darryl ramm's blog

After suggesting to other pilots on the ASH-26E owners forum that the Naviter SeeYou Mobile Simulator is not that useful I actually started to play with it more than I had done before and I have changed my opinion, it is pretty nice to play with and handy for testing out stuff. I’ve also hacked the simulator to run in a custom skin with an 800 x 480 pixel resolution, shown in the screen shot above (click on the image to see it full size). Below I’ll provide the files to do this.

[Note: I've updated this with a skin with the additional iPAQ PDA buttons for Calendar, Contacts, Mail and iTask. However  I am still having problems understanding the simulator behavior with these buttons. See notes below.]

While Naviter call it a simulator it is not a low level emulator/simulator. It is not emulating PDA hardware or the Windows Mobile operating system. Instead the simulator is a port to Windows of the SeeYou Mobile applications that normally runs on Windows Mobile (and soon Windows CE). I’m not sure what tools were used to help do this but it is impressive that Naviter have already done this.

By default the simulator has 230 x 320 pixel QVGA vertical PDA format like many current high-end  PDAs. However on a modern computer display this looks awfully small. Also my interest in SeeYou Mobile moving forward is really on the HP iPAQ 310 and similar Personal Navigation Assistants (PNAs) and those tend to be 800 x 480 pixel displays. I also wanted to create a large display on my computer so I could play with connecting this to the Silent Wings soaring simulator.

So I looked more closely at the simulator and realized it is easy to change this. The simulator configuration is controlled by the devWin.ini file, usually installed in \Program Files\Naviter\mSeeYouSim. This file has offsets for the SeeYou Mobile window within a .BMP bitmap file skin as well as specifications for the location of the simulated PDA buttons on the skin bitmap.

I created a new bitmap skin in Adobe Illustrator and tweaked the devWin.ini file to accommodate that skin. Apologies for the ugly beveled edges, but I’ll make them look better in future.

I know that PNAs like the iPAQ 310 do not have the standard iPAQ buttons but I still wanted them. I could get the left, right, up, down, enter, and power buttons appear to work perfectly. I have included the Calendar, Contacts, Mail and iTask buttons and they will work with a default behavior, however it appears that if you make any changes in Settings>Commands in the simulator then the Calendar, Contacts, Mail and iTask buttons stop working. The other buttons keep working. To get back the default function of these buttons power off the simulator, delete all the  XML tags in the BigScreen.XML file between <COMMAMND> and </COMMAND> (but leave the COMMAND tags, I dod not check what happens if you delete them), and restart the simulator. It could be that I’m misunderstanding something and I am hoping Naviter can point out what I’m doing wrong.

As with the default simulator the keys on the PC keyboard are also mapped to the buttons so the left, right, up and down PC cursor keys will do the same as clicking on the icons.

If you want to do this yourself here is all you need -

1. Install the SeeYou Mobile Simulator on your PC and test that it works, start the simulator by double clicking on the icon installed on your desktop or by double clicking on  DevWin.exe usually installed in \Program Files\Naviter\mSeeYouSim
2. Download bigscreen.zip. The bundle contains just three file.
   1. Copy the simulator skin file Frame.bmp from the zip package to the SeeYouMobile Simulator directory, normally \Program Files\Naviter\mSeeYouSim
   2. Move aside the current devWin.ini file by renaming it to anything else. Then copy the devWin.ini file from the zip package you downloaded to the SeeYouMobile Simulator directory, normally \Program Files\Naviter\mSeeYouSim
   3.  To make things easier to get started use my BigScreen.xml configuration file which has been set up for his higher screen resolution, download this and place in the user which will normally be in your My Documents\mSeeYou folder. When you start the simulator you will see a pop-up dialog box  asking which configuration file to use. Select BigScreen. If you have installed custom maps and airspace files you will need to modify the Settings to point to the right files once the simulator is running.
3. Start up the SeeYou Mobile simulator. If launching the simulator from withing the installation directory, you launch the DevWin.exe icon not the mSeeYou.exe icon. Alternately you can use the links the installer may have installed on your desktop.
4. In SeeYou Mobile in the simulator go to Settings>Files and make sure all the files point to the correct location. This would normally be files in the users My Documents\mSeeYou folder.
5. You should see a simulator window like the screenshot above, if you don’t let me know.

One claim I have seen is that the emulator could be used to run SeeYou Mobile on Windows XP or Vista based devices like the OQO 2+. The OQO 2+ has a 5″ diagonal 800 x 480 pixel display, optionally using OLED technology.  But the OQO 2+ is expensive, currently around $3,000 for the OLED version with accessories (while a HP iPAQ 310 can be found for a few hundred dollars). While it would be interesting to play with this the emulator on a Windows XP device like the OQO 2+ but the simulator appears to have too many UI bugs to be usable in actual flight. Some of the small problems I’ve seen are mentioned in the Naviter Dicussion Forum.

And all my playing is really done on my MacBook Pro, running Windows XP SP2 under VMware Fusion.