G3

oh the scissors, its a fine example. the old spread the blades apart, i know it well, hehe :) mr wolf, i agree the sticks you showed would be fine if not after a hotas setup. and for a hotas one of these would be great with a home made throttle. i will consider and look for the gold version, as even without worrying about a throttle i am unhappy with my current stick. ( i just cannot use the on stick throttles ) what would be nice is for a company to manufacture a base of solid construction and with a reliable accurate movement, and then make the actual stick or grip attachment in a variety of configurations, such as f-15, f-16, heli etc, and in left and right handed. but hey, i'm just an ideas man...

snomhf, you the man. what a great attitide you have to all this, thankyou. i loved the mit story, all the power to you. an inspiration to all. any lefty knows the pain of living in a world dominated by the right. even my bloody mouse is wrong :) mikoriad, i understand you are just having a laugh along with us/at us, point is anything can appear trivial when it doesnt effect you personally, too me this is an issue that has so far plagued me for my entire life, and will no doubt continue to do so unless i do something about it and thats what i am hoping to achieve here, so far so good, some great ideas coming thru. funny you mentioned the gear shifting thing as i originally learnt to drive left hand drive, so the shift was on the right, now i drive right hand drive with the shift on the left. therefore reinforcing comments like "get used to it" and also it kind of contradicts some of what i have said but make no mistake, not entirely. when i learnt to drive i had no previous manual transmission experience so i didn't know any different. i soon adapted to the right hand drive shifting and it all seems very normal these days. unfortunately i have just spent far too much time flying the left handed way and don't think i could ever seriously change back, its locked in and the key has been thrown away. i thank everyone for a great discussion so far and look forward to reading and contributing more on the subject, thankyou ggg87.

Jester, i hear you loud and clear, forgive me but i took the first part of your post as serious, hehe. as for the average price increase you mentioned, i for one would have no issue paying $100 extra on top of the less intelligent version for an off the shelf left handed version. maybe a partition to ch or cougar might do the job, i don't know. i would happily pursue this option if we think it will do any good. i guess it all stemmed from the first day i tried to cut paper with a standard pair of scissors.

please refer to original post, and from a fellow lefty. come on, we are supposed to be the more intelligent ones :) i have tried right handed but it just doesnt fell right, i feel clumsy and inaccurate, especially if i am flying thru a valley or mountain range not to mention a dogfight or missle avoidance. now come to think of it perhaps i am lacking the intelligence to comprehend controlling the planes the right handed way, i do appreciate what you are saying but the thread is intended to provide options and not to condem our superiority :), hehe.

thanks mark, thanks for the insite. you may have me down at the nursery yet, i know the green stuff you mean, solid yet easy to work with. cheers.

hey there snomhf, could you please go into some more detail as to how you achieved this result, they look amazing. eg: did you make a reverse mould or something like that? i for one am very interested to learn more on how you achieved this end result, brilliant in my eyes. it would appear you left the sticks main buttons/hats intact on the circuit board (i am assuming they are mounted directly to a printed circuit board?) you have done a magnificent job and i believe it was your controls that inspired this thread in the first place. ideas like this is what its all about, keep em comin lefties.............

yes Ned had the idea, and believe me i would like to start my own LH shop, even if it just made hotas's :) lets keep this semi serious please.... (i fear just by saying that i will regret it). off topic: below snomhf tells about his controls, i was just typing that i had seen somewhere a guy made his own but sometimes the forums refuse to accept my updated posts and revert me back to the login screen?

