Ok, so I'm looking into building a pretty standard pit that would be a cross between a modern commercial jet cockpit and that of the rafale. The instruments would all be shown on three different screens, one for the attitude indicator, ASI and altitude (Similar to whats found in a 747), one for crew alert system (Showing aletrs, engine power and so on.. ) and one last screen for the weather radar/radar. I guess for this to work, I would have to make a custom firmware that would interpret the data from the flight simulator (probably fsx or x-plane) and display it on these three screens. The three screens appearance would therefore not change depending on the aircraft used. I guess that these three screens could all be powered by a slave PC, using several cheap graphics card in SLi, which would recieve data from the Master PC running the simulation through a simple client/server ethernet interface.
I'm still unsure of how i would proceed to rig up the switches and buttons, but I guess I could hook them up to the slave PC via usb... The goal is to have almost all usefull features such as lights de-icing, autopilot, gear, trim, flaps, spoilers as physical switches/buttons. Maybe I could otherwise simply use a PS/2 controller and rig the buttons up to that...
As for the flight controls, seeing as I'll be using a Suncom SFS throttle and Suncom talon stick (The goal of my project is too make this CHEAP but nice, I already have old screens and graphics cards and almost everything I'd need except for the switches and the panels I'd need) it would make sense to hook up them up to the slave PC as well....
I know I would probably be better off using some kind of system like EPIC, but I can't seem to find the price of such a system and one that has the capabilities that I would need for my instruments..
Thanks for your help!