The Mr. RPM we had didn't have the skydrol nor the hydraulic motor. It used the bleed air off the turbo chargers for the pressurization- i am not sure if the bleed air ran the cabin supercharger or a different system.
I agree, a few falsehoods being talked about. The gear handle in the up position when parked and no hydraulic pressure from the engine driven pumps, does not retract the gear. But with the gear handle in the up position and as soon as you start the first engine, you should get a loud horn screaming at you for about 2 seconds, and will see the gear come up nicely as you will find your plane sitting on the belly of it within a few seconds later with the gear retracted- this is not a nice feeling at all!
The Mr. RPM we had was a pretty heavy aircraft with a nice interior, etc... but did not climb very good on takeoff and in-cruise shook alot more than any other commander i have flown. Dick Mccoon went up with me a long time ago and put the plane in alternating single engine chandelles to try and figure it out the shaking. His belief was that someone might have packed the wall of the fuselage with a ton of sound dampening material and didn't allow the tuning forks to do their work. Fortunately, or unfortunately- depends how you look at it, we never got to dig into the shaking problem as i put the plane into a field south of the runway trying to take off at 230 pounds over gross with ice contamination on the top of the wing. The landing/crash was too hard as it buckled the fuselage and one of the gears, etc...
It was a pretty airplane and if you got over the shaking, it performed decent at altitude in cruise, just glad i put it in a nice flat midwestern field, instead of a metro or mountainous area. It was a bad decision on my part to try and take off back then for sure and i got fined back then by the FAA too for the overgross takeoff, but, part of me still thinks i might have saved myself from a future mishap in poor terrain or saved the future buyer of that aircraft too. Ah, that was 27 years ago now, just wow has time flied.
I still love our 680FLP- IGSO machine, just took it up yesterday for just a short flight, it performs very good in our nice winters in the tundra here- summers, one has to really keep it lighter a bit for margins. Its a fun airplane to fly and very quiet as well- loves to pull 47 inches on takeoff as it sounds so cool. People on the group just love to see it takeoff as well, i get people always coming over later and taking about it. Ground heat on this machine is actually better than the 980 also, as that heater in the 680FLP in a cold soaked plane just fires up and can get you really nice and warm very quickly, whereas in the 980, you have to run up the condition levers if you want any decent heat out on the ground. I love them both! This is an old picture i might have posted already, but they are so good looking, sorry.