There are at least two programs that will do this for you
Though one is really a upgrade of the other.
1). CFGEDIT is freeware and will do this as long as you have no XML gauges in the panel. It will not support that
2).FSPANEL STUDIO is a upgrade of cfgedit but is pay ware. It will edit and make XML gauges it sells for around $20.00. I use it all the time to check panels with as it will spot a lot of problems in the panel.cfg file that might be missed.
DO not expect it to make a virtual cockpit with as that has to be done at the time of the planes design.

You should not need to upgrade to FSPanel Studio to add a new window.  You can do it with notepad if you have enough patience.

The way I learned to do it was to reverse engineer some panels.  Examine the code with CfgEdit.

John Consterdine's Baron panel http://www.simviation.com/fs2002panels22.htm has a nice little popup yoke.  If you examine how he did it you should be able to figure it out - maybe even add his nifty little yoke icon.

Yes, the sim interprets black as transparent.   I'm not big into bitmap  editors but  I suspect the black layer is something like 0,0,0.

To make it non-transparent you have to make the non-black background as close to black as you can  - depending on the  capabilities of your .bmp editor.  I use MS Paint - probably not the best one out there - to change the desired backgrounds to the darkest gray I can get.

For extra credit figure out the yoke icon.

I tried Pixia but it was overkill.  Gimp is probably overkill, too.  MSPaint and Irfanview work fine for my very limited editing work.

In the panel you downloaded and reverse engineered the icon is in JCYoke and the panel.cfg entry looks something like this:

gauge45=JCYoke!yoke,  932,97,26,26

and the yoke window is here:

[Window03]
file=58Yoke.bmp
file_1024=Yoke.bmp
size_mm=480
window_size_ratio=1.000 
position=0
visible=1
ident=31
window_size= 0.375, 0.375
window_pos= 0.160, 0.734

gauge00=YokeATC!Switch,  66,14,30,16
gauge01=Beech_Baron!Clock,  206,145,70,40
gauge02=YokeAP!Switch,  386,14,30,16
gauge03=APlight!light,  368,14,7,8

CfgEdit should be able to find a few more icons in simicons.cab and simicons1024.cab.  You can download a lot more icons in a package called cpt.icons.cab either here or from AVSim.

The tricky part is that the each icon is tied to an ident=x value.  I think there are some old discussions in the panel forum about that but it can be difficult to get these entries to match.

Some F1 ATR72-500 captains (AMEs, actually) have added the default GPS500 to the 2D panel as this plane comes with the HT1000 (no map display) . . . just edit the panel.cfg in notepad.

bill
GPS500added

Quote:

CfgEdit cannot read XML gauges. This is the only reason it's not fully-compatible with FS2002/4. You would either need its big payware brother FS Panel Studio or add XML gauges by manually editing Panel.cfg in Notepad. You can use conventional gauges to position them in CfgEdit then swap the appropriate gauge names.

Webb I'm sending the panel to you now.


Thank you for your in put, and help.

The preview looked pretty nice.  Let us know when you upload it.

I use FSPANEL STUDIO because it like cfgedit will spot problems in a panel like a missing gauge or misnumbered gauges or windows. They will renumber the gauges and windows. But if you have left out a gauge in a plane it can cause FS to crash when you try to display that panel. CFGEDIT and FSPANELSTUDIO will warn you that there is a missing gauge or a missing BMP file for a window. For me it just makes things easier I am a firm beleiver in the K.I.S.S method (keep it simple stupid) why complecate it if you do not need to.
But like I said cfedit and fspanelstudio were just two ways of making a new panel or window, not the only way. 8)