Flight Sim Cockpit - Take 2

I just got back from visiting Washington DC last week, and we spent time at the Air and Space museum. While there, I had the chance to play around in a flight simulator (for $8) that tilts up and down and rolls 360', called SX-Interactive from Simworx. Looking online, they only run around $85k, new (grin). There is an even better one, called FS2000 from Maxflight that does both 360' pitch and roll. That is only $150k new (HA!). That was fun, and I got renewed interest in going back and trying to build my flight sim cockpit (sans-rotation and stuff for now...grin). Though, this motion cockpit video looks cool (and this one).




After searching for a little while, I turned up a bunch of YouTube videos showing multi-monitor flight sims and PC car driving games, mostly running Microsoft Flight Simulator X. A lot of them seem to use a couple products. First, the Matrox TripleHead2go, which is a product that takes 3 monitors with 1280x1024 native resolution (like a 19" LCD 4:3 display) and maps them all together to look to the video card like a 3840x1024 single display. Also, since most current generation gaming rigs can support 2 monitors/video card, and typically, you can run two video cards in a system, you can extend that to have up to 6 displays easily on one computer to show off wide view flight cockpit and dedicated map/instrument displays. So, I picked up 3 19" LCD normal 4:3 HannsG displays for $169 each to try with the Matrox TripleHead2go. We'll see if I get something better and use these for instrument/aux/map displays later. Also got a new nVidia 8800 GT PCI-X DX10 with 512MB GDDR3 video card and a new 3.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Wolfdale E8400 (45nm process).






Next, is getting all the input devices. I wanted the cool feature of the TrackIR 4 6 axis input that seems to be supported for looking around in FSX. I also wanted at least a good flight yoke and throttle mixture setup. I went with products from CH Products Flight controls. And I already had rudder controls from CH. That was good for commercial type flight, but I also wanted an updated USB input fighter stick and throttle control. Picked up one of each, also from CH Products Flight controls.




Hopefully everything gets here by the weekend for me to try to set up and play with it a little on Father's day, Sunday. Lots to learn and get worked out and figure out what works well and what is just gadetty and not great. I have high hopes for the TrackIR, but I think it is going to be weird to turn my head, but keep my vision focus on a static monitor. We'll see, and hopefully if I turn up the gain a little, it will not be too weird (slight turns of my head should move it quite a lot and not cause too much eye strain).

Next, I'm going to have to really go back and brush up on my private pilot ground school. Especially on the navigation part. There is a pretty good site, geared toward flight sim at Flight Sim Navigation. Also, my father-in-law is a long time private pilot, that maybe I can get interested in helping out with and playing around with flying different aircraft in a "sim" that he wouldn't normally be able to. I think it is really something that he would like.

Here are a couple links:

Home Built Cockpits
Mikes Flight Deck
Flight Sim Cost Proposal
FS2000 Commercial Model
Microsoft Flight Simulator X
CH Products Flight controls
TrackIR
Flight Sim Navigation