first and foremost, this is not a thread for right handed players to tell us to "just get used to it" and so on, so please resist. we know its not real and not right (pardon the pun), and its not a real plane etc etc, so that crap is not required here. i have attempted to come to grips (more puns) with the way of the right hander but i am afraid i am too far gone, the dark side of the lefthander is strong in me. as a left hander i am interested in hearing from fellow left handed pilots and what solutions if any are available for us lefties. at present i am using an attack 3 from logitech, this stick attracted me as its obviously ambidextrous, initially i was happy with the stick but it has gradually become spikey and has a tendancy to randomly roll right, and centre slop is also a disappointment. seems to require constant calibration, in the end the nicest thing i can say is it looks nice. in the past i was using an old gameport ms sidewinder pro with twistgrip option for rudder, this stick was accurate and reliable, but as you can imagine the buttons etc are placed for right handed operation. the problem just snowballs when it comes to hotas, who is going to make a left handed hotas, the market is already quite niche, and lefties are a niche within a niche. for throttle i have been using a small program called ppjoy that allows you to map the throttle axis to the vertical mouse movement, not bad but it doesn't quite give that feeling of a hotas throttle as in the repeating definate position of afterburner etc. for a while now i have been operating the rudder thru my racing wheel pedals, works very well as you would expect, no toe brakes but no big deal there. and as an experiment i disabled the ffb on the steering wheel and moved it to the right of my desk and am now using it as a throttle. this may sound strange at first but works quite well considering, at least the movement is consistant compared to the mouse throttle. other solutions i have seen include the cyborg series with swap-able grip supports, the reports i read on these sticks range from great to crap, never having had one myself i would like to hear from owners of these sticks, along with any other solutions you have come up with to enhance you lefthanded flying experience, thankyou.

hey Groove, any luck Groove, how did you go with the vertical screen stack?

is the 2gig ram upgrade worth it in an agp system. sounds like good advise from experience. i must have missed something here, the evil one is leaving? a question for cobra360 ????? or others with similar pc specs.... due to the fact my current system is similar in spec to yours, you mentioned the upgrade to 2 gig was worth it, can you expand on how it improved things for you as i am deciding wether or not to bother going to 2gig or waiting to build a new pci-e setup. all @ stock settings: a64 3400 754 1gig corsair xlpro 2.2.2.5 6800 ultra please advise.

joe, look foward to the review, best of luck and thanks for giving this product a run thru with lockon. groove, these may seem obvious but its offen something simple. if i recall we were having trouble with this before, never solved it hey. when attenpting the 0.625 are u including the 0 bfore the decimal point ? are you setting the fullscreen to 0 in the config or in the game options? what vid card and drivers, do you already have it spanned vertically in the driver? is you ctd as you start the game or or as you try to fly? i know it works, i had troubles with the game crashing to desktop and not even getting the yellow ended loading egg timer but i am fairly sure this was resolved thru setting the fullscreen option to 0 in the config. once again if you have no joy i will be happy to set it up myself again and give a step by step in need be. i want to help you get it going as much as you do, no use having that other monitor sitting around gathering dust...

at work i failed to see what you were saying as the images in the posts do not appear, now i see exactly what you mean, looks like a sweet setup. i seem to be turning a little green with envy :)

groove, from memory, i did nothing more than use the full verticle resolution and then and devide the horizontal by 2 or 3 screens worth. so if the monitor by default is 1280x1024 i used the 1024 vertical, and then just divided the horizontal by a factor of 2 something like 640x1024 aspect 0.625, yes that rings a bell. i think its also imperative to set the fullscreen option to = 0 if it doesnt work for you let me know and i will set it up again myself. you can also do this with 2 monitors in vertical span mode, its all in the aspect ratio, but i know you know that :) joe, i seem to recall to get the disired result in the f-15 i had to basically zoom fully out and this would provide the normal looking size view, i never did get any futher on the matter, sorry i cannot advise you more on this issue. i am glad to hear you understand my previous points, and i will gladly have you talk my head off about it anytime, i have one head ready to be talked off :) as soon as the nda is over. and i am open to some in house testing here if required :P, i wish, hehe. overcoming the gap issue of the bezels and making the view appear to flow will be a great feature if it can be implemented, did i mention i am looking forward to this product :)

in order to get it working in english....no russian reading here unfortunately. could the details be changed in the config/ localizer or wherever, or is this locked for the region the cd was burned for? just a thought?

