Select Page

Coming Soon ….. new Saitek FIP Interface

Marc’s Saitek FIP Look and Feel

This title needs a further explanation, right?
Who doesn’t know Marc Leydecker a.k.a. Belga12345? Marc is well known about his gorgeous and ultra-realistic Virginia, USA airports. But what you didn’t know is that Marc has many other skills, not all related to X-Plane, but once and a while, Marc pops up with new great and almost very interesting ideas.

Let me introduce you to his latest – Marc needed to take a break from scenery development – creation …. the all new, refreshing look and feel of Saitek FIP X-Plane interface with photo-realistic graphics. Oops, what’s all about this?

For those who aren’t familiar with Saitek FIP; a FIP (Flight Instrument Panel) is a colorful 3.5-inch LCD screen that seamlessly integrates into flight sim software. The FIP automatically updates and reacts to software events, giving you accurate, real-time access to important flight and aircraft information.

Saitek FIP (Flight Instrument Panel) Units

Perhaps this sounds familiar, perhaps you to have it somewhere laying and not using it. The same with Marc. For a long time, Marc had a Saitek FIP laying in his drawer. A cool gadget he thought, but it was never too impressed with the buggy interface and the cartoonish graphics. And that cartoonish look and feel of the FIP was for Marc a good reason to start all over again. Marc thought “would it be possible to replace those cartoonish images with realistic ones; would it be possible to rewrite the way they are presented without toughing the Saitek software?”

Marc continues” I never wrote an X-Plane plugin so it was a challenging task to say the least. So far, as of this writing January 2017, I managed to program 9 Saitek FIP instruments and a couple more will follow since the idea is unlimited. Little by little, I start to understand the relationship in-between the XML code, the DataRefs and DataCommands.”

The Old and New refreshing FIP Look

The following screenshots are some of the provided default Saitek FIP flight instrument images. Perhaps you liked the cartoonish look of the horizon, VOR, ADF, but Marc thought that it must be possible to change the look of these FIP’s.

Some of the cartoonish look of the original Saitek FIP software

The more I see it , the more I never understand that even Angelique van Campen (Marc personal writer) who had these FIP once for a Saitek review, liked those cartoonish look of the instruments. While Marc continues with his programming and other challenges he’s facing is making this available to everybody, he would like to share with you a couple of his exclusive Marc FIP design. That said, here some exclusive screenshots of what is finished so far and believe it or not, it’s fully operational and it looks gorgeous.

And yes, these screenshots are the way your Saitek FIP
will look like after the implementation of Marc’s rewrited coding.

And finally, Marc does the following request to every simmer out there … if you have an instrument on your wishlist, let me know and I’ll try to include it in the project. You can contact Angelique (on behalf of Marc) via Angelique@x-plained.com.

That’s it for now. More information follows soon.

With Greetings,
Marc Leydecker

1 Comment

  1. Rivegauche610

    Holy Christ in a sidecar. Spectacular. Bravo.

Leave a Reply to Rivegauche610 Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.