Sean

yep sat here and watched them all sell out....... decided on ballast ploughs though, since not having them was putting me off starting a rake. was either that or cement bubbles and i dont really want to add a cement plant to my layout. the lights will be fun to play with

this restocking event has me filled with indecisiveness, everythings gonna be gone by the time my mind is made up! a few things that i had relinquished as "its gone never to be bought again" are now all in my face at once the the wallet is currently holding moths......

Will investigate during the week as I have to borrow a Windows laptop each time I wanna mess around. I reckon I'll be putting a better computer together from the scrap pile this week. Have a sound card with 8 outputs too so that should be interesting.

Is the sharing of esu files/flashing to multiple decoders to be frowned upon? Or is it upto the manufacturer to protect them? I see they can be locked to only work on a certain decoder.

My justification is that whilst the coaches fit my era they did not exist in this guise until 20 years later so I can be a bit "loose" about my choice of loco. It can be my own little tribute to the cset locos at Downpatrick pulling flying snail coaches

Came on to post that listing.. it really takes the p*ss Someone's still getting ripped off....

Whilst in reality I am flying though things in my head I'm slowly getting there The old pva trick worked as I was able to spray paint down the concrete with cheap nasty deals primer without melting the surface of the layout

Yea got my set secured as well, first time ever making a pre order of any kind Shamelessly, im gonna pull them with one of these things!

Are the sound decoders limited runs or are they in constant production? since after all the actual decoder itself is going to be in constant production.

these look great! last few announcments have been a little "meh" for me but only because the models didnt fit into the greater scheme of what i have been trying to do on my layout.... that being said these more than make up for that! and reassures me a bit of more liverys coming down the pipeline. hoping i can get a pre order in before they are all gone, on that note, maybe the unpaid pre order option could be resinstated on the condition that pre orders must pay a deposit? i would happily go for this and put down 25% if it meant the item was secured for a later date. (will email for a payment plan later) also noticing how this is called "set 1" when are ye announcing set 2?

That boards looks absolutely PERFECT for the job and you know its gonna be tiny when you see that micro usb connector. took apart the lynx pack and its essentially one of those although the pcb is a bit too big for a loco, its a good starting point for mounting into a building etc. that board is actually capable of 2x3 watt so i bet they could be tied together into a 6 watt package for mono setups like we have in our locos. not sure about FT just yet, I dont think its enabled by default but at the same time i really dont know what i should be listening for, i was trying to use isolation switch and reverser centre functions and they were not responding as expected, however they are disabled by default in the files anyway. nextgen does send throttle info and the default enabled functions just fine except now the loco responds to functions both on the decoder and in nextgen so its a little bit of a mess until i get in and map them out to different f numbers. I assume it should work but i dont really know how it should be behaving with it turned on so cant really say until i investigate further.

wasnt too fond of that corner and ive already got a fairly busy scene for buildings so i just spontaneously put this mound together tonight, will model a little field edge on the top of it and it should look decent. a rare appearance from an out of era spoil, totally acceptable whilst we are still under construction as how else would we build the model without modern day stock kinda mad to think this "corner" of the layout will be complete as soon as i get some ballast down and all the white surfaces covered. its my first "all irish" layout and definitely the most prototypical ive built so far. Im now most looking forward to still trying to decide between beet doubles and pallet cement as my last source of industry i have some ambitious plans going forward in terms of adding sound and lights, so maybe its good that im geting all the model work done now and I did always anticipate this to be a quick project.

ya your right, seems to be mention of an amp board too in the comments, another possibility would be a small battery powered bluetooth box, have an old lynx one here that im gonna pull apart for a look tonight , only downside is you would need to get at the charging port easily, so im thinking 141 would be a good contender since the cab comes off so easily. looks like bachmann have an implementation of it in their app too.

How old are the reach stackers used in this video? have been hesitant to buy some lately as they seem a bit too modern for my era.

Interesting. In theory once theres enough current then somthing like this could be dropped in and wired to the existing speakers set up as a set of headphones within windows https://gleanntronics.ie/en/products/bluetooth-audio-receiver-module-5v-for-diy-wireless-speaker-3099.html?gclid=Cj0KCQiAjc2QBhDgARIsAMc3SqT0NNcSf37RttamCCVKjc7j_NFhYLLoBSNlkVpMJw41PaBzEhZpgMMaArf_EALw_wcB

Does anybody know what voltage the aux pins on a 21 pin decoder are outputting at or if 5v is present anywhere on the decoder or loco pcb?

