Zusi on Portuguese Training Simulator
Verfasst: 23.12.2009 20:31:46
Greetings!
In this Thread, I will post the development of a simulator equipment in Portugal
Some Background:
On the 15th June 1994 two simulator equipments were inaugurated in Oporto and Entroncamento. This was complelty new in Portugal at the time. Fernave - the company responsible for training of Railway drivers for the national rail operator CP - was assigned the mission of training engineers with this equipment.
The simulator, DX 404 developed by Belge company GDI Simulation (Giravions Dorand Industries) consisted on one PC 486 DX33 wityh win3.1 as main interface and Instructors post, one PC 386 DX33+ for control of Cabine, one Magnestoscope+VHS recorder linkd to four laserdisc readers and a full size cab recreatring a CP2600 locomotive (similar to SNCF BB17000).
This equipment served for a small number of years. As far as i was told, in 1998 one of them was already mal-functioning and as late as 2003 they were both out of order. On that same year, on a Presidencial visit to Entroncamento, the equipment was not functional for a demonstration.
After all these years, me and my CP Virtual team have challenged Fernave to let us have a try on a reabilitation of the equipment. From the old equipment, we intend to use just the cab, and interface it with a normal PC with a ReDAC from P.I. Engineering (the same guys that built Raildriver) using MSTS has a simulation platform. Programming for ReDAC will probably be done mostly in Visual Basic. It's my most fluent programming language.
At first we were only considering MSTS because most of our Portuguese add-ons are made for MSTS. But MSTS has all the I/O limitations we know, so we needed to consider a new platform. TrainZ was placed out because of software licencing for training purposes. Railsimulator was also not an option because for a few months we tried to convert all our add-ons for it and we found it to complicated.
So, we chose Zusi especially because of the I/O possibilities and all other features that, toghether with it's technical acuracy, make it a very serious simulation software. We just hope to overcame the language barrier.
Last week, Fernave sent word allowing us the oportunity for this and now we will start work!
Over the next few months I will place here photos and a description of the wok's progress.
In this Thread, I will post the development of a simulator equipment in Portugal
Some Background:
On the 15th June 1994 two simulator equipments were inaugurated in Oporto and Entroncamento. This was complelty new in Portugal at the time. Fernave - the company responsible for training of Railway drivers for the national rail operator CP - was assigned the mission of training engineers with this equipment.
The simulator, DX 404 developed by Belge company GDI Simulation (Giravions Dorand Industries) consisted on one PC 486 DX33 wityh win3.1 as main interface and Instructors post, one PC 386 DX33+ for control of Cabine, one Magnestoscope+VHS recorder linkd to four laserdisc readers and a full size cab recreatring a CP2600 locomotive (similar to SNCF BB17000).
This equipment served for a small number of years. As far as i was told, in 1998 one of them was already mal-functioning and as late as 2003 they were both out of order. On that same year, on a Presidencial visit to Entroncamento, the equipment was not functional for a demonstration.
After all these years, me and my CP Virtual team have challenged Fernave to let us have a try on a reabilitation of the equipment. From the old equipment, we intend to use just the cab, and interface it with a normal PC with a ReDAC from P.I. Engineering (the same guys that built Raildriver) using MSTS has a simulation platform. Programming for ReDAC will probably be done mostly in Visual Basic. It's my most fluent programming language.
At first we were only considering MSTS because most of our Portuguese add-ons are made for MSTS. But MSTS has all the I/O limitations we know, so we needed to consider a new platform. TrainZ was placed out because of software licencing for training purposes. Railsimulator was also not an option because for a few months we tried to convert all our add-ons for it and we found it to complicated.
So, we chose Zusi especially because of the I/O possibilities and all other features that, toghether with it's technical acuracy, make it a very serious simulation software. We just hope to overcame the language barrier.
Last week, Fernave sent word allowing us the oportunity for this and now we will start work!
Over the next few months I will place here photos and a description of the wok's progress.