agreed about the learning curve bit, i too enjoyed the leap from total novice to learner to then being able to use the radar, mfd, pacs, tews etc. at first lucky to live thru a mission, and then not being happy unless i returned with mission accomplished and landing successfully :) just jumping into something and blasting away is precisely the shallow desire of the average console gamer, not us though, we love hours of struggle with both software and hardware, learning the game and the tinkering with settings to achieve the best possible performance, helping and learning from one another, its just a completely different scene. good luck on their conversion, perhaps an accelerated learning curve might help, rather than force them to learn as you did, maybe give them a basic run down on what you need to get flying and launching missiles etc, that should get them in, let em get a few kills and they will want more, more i tell ya :) some folks like a good book and once they start reading they just cannot put it down. lockon is my book :) . and looking forward to the next chapter.

yes that should sort it out, good one groove. as for turning it on i think its always on and if you want to play a single screen game it just goes to the middle screen at normal resolution. and Joe, don't forget that once you modify the config file to then leave the in game graphics options well alone or it will revert back to the original aspect ratio i believe. also you might try turning off the full screen option, seem to recall this may help with the menu stretch. also in that config, you might want to first try just editing the 'simulator' values rather than all of them. hey joe, please keep us posted and i for one will definately be checking out the up coming review with great anticipation and am sure anyone here will be more than happy to give any help we can. many like minded people will be greatful to see some results before considering purchasing one of these little beauties. as for the question as to what cards will support lockon with th2go, if spanning 2 screens from the ultra is any indication, i suffered very little performance loss going from a single monitor to running two from the 6800 ultra. but yes three will be interesting to say the least. something like trying to run one of those fancy big new dell lcd's. hell i will gladly turn some candy off to get it running smooth :) the added periphial real estate will more than compensate... and the good thing is future hardware won't care either, its just a monitor. a slightly off topic question, you may wish to explore in your review is the allowance of the bezel edges between the screens, even thin 1/2" bezels like the lg L1950sq give you approximately an inch between screens once butted together and so far none of the solutions i have seen allow for this gap, let alone allow the user to adjust the display to hide the equivalent picture area that would normally be behind the bezel, from what i have seen the picture stops on one screen and continues on the next, look at the matrox th2go examples to see what i mean, for example diagonal lines do not line up between screens and basically this looks wrong. currently to overcome this i adjust the monitors picture position so that i loose an inch of image at the two outer edges of the triple displays setup. it would be a real bonus if the positioning was adjustable but breath should not be held in this case as i see several obsticles in achieving this, time will tell. now, getting back to what groove was saying, heres some examples of single screen lockon with modified aspect ratios. hope this helps a little. Joe as a personal request, would you be kind enough to try this out with the th2go at the resolution of 3840x1024 with an aspect ratio of 3.75, ideal figure for 3x 19" (apparently only @ 60hz? ) as i think this will be the decider for me, if it can do that res count me in.... thankyou in advance, G3. ps: did you catch what i was saying about the bezel edge issue?

this device looks to have the potential to really get 3 monitors working with little or no fuss, the pc sees the box as a single very wide res monitor and then does all the splitting up for you. windows and your games are non the wiser, selecting the desired resolution and a simple change to the aspect ratio in a config file should be all thats required. (we know lockon likes to change it back to default ) one exiting bonus from 3 screens driven fron a single pc is that trackir will work across all three in sync, oh yes that will be pretty to watch. i would think due to the large res of say 3840x1024 ( 3x 19" ) it may put some extra strain on the videocard, but as we know, in lockon this is not the bottle neck, and who cares, your videocard is probably getting old anyway :) as some of you already know, i have been playing around with 3 monitors, with the same idea as Bflagg has in mind. with some degree of success, but ultimately failed. this is a shot of the desired result i achieved messing with view angles. 3x 19" 1280x1024 which equates to 3840x1024 with an aspect ratio of 3.75 to suit. i tried it across 3 pc's via lan in multiplayer, also tried it with a 6800 ultra agp dual dvi output and a fx5200 pci card to provide the 3rd output. running in spanned mode on 2 monitors was obviously a no brainer but view was split in the middle, which renders it useless. the lan idea works on other games, basically spectating the middle screen player and looking to the left and right. unfortunately i was unable to get into the cockpit view of another players aircraft and this is where my testing came to a halt, even in other views the lag i saw on the side views updating was somewhat discouraging. at present i am in discussion with the good people at matrox to get a confirmation of what cards can deliver the big resolutions, as it seems the specs may be limited to the dual output max res, yet the cards may be capable of exceeding those figures. its very exiting and i anxiously await the answers to my questions which i will share along with screen shots as soon as one of these boxes lands on my desk...

