Confession: although I shifted a whole bunch of CS2's, until today I really had no chance to sit down and play with it. Your typical shoemaker without shoes scenario
Below are my trials and tribulations with CS2.
Well, when a customer sent back his CS2 after Mfx stopped working, poor old me has finally decided to take a plunge. Ouch![B)]
I had 60055 trafo with a power cord, which I wanted to just stick in the CS2, but no-o-o-o-o, M* spared no expense and came up with nice proprietary square power plug. So I had to unscrew wires from 60055
connector and screw in wires from CS2, no biggie, I guess.
A, what a lovely screen, except it's in bad need of calibration.
How do you select calibration option when your stylus registers about 5 centimeters from where you are pointing it, and then having to confirm it (and going through the same nightmare again of trying to hitting checkmark) when you finally manage to click in the right spot)? Why, by loudly and repeatedly cursing, of course, that's how!
So the version is 1.0.2, and Mfx does not work as stipulated, let's go to M* website and download the latest and the greatest version, shall we? O, better check the Forum for heads up, tips and suggestions. My, my, what a contentious place the forum has become! [xx(] A lot of nastiness flying around, but nothing concrete about how exactly to upgrade... Wait, version 1.0.7 kills boosters, let's stay away from it. I see something about using USB stick in order to upgrade. What the hell is USB stick? I know lipstick, I know dipstick, but USB stick?
- Honey (wife and webmaster of euromodeltrains site), you ever hear of UBS stick?
- Not UBS, USB stick, what's the matter with you, like you never used one?!
- A, no.
- Here, take it.
Lovely, it does look like a stick. Now what? O yes, M* web site.
Stay away from version 1.0.7 and don't pick a fight with Lutz, right!
www.maerklin.com->Products->Tools&Downloads... nothing, nothing at all about software updates!!! [xx(][xx(][xx(]
Alright,
www.maerklin.de->Produkte->Tools&Downloads(hey, I speak German!)->SoftwareUpdates(and with perfect Berlin pronounce!) and voila - software updates for the taking! Copy and paste instructions into translator, something about using both cs2update.tgz und s2update.md5 files. Now, *.tgz is a zip file, even old me knows this (as I am sure everybody else), click, download and save to USB stick.
Click on s2update.md5 and I read this:
bf3e47a26201b4d9d533fb472bca1d94 ./usb_small/cs2update.tgz
Clear enough! So I copy this line into Notepad and save it onto USB stick as s2update.md5 file. I read somewhere that Nev said you had to unzip cs2update.tgz prior to upgrade. So, Winzip, open, extract, boom! whole bunch of directories just appeared. Take the stick to CS2, select upgrade from USB stick and it actually worked! What will they come up with next - MS that can control turnouts so I don't have to do song & dance routine every time a starter set is sold and customers wonder how they can control turnouts digitally? You think?
O, and the Mfx issue? Gone, resolved, solved.
I tell you, if only everything else was as easy as upgrading CS2, world would have been much nicer place...

Mike