Possible incompatibility between HC AFC Bridge and Mac OSX (Big Sur) using XP12

[paul greasby 1]

Hi all

I recently upgraded to XP12 after giving it nearly 6 months to stabilise a little. I have the Honeycomb Bravo throttle, originally installed into XP11. I have had some success simply dragging plug-ins and scenery over (or creating an alias link). For a time, things seemed to work fine (using XP 12.03). I then couldn't get the XP updater to update to 12.04, because it seems to have issues if your installation is on an external disk (although the original demo downloaded and scenery installation via the updater works). I managed to get 12.04 in the end through a workaround.

 

The reason for this post is I've recently had significant stability problems with XP 12.04, and believe I've finally narrowed the culprit down to the AFC Bridge plug-in. Updating XP to 12.05 (beta) made it far worse. I was having XP 12 freeze after anything from 5 - 15 minutes, and it was happening so often it made it completely unusable. I stopped using .05 and tried .04 again. Although far less troublesome, it still ended up freezing at some point. I'd removed all BUT the HC AFC plug-in, because I thought this was the least likely to cause issues.

 

On removing the plug-in I ran 12.04 again and it seemed stable. So I tried on 12.05b (with all plug-ins now removed) and flew for several hours, without any issue. I went back to scenery regions and aircraft where it seemed to be most problematic for these test flights (although not sure any region / aircraft can be singled out).

 

It's too early to say if this apparent success is purely coincidental. I had been running quite long flights with all plug-ins installed and hadn't updated anything when these instabilities started happening, which is most odd. Usually it can be pin-pointed to something the user has done, like installing a new plug-in or update. It's something that appeared to happen without any apparent cause. In my case the update to XP12.05b was in a desperate attempt to find a more stable version (which it wasn't). The plug-ins I removed are SAM, the Better Pushback and AFC. Everything in the plug-ins folder is the defaults for XP12.

 

I'll followup up if I find the problem subsequently reoccurs (which I'm almost anticipating). But until then, if you're flying with something similar to my configuration and having these issues, try removal of the HC AFC plug-in and see if that helps. Of course doing so removes the panel lights which is a bit of a loss, plus any complex scripting (e.g. the autopilot knob control). But I can live without it if this is indeed ruining my flying experience.