Same s***, different day.

[G3750]

I feel sorry for the guy. He has no idea what he's gotten into.

https://ogrforum.ogaugerr.com/topic/dcs ... 0135891370

It's still true. There are only 2 types of DCS users.

Those who have had problems.

And those who will.

And in less than a year, any pretense of support will up and blow away...

George

[chuck]

They forgot to tell/ask him if he was wearing the pointed aluminum hat?

[G3750]

They forgot to tell/ask him if he was wearing the pointed aluminum hat?

I remain to this day (15 years after my foray into tin-foil hat land) just amazed by what people are willing to tolerate.

George

[chuck]

It was bad the way PS-2/DCS was rolled out. They had set themselves up for failure. The terms of the PS-1 contract were expiring and the original batch of NiCads necessary to support were also at their end of useful life. He did not expect that everyone but Williams would jump on the license TMCC bandwagon. He pushed "features" that made no sense to anyone but himself which caused more issues with the technology. To be completely honest, TMCC was rushed when it was released but the missing stuff, a) wasn't critical, and b) almost no one read the owners manuals so they didn't even know about the missing stuff.

The sudden and half assed announcement in Vol 2 catalog made things worse. There was no path to upgrade older PS-1 locos unless you gutted them and replaced the PS-1 stuff with TMCC (this was the "official solution"). Then there was the two year delay on the actual control system that culminated in rushed PR trips with a laptop and a bunch of sandpaper to "clean the track" to demonstrate that DCS wasn't "vaporware". I'm surprised he didn't try to hire a voodoo priest to accompany him and "bless" the layout or drive out the daemons.

The guys doing the development work probably never even considered that this would be used on complex layouts with half ***'d wiring. I seriously doubt that they would even propose trying to USE the track as a signal propagation device (i.e. wires). They upped the baud rate to the limit which left almost no room for error detection/correction. He should have just licensed DCC.

BTW, I found PS-1 to be too clunky to deal with and only purchased engines with DCRU's or just rolling stock/accessories.

[G3750]

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The guys doing the development work probably never even considered that this would be used on complex layouts with half ***'d wiring. I seriously doubt that they would even propose trying to USE the track as a signal propagation device (i.e. wires). They upped the baud rate to the limit which left almost no room for error detection/correction. He should have just licensed DCC.
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Given what I've experienced and know about software development, the chaos might have been beyond belief. Nothing like an impossible deadline to meet with significant technical problems to overcome. Neither cheer-leading nor temper tantrums will fix a death-march type of project.

Don't ask me how I know.

George

[chuck]

Just license/use DCC. It would have been much less expensive, much less difficult, etc. Yes, your stuff will not be compatible with anyone else's but that was so low on the totem pole it shouldn't have mattered. I wonder if they even looked at it or tried it?

Lionel did look at DCC AND QSI's state system before going off to develop TMCC and their reasons were pretty sound given most of the loco's used AC motors and would require serious rewiring and these are large "toy" trains operating at non prototypical speeds on seriously shorter tracks which entail command latency issues, aka by the time the command is issued and interpreted you are already in serious trouble.

It looks like LionChief may be the ultimate winner in O gauge/scale as each succeeding release offers more features and greater compatibility with the older/existing systems.

[G3750]

Just license/use DCC. It would have been much less expensive, much less difficult, etc. Yes, your stuff will not be compatible with anyone else's but that was so low on the totem pole it shouldn't have mattered. I wonder if they even looked at it or tried it?

Lionel did look at DCC AND QSI's state system before going off to develop TMCC and their reasons were pretty sound given most of the loco's used AC motors and would require serious rewiring and these are large "toy" trains operating at non prototypical speeds on seriously shorter tracks which entail command latency issues, aka by the time the command is issued and interpreted you are already in serious trouble.

It looks like LionChief may be the ultimate winner in O gauge/scale as each succeeding release offers more features and greater compatibility with the older/existing systems.

I think DCC would have been a good choice. Honestly, if ego would have allowed it (huge "if" there), signing up to TMCC would have been MTH's smartest move. They were offered the option. And given how great their locomotives look, it's likely that would have been a formula for success. But that's not in their DNA.

I agree that LionChief will be the ultimate winner, although there needs to be a mechanism to control accessories, implement routes, and record/playback command sequences. Those are the chief advantages TMCC and Legacy have over LionChief.

George

[chuck]

I agree that LionChief will be the ultimate winner, although there needs to be a mechanism to control accessories, implement routes, and record/playback command sequences. Those are the chief advantages TMCC and Legacy have over LionChief.

All true. I don't know if they will be able to do direct LionChief or use some form of bridge communications to have TMCC?Legacy do this. LionChief was really meant for the occasional user with "play value" as the guiding principal. Layout control is a much more elaborate/serious endeavor usually reserved for the serious model railroader who is willing to put the time, effort, expertise (and money) to achieve it. I am actually blown away by the compatibility chart in the new catalog for LC Plus 2.0.

[jlong]

Someone forgot to tell him to get a 2 year tech school degree in digital electronics along with a library of publications on DCS application and trouble shooting. Once you get past all that, DCS becomes easy to use and troubleshoot.

[Neil]

I am convinced that some of MTH's market distress over the last two decades after almost eclipsing Lionel in sales has to do with word of mouth of PS2/DCS's quirks, problems and sheer failures. It's the unpredictability that most people find frustrating. It's all quite sad by now. The best thing to happen to command control in model railroading is Mike Wolf's retirement. Seriously. DCS and PS2/3 will eventually fade into the annals of history and honest people will admit to its failings. TMCC/Legacy is basically a reasonably robust system that has survived all manner of changes at Lionel. Neil Young, Lou Kovach, Jon Z. and others are no longer involved but the system continues. LionChief and its successors are likely to be inexpensive, reliable and a continued success. Now that Barry B is deceased and Mike Wolf about to depart the scene, DCS will go to its justly deserved grave as well is my guess.

