Bachmann database?

[Spireblade]

Hi, I know it's a rival company but it would benefit me and no doubt many more of us who have a mixture of loco's, if there was a Bachmann database included in Railmaster. Are there any plans to include it in the next update or is it a non starter?

 

Cheers

[walkingthedog]

Quote from Railmaster Support although it was in 2014.

 

"RailMaster already makes it relatively straightforward to add locos from any manufacturer to the program and also to profile them for scale speed operation.

Hornby locos going back to 1975 have been added simply to make things easier for customers and you must bear in mind that in order to add locos we must have them in our possession.  This is not practical for other brands as they may not be in a position to provide all of their locos to us and it would be prohibitively expensive to purchase them all.

We have, as you will notice, added all the major loco decoders and accessory decoders and there are built in profiles for common Bachmann steam and diesel sound loco functions (read the RailMaster PDF guide), so whilst it would be the icing on the cake to have every loco from every manufacturer built in, RailMaster has gone to great lengths to ensure adding non-listed locos is a simple thing to do."

[Spireblade]

Fair enough. I can add them in easily enough but the pictures aren't always easy to get in there. I do have a slight problem when programming Bachmann locos into RM in that as soon asI set them going the immediately race off at full speed and the sliders go straight to the top. My Elite works normally with them so I'm a bit confused.

[Chrissaf]

I only have a total of 8 locos, six of them are Bachmann. I added my six Bachmann locos manually to my copy of RM (used with the Elite). I also imported 'externally sourced' images for my Bachmanns as well (I have not used any images from the Hornby database for Bachmann locos or any other part of the Hornby database either). I have never experienced any of the issues you have described. I can only suggest that it is the way in which you have configured and set up RM to work with them that might be different to my configuration methodology approach. One aspect that might explain my lack of configuration and operational difficulty compared to your experiences is that all 8 of my locos (both Bachmann & Hornby) have Loksound V4 sound decoders in them, with one exception. The one exception is that my Hornby 08 shunter has a Loksound V3.5 rather than a V4 decoder.

[Spireblade]

yes it's a strange one. I am using Loksound V4 chips in the Bachmanns. There is a bloke on Youtube called Brian Hughes that explains Railmaster stuff quite well and I got in touch with him about this issue. He connected to my RM via Teamviewer and noticed a small blue text under the cruising speed in Locomotive ID. Says Max 80. He had never come accross this issue before either. Apparently whatever is causing this to appear is connected to my problem. It seems like I will have to go the long way round rather than using the equivelant Hornby models in the database to set them up. Not really a problem, but I was just wondering if Hornby had any plans to have a Bachmann database included in RM any time soon, not realising the issues that Walking The Dog explained earlier.

 

Thanks anyway.  :-)

[96RAF]

.... About as much chance as Bachmann including all the Hornby locos in their Ralcontroller software Or pre-loading them into thier Dynamis controller.

[Chrissaf]

It seems like I will have to go the long way round rather than using the equivalent Hornby models in the database to set them up.

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If you have been trying to use near equivalent Hornby models from the Hornby database for your Bachmann locos, then I am not surprised that you have experienced control issues. You must manually add the Bachmann locos from a clean sheet. It really doesn't take long. Since 75% (6 out of 8) of my locos are Bachmann locos, I can now add a new Bachmann with sound loco to my roster in less than 15 minutes, including setting up (typing in) the 'sound function' list. Practice makes perfect as they say.

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The loco images I use (not from the Hornby database) I find using Google on the internet. More often than not, I end up cropping an image from the Hattons site or some other model retailers advertisement. Most screen capture utilities support cropping, so that you can select just the outline of the loco in a 'letterbox' format. Images in a 'letterbox' format import easily into RM. I just try to find images in a 'side on' view with (where possible) a blank white background. This is something that Hattons do rather well with their images.

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[Spireblade]

Yes, that's what I have been trying to do, without success. I have manually entered them in, as you say it dosen't take long. The only issue I have is the Loco ID numbers. My RM dosen't like me to use loco ID's that I have used previously and deleted. I have to use a brand new ID number for it to go smoothly.