I have the demo for Train Controller. That seems to have what you need.

Thanks.. It looks like I only need the Train Controller.. At the moment this product is priced much more attractively than the WinDigiPet and seems to have a similar capability.

Thanks Juan..

Time is always an issue. Miss 4, the finance controller and I are working on a mountain for the part of layout. (New Year's Day is a public holiday in Australia.)

I only need to acquire a s88 and we are ready for better automation..

As for retirement... A mortgage, a miss 4 and a few hobbies mean that I'll still have to work until I'm 80.. If I gave up work, I know I would simply have more time to spend more money..

Thanks
Adrian

Well... I have just spent the last hour getting this one going in demo mode... It talks to the IB easily enough, but it is not very responsive on the PC I am using.. For example, I was setting the a contact track number (ie position on the s88) and it took ages for the inspector panel to expose the address item for editing..

The train PC is a Pentium III 500Mhz 256K memory with Windows 98... I would have thought this to be fast enough.. There is also a huge delay between setting the lok speed and the lok actually moving (It's a 39604)... I also managed to confuse the train control at some stage and it forgot the direction that the train was travelling and I lost control of the speed..

I need to read the manual some more with this one, but I found it hard to use and not very intuitive.. DigiPet seems more intuitive, but I will persist with RR a bit more..

I'll let you know more later..

Adrian

It sure should be, I run the software on an old laptop PC with a 133 MHz Pentium processor, 40 MB memory and a 256 colors 800 x 600 pixels screen. (However I'm surprised you only have 256K memory in your machine... ) Mr. Freiwalds provides a simple formula for the processor required: He recommends 3 active trains per 100 MHz processor. An active train is a train that currently is executing a speed change, i.e. trains waiting in a yard or rolling at constant speed do not count here. Currenly beta testing the new version 5 of RR&Co, I can assure you that there are some nice new features. Management of reversing loops is simplified, and train tracking is so good - if when trains are controlled manually - that you never will consider to buy a transponding system. (Well, I guess I will have to eat that statement later...)

Peter

An undocumented recommendation from some software providers - incl. RR&Co - is to use 9600 baud maximum with IB. I have 32 contacts and 8-10 trains controlled by the software, and so far the 2400 baud provided by the Märklin interface is sufficient.

(Still Sunday in Sweden, and day or night doesn't really make a difference here during this season...)

Peter