can only link you to some random german forum theres no website or anything for the project as such, but videos of it working on youtube... i think its safe but as always with random.exe files take care. my german is poor to nonexistent so you may find better insight there than I have ha. https://www.stummiforum.de/t200523f7-NextGen-the-Windows-loksound-simulator-free-download.html not inside or part of rocrail as such its more of like a "plugin" for z21 systems and it just so happens rocrail can emulate z21, the only downside im seeing so far is that it only supports esu 5 files, so the 071 and 201 downloads on esu's site are not working as they are esu 4 files. im hoping i can make a small alteration with the lokprogrammer and resave these so that they become esu 5 files. worst coming to worst i can live with american prime mover sounds and ill find an irish horn somewhere, i was always just gonna put a class 66 hornby chip into 201 anyway so i dont need exact accuracy to be satisfied suddenly a wheeltappers Baby GM file becomes an attractive proposition to purchase.

ah yes so the plot thickens even further. found out that rocrail supports both dcc++ and it can be configured to as a z21 base station in a sort of passthrough manner; im in luck! figured out that rocrail is not that bad and just needed another guide to get me started as the menus are a bit nuanced. (its definitely not as stable as jmri as it crashed a few times) once i had that working i added the z21 server and fired up my third party solution. this is where things get interesting because now my throttle app doesnt work anymore, but the official z21 one does, and it feels a good bit easier/more comfy to use, and the functions seem more straight forward. There is another application now also listening on the z21 server and this is where the sounds are being generated. So why have i gone to all this extra trouble you may ask? well mostly because i wanted the 8-567 and 12-645e and the jmri option had been only offering me 16 cylinder versions that left a lot to be desired in terms of detail. video-1645428542.mp4 we are now decoding .esu files! video-1645428617.mp4 to take things a step further even, the person developing this has begun mounting bluetooth speakers within locos. possibly a sign of where the tech might be going soon. whats interesting is i see scope for having the bluetooth speaker complimented by some sort of small sub woofer hidden somewhere near the baseboard. so something else in terms of sound also which could be possible using jmri, the audio backend really reminds me of the audio engine within a video game, i see there may be some scope to add 2 or 4 speakers into the corners of the layout which carry a panned soundscape of the surroundings on the baseboard, an example of this would be the sound of welding buzz coming from the car garage on my layout in the right location, there may be also some scope to trigger effects based on block occupancy, for example the layout has 3 points in a row at one stage. it would be cool to set these up as a block that triggers the sound of flange squeal in the location of the block in question and stops it once the train is off.. it could be done over multiple different blocks depending on where it would be desired. other effects could be triggered in such a manner too. one thing i will definitely be doing once the layout is all set back up is i will be setting up 130 with the push pull carriages as a shuttle that comes and goes in between manual freight workings.

thans for posting these, have decided to go down a bit of a different path for sound but these will sure come in handy as reference pieces

not only did he create the market, he created the "you cannot have it" factor for people getting into the hobby late, thats a huge marketing trick within itself, the best of 121 did not hang around for a long time either.

had been thinking this myself lately, not sure its gonna happen though given the Bachmann tooling situation and i feel like IRM might not want to make one for as long as murphy is still in business. might be more likely that we see an 071 reissue first. then again if a new 141 comes out this year with updated bogies and all the mod cons I will definitely eat my hat, got a mint 141 on here lately for what I would of considered to be a fair price but would not want to be paying much more for one.

yeah it was a runner as far as im aware.

backscene is up, underestimated how much id need but im half way there. good chance to try out another one from the range so i can match them up. definitely need some kinda building to disguise the corner. theres a decent amount of pva leftover so im going to paint it all over the polystyrene to seal it against solvent damage at any point.

and someone sold one for 35 squids on facebook yesterday!

video-1645342245.mp4 well holy moly! went deep down a rabbit hole with jmri tonight and this is the result, theres an EMD 645 sound also hard to show it off on such a short bit of track but its a start! sound is coming from a stage monitor with the bass cranked sitting just behind me. still feel like im only just barely scratching the surface with jmri, it has massive potential. ya theres weird conditionals tied up so that they were only working with the headlight and even then the front marker was tied up to the headlight with no apparent solution unless you reprogram. actually murph I did install rocrail tonight but i had no clue what was going on so i left it, I was looking for a way to hook up to multimaus etc using the Roco proprietary lan protocol so that the rocrail system would appear to other devices as if it was a z21 box. found a super interesting implementation of what i have in the video above but unfortunately it only works connected to a z21 station. it actually seems way better than the jmri implementation so if i could get the rocrail to be a z21 it would definitely prompt me to switch over to that platform in a heartbeat.