck with ASA products. Apparently no one else
has.

Bob Gardner

At the booth in Oshkosh I received a demo of On Top and purchased both
On Top and IP Trainer. I was told nothing special was required to run
these packages. I got home and found they didn't work. The one
useful information I ever got out of ASA Tech Support was:

Op Top and IP Trainer (of the version then current) did not support
Direct/X. This means there was no way the code would run on Windows
NT or later operating systems. Nearly all of my computers ran some
variant of these operating systems. This meant that I was out of
luck there. Margy did have a Windows 98 system on her desktop, so
I installed IP Trainer on that. It seemed to be extremely fragile
in it's operation which ASA support blamed on sound card
incompatibilities. I never got around to trying OnTop on the
Windows 98 system.

Further attempts to get any assistance out of ASA's software
department were futile. I was essentially, told sorry, you're
screwed. The product isn't advertised to work on the later
versions of windows. I was stuck with over $400 of useless
(to me at least software).

A year or so laster, ASA releases a patch to "provide" DirectX
support for the products. Of course, they don't bother to
actually tell me about this. I tried it on a couple of machines
but still never got it to work.

I'm not an idiot. I write high performance computer graphics
software for PC's for a living. Higher performance stuff than
what OnTop's demands are.

Despite numerous attempts to resolve this, nobody at ASA has bothered
to follow up other than Bob (who really is only related to the
company as they publish his books, which are quite good by the
way).

As for Prepware...the verseion I got at the same time as I purchased
the OnTop/IP Trainer worked as intended. It was just junk. The
image viewer was unusable. The images were scanned at a low res
and there was no way to zoom it. There was no way to measure
anything on the charts. As they didn't give you a copy of the
charts in any other form, it was kind of useless to study by.
Further annoyances were the fact that the entire help page for
the product was a single HTML file with links in it that didn't
go anywhere.

Compare that to Irwin Gleims stuff which has a very sophisticated
image viewer that allows you to zoom up and gives you enough tools
to actually measure things on the charts and answer the questions.

The general agreement (and Bob will admit to this) is that there
is no real tech support for the software at ASA. I'll continue
to point this out until ASA resolves the issue by either refunding
the money I wasted on this, or providing me with a version of the
software that actually runs on a modern machine (hopefully now
that the direct X issues have been fixed because nobody is
using Windows 98 or earlier seriously anymore).

=Ron

On Tue, 13 Feb 2007 15:13:19 -0500, Ron Natalie
wrote:

Bob Gardner wrote:
Ron has had spectacularly bad luck with ASA products. Apparently no one else
has.

Bob Gardner

At the booth in Oshkosh I received a demo of On Top and purchased both
On Top and IP Trainer. I was told nothing special was required to run
these packages. I got home and found they didn't work. The one
useful information I ever got out of ASA Tech Support was:

Op Top and IP Trainer (of the version then current) did not support
Direct/X. This means there was no way the code would run on Windows
NT or later operating systems. Nearly all of my computers ran some

Version 8 seems to run just fine on XP Pro. It was a bit picky about
calibrating in a specific order, but after that it worked just fine.

I'm not an idiot. I write high performance computer graphics
software for PC's for a living. Higher performance stuff than
what OnTop's demands are.

My biggest problem in cases like these is (or was before I retired) my
field is CS, my degree is in CS and I think like a programmer and they
are trying to talke to the average user which can leave us both
confused.
Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com

On Mon, 12 Feb 2007 20:43:56 -0800, Hamish Reid
wrote:

In article ,
Ron Natalie wrote:

Peter Clark wrote:
]

According to ASA's site they now have the RealityXP GNS430 and a 182
with G1000 option in v9. Course, since Windows Vista breaks the
RealityXP gauges (at least it does with FS9 - Microsoft has completely
munged IPC for 16bit applications) this is another package which will
break if one upgrades Windows. It'll be interesting to see if they
manage to make their stuff work with Vista. Looks like a lot of
rewriting is coming.

Don't hold your breath. They never got Version 7 to work reliably
on the direct X (or anything else on a NT or later OS). Customer
support is non-existant. My full price purchase of OnTop and IPTrainer

I had some minor problems, talked to a tech and had them fixed in
minutes. The guy stayed on the phone and talked me through the steps
even though I was familiar with the process.

Currently using OnTop 8

was the biggest collosal waste of money I have ever spent in aviation.
(Don't even get me started on the crap PREPWARE they sold me at the
same time, at least that was only $75 not the close to $500 I blew
on the rest of their crap). ASA has never responded (other than
with lies) to my complaints. I wouldn't go near them. Perhaps the
later versions are better, but they never offered them to me (nor
a refund) to the fact that the stuff they sold me never had a prayer
of working (and they knew that at the time, but the stooges they
had manning the booth at Oshkosh were all too happy, to lie and
say it would work).

On Top7 always worked flawlessly for me, and it was a great help for me
while getting my instrument rating, but then what would I know...

Hamish
Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com

Roger wrote:


I had some minor problems, talked to a tech and had them fixed in
minutes. The guy stayed on the phone and talked me through the steps
even though I was familiar with the process.

Currently using OnTop 8

This was an earlier version. I can't see throwing more good money
after bad. Of course if ASA offered an upgrade, I might change my
tune. But until then, my position is they let an either incompetent
or dishonest salesman sell me a package that corporately they knew
wasn't going to work, and offered no remedy to the fact that I blew
close to $500 on the pair of worthless packages.

Ron Natalie wrote:
tune. But until then, my position is they let an either incompetent
or dishonest salesman sell me a package that corporately they knew
wasn't going to work, and offered no remedy to the fact that I blew
close to $500 on the pair of worthless packages.


Sounds an awful lot like Windows ME...

--
Frank Stutzman
Bonanza N494B "Hula Girl"
Hood River, OR (soon to be Boise, ID)

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 15:05:39 +0000 (UTC), Frank Stutzman
wrote:

Ron Natalie wrote:
tune. But until then, my position is they let an either incompetent
or dishonest salesman sell me a package that corporately they knew
wasn't going to work, and offered no remedy to the fact that I blew
close to $500 on the pair of worthless packages.


Sounds an awful lot like Windows ME...

I hate to say this, but I had very few problems with ME. :-))
Besides, ME was a LOT cheaper than $500.
Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com