[G3750]

I am convinced that some of MTH's market distress over the last two decades after almost eclipsing Lionel in sales has to do with word of mouth of PS2/DCS's quirks, problems and sheer failures. It's the unpredictability that most people find frustrating. It's all quite sad by now. The best thing to happen to command control in model railroading is Mike Wolf's retirement. Seriously. DCS and PS2/3 will eventually fade into the annals of history and honest people will admit to its failings. TMCC/Legacy is basically a reasonably robust system that has survived all manner of changes at Lionel. Neil Young, Lou Kovach, Jon Z. and others are no longer involved but the system continues. LionChief and its successors are likely to be inexpensive, reliable and a continued success. Now that Barry B is deceased and Mike Wolf about to depart the scene, DCS will go to its justly deserved grave as well is my guess.

It was the unpredictability that frustrated me. How do you build a layout with tunnels, hidden areas behind backdrops, and other difficult-to-access spots when you know the odds of DCS working are 50:50? Who does that? How can you do that?

I agree with you Neil. DCS will very shortly join the Edsel, the betamax, and EBCDIC on the scrapheap of history.

George

[Neil]

Ask yourself, are there any Lionel equivalents to Barry Broskowitz, Ernie Emrich, Marty Fitzhenry and David Klein (toytrains1) who were the apostles for DCS/PS2 in the first decade or two of the 21st century? No there aren't any such people. TMCC/Legacy really didn't need religious zealots or 200+ page books to make the godawful kludge that was DCS work.

And yet many people in the hobby, the media and on-line continued to argue that somehow this mess of a product was actually satisfactory, or even superior to what was available from Lionel. One still occasionally has people making clueless remarks that DCS controls Legacy but not vice versa so it's the superior system. A new level of ignorance and idiocy in some ways. DCS is a truly pathetic story in so many ways.

Now that Mike Wolf and his stupendous ego and need for domination is finally leaving the scene, perhaps some degree of common sense about command control in 3 rail trains can return. As a producer who made himself well off and pleased a lot of people he was a success. As a dominant figure in a declining industry he was a source of discord and, on balance, I think, an almost complete failure. He failed to create an iconic product or dominate as he so dearly wished. He did not meet his own personal goals, and didn't deserve to, frankly. Karma, as usual, is a dagger in the back.

Hopefully the hobbyists whose romance with DCS was without any reservations can find some happiness with other systems. Hopefully the dealers who hitched their wagon to MTH's future will find some other way of earning a living. I, for one, will not miss either MTH or Mike Wolf. Not that I don't own any MTH or acknowledge the positives that Mike Wolf contributed. But they made the hobby a nastier and more frustrating place than it had to be.

[chuck]

It was the unpredictability that frustrated me. How do you build a layout with tunnels, hidden areas behind backdrops, and other difficult-to-access spots when you know the odds of DCS working are 50:50? Who does that? How can you do that?

The tunnels per se were not an issue. This is all related to using the track as a primary signal carrying medium. It works well on a single loop (no matter how many twists and turns you put in it IF you balance the primary feeds via star wiring patterns where each side of the wires/track are pretty much all the same length. Bus wiring only works if the individual sides of the busses are the same length and the track feeds are equally balanced (and the bus doesn't connect back to itself (aka no loop). The other thing that works well is a single line of track, again with balanced feed lines. If you have turnouts, spurs or reversing loops or anything else "interesting" then you can expect signal propagation issues. I suspect that the communications issues are similar to the problems with SCSI bus or thin net ethernet (10 Base 2) where you have to terminate lines with specific resistors to prevent signal reflection/confusion. Basically this was a really, really, really bad idea.

As a side note, I think he would have done better to market his trains as a higher quality more detailed version of Williams and stayed out of the electronics business. They made beautifully detailed models and robustly made drive trains. Just put a DCRU in or allow users to put in DCC or stick with the QSI state machine concept. PS-1's issues were mainly a result of MW's mucking around with QSI's state machine and breaking more stuff than it fixed.

[ScaleCraft]

And he made all sorts of promises...and assertions. Like when he showed up locally at a hobby shop to show how HIS system could control TMCC or whatever Lionel product he was trying to control. After 45 minutes, folks just started leaving. He never did get it to work.
In his #1 gauge stuff, he promised several of us in the hobby business that you would be able to purchase locos without DCS. And, that the sound systems would be configured to operate also off open collector triggers or reed switches.

None of that happened.

[MartyE]

Ask yourself, are there any Lionel equivalents to Barry Broskowitz, Ernie Emrich, Marty Fitzhenry and David Klein (toytrains1) who were the apostles for DCS/PS2 in the first decade or two of the 21st century? No there aren't any such people. TMCC/Legacy really didn't need religious zealots or 200+ page books to make the godawful kluge that was DCS work.

I'm as probably as close as you can get as the organizer of the Legacy meetings at York. I had several people ask me if I'd write a book and my answer was always the same, "It wasn't needed". TMCC and Legacy was never that complicated IMO. It has it quirks but most of the meetings we were showing new things. Sure we answered questions but most were not that complicated and started to get repetitive.

I always enjoyed doing it and didn't mind the questions being the same sometimes because we always had some new folks that might have missed them. With the forums and Lionel doing their own videos, our meeting became pretty much a social event.

I did go to the DCS meeting a couple of times and enjoyed myself. I did like that MTH folks were a bit more involved in the event but we always had great support from Mike Reagan, JonZ, Rudy, Dean and Dave. I consider all of those folks friends.