Using Screensaver Images

For those of you who have not yet worked this out, the Saitek FIPs display images in rotation when your flight sim is not loaded. You can press a button on the FIP to stop this display, or you can replace the images with your own 320X240 pixel 24-bit Windows Bitmap (.bmp) files.

The driver installs five default images which are basically adverts for all of Saitek's other products; you can delete these if you get fed up of the free advertising all over your cockpit, and you can add as many images as you like to augment or replace these files and they will each be displayed in directory (alphabetical) order.

Contrary to popular belief, they do not need to be named "Fip1.bmp, Fip2.bmp,..."; they can be called anything you like, and can even be larger than 320x240 pixels (in which case they will be scaled to fit the screen), and seemingly can also be any colour depth -- the FIP seems less picky with these screensaver images than it is with images used for gauge creation.

These image files are located in (and if you've selected a custom install location obviously this path will be slightly different) C:\Program Files\Saitek\DirectOutput\. If you're on a 64-bit system (and it's likely that you are in this day and age) it's worth noting that the Saitek drivers will create two Saitek folders, one in C:\Program Files and another in C:\Program Files (x86) - for these images you want to use the one in C:\Program Files and not the one in C:\Program Files (x86).

Just drop your image files in this directory and watch them display. There is no need to restart anything, the panel will just load the images as soon as you've put them in the directory. If you delete an image while it's trying to display it, you simply get the filename at the top of your FIP display.

Unfortunately there is no way (that I have found at least) to stop the first "serial number" screen from appearing, and neither can you change the background image of this screen.

From what I see from reviews and comments from people having used these FIPs a lot longer than me, using a screensaver or (even better) pressing a button to blank the screen instead is a good idea to prevent "burn in", a condition where an image is on screen for so long that it "burns in" and leaves a ghostly apparition of that screen even when the display should be blank.