Thanks for the tip Corrado. It did help with establishing the gauge visually. But as you found in your experiment, the finished product is placed backwards and upside down when using the new section. I didn't get it to work at first when assigning everything to Vcockpit60 as the location. So i inserted the data to the empty Vcockpit01 section, overwriting $mc202_01 and that gave me the visual gauge. I'm guessing that $mc202_01 may have been the original location for the coding of the XML attitude gauge.
Anyway, the effort of reworking this complex VC has many twists and turns. Below are pics of my results so far. I'm dressing both the new macchi202_cfs2.MDL and the older M202T356.MDL. Since they obviously have the same origin, it stands to reason that they should support the same VC structure in the panel.cfg. The first pic is the 2D panel for both. Its a little more fancy than the actual panel of the authentic aircraft, but that's how i roll sometimes. The second pic i what i've accomplished with the new macchi202_cfs2.MDL. Third is the older M202T356.MDL, which suffers with the backwards tailwheel from the CFS2 conversion process.
Both models are using the same exact panel.cfg - sharing the same 2D and VC sections. Note that the older model is receptive to all of my customizations which show up fine, whereas the newer model is still missing some key gauges and falling back on original static bmp images to fill in blank spots. I know at first glance it doesn't appear so, but at least five dynamic gauges are missing from the new model's pic. If i can't find the handle, maybe at some point i'll scasm the old model and try to fix that wheel.
The fourth pic is the dp box layout i put borrowed and tweaked from the 1% MC205. I also put in the break points so the model has tested breaking parts in combat.