Hello All:

First of all, let me say that I have finally been able to initiate Rocrail's computer control with my CS2 (60213)... hoorahh

The good news... everything seems to be shunting along quite well.

After much frustration, (and you don't know the frustration here), my computer now talks to my CS2.

It will turn functions on and off and run most of the loks.

However... (there's always an "however")
In order for Marklin built locomotives to share the same addresses within the realms of 1-80 they use a hexadecimal system to assign individual addresses. Rocrail unlike Marklin, doesn't recognize hexadecimal addresses(a small fault in their software, and one which their programmers will,I hope, address some day in the future).

Therefore one must delve into Marklin's programming (a task in itself)and find the hexadecimal addresses so as be able to convert them to into their decimal equivalents in order for Rocrail's software to read it (with all of the advances in computers these days, you would think that there would be a program to do this within the software itself, but again, I digress).

Okay, having pulled up the hexadecimal addresses and having converted the numbers to decimal, I discovered they didn't work.

Go figure...

Long ago I discovered the axiom, "Cicero... there is only one way to Rome...step by step, and that there are no quick or easy fixes".

So now what? Well eventually I had to manually enter the numbers, one by one, from 1-35 to find out which numbers (addresses)controlled which locomotives. Okay so after a long night of trial and error I had most of my locomotives entered into Rocrails buffer, but as I said... most... of the locomotives were programmed. After entering all of the locomotives addresses one by one there were just a couple of little problems left.

Problem #1:I have an FX BR 18.4 S 3/6 (#37187/2)with an address of 18,
as well as a MFX BR 85 (29531/2) with address 18.

So I'm thinking that obviously I have to change one of these addresses so that Rocrail can identify them, but at this point the question is How

I have tried to change the FX BR18 's address to a higher number, but no joy here. I'm wondering if I can change the BR 85's address now, thinking that since it's and MFX locomotive, changing the address will be easier. However (again with the however) I would like to ask for some advice from this August Forum, which has always been a great resource of knowledge, before I attempt to re-program any further addresses.

Problem #2:one of my locomotives, a BR 218 made by ROCO is entered into my CS2 under the DCC settings
(which I find makes the lok run smoother) with an address of 3, but if I enter this locomotive into
Rocrail under these DCC settings the whole system somehow gets thrown out of whack,I lose certain
locomotives and the CS2 begins to re-initialize the MFX settings of most of my other locomotives.

I found this out the hard way and had to re-program all of the locomotives, one by one, again.

Therefore, in the words of that famous poet... HELP!!!!!!!

I humbly beseech any members who read this post for any advice they may have to offer.

Sincerely
James B. (the computer idiot)