i would be happy downloading any and all of your movies, most impressive from what i have seen so far, fingers crossed for the mod to eventually be released with your clips iincluded :) :icon_syda your lockon movies..........xxoooxxxoo :rolleyes:

i concur, an official responce from ED is far better than my hearsay.

hey evil, maybe its just a perspective issue, all screens may infact be the same, maybe not? when angled back my sides look similar, just like those antec 1080 cases that look sloped and are infact square. from some recent testing i believe lockon will support it, it most definately has ingame support for more than one monitor, it certainly works across 2 screens no worries, 3 like this is what i am trying to do with the 2 nvidia cards but so far no joy. in the graphics options ingame i have seen it offer me dual and triple diplay resolutions. i have had it working as above in fs9 with a program called wideview in a server/client setup. it allows you to do the same but each monitor is fed from its own pc which are in turn all networked together. as for lockon, 2 screens looks awesome, 3 would be shear optical heaven :) man this has some serious potential, thankyou.

update: after several days of driver testing etc, it seems that my desire to have 3 monitors accelerated in a agp/pci setup does not look good. i am now waiting on confirmation of wether on not this is possible with a modern sli setup, we will see.

hey groove, may i suggest you consider resizing your images, i do it thru xp just by going edit, stretch and skew, 40% and crop to suit, simple and keeps things on one screen, save as and it also majorly reduces the images size down to a few kB. basically if you have to scroll around an image it looses its impact imo, take it or leave it :) your aspect ratio looks correct and unfortunately for you it does work, as i just replicated your setup and had it running 2 monitors stacked vertical with a res of 1280x2048x32 @75 aspect ratio @ 0.625 so as for your error i am unsure. the only issue i see is an inch or so top and botton that is not diplaying correctly, its there but not quite right. i would look elseware for your problem. will upload screenshot later. edit: done see below. i found it looked ok if the screen had the hud. vsd and the tews, the bottom having the pacs and alt etc. this was in the f15, other planes will vary, i did notice when the botton view has no outside view in teh corners, you then don't really need to allow for the screen bezel thickness, so you get to fully utillze your monitors. this 2 stacked setup certainly has potential. additionally imagine 3 screens across and the centre stacked with a monitor below for the instruments, crazy as it sounds it may be possible. lets try and get yours working for a start. more info on the error might help, and whats your hardware, drivers etc. if you mess with it alot then maybe a fresh install might be on the cards. if you do, make a copy of a known good install of lockon, then if you get to where it has an issue you can revert back to the known good copy by just copying the desired files or the whole folder for that matter :) something else i noticed was that most games don't like starting up if you have gone back to a single display in nview or diplay properties, unless you reduce the res ingame first. great to hear and see that you saw it stacked even if only in a horizontal physical layout, we know it can be done, see how you go, good luck. ok for now i have a screenshot or 3 to demonstrate the ability to use resolution and aspect ratio to manipulate the view on one screen only. note: to get this view to work i had to set fullscreen = 0 for anyone that doesn't know all these setting we are editing are found in the config folder in the "graphics.cfg" file. so that you can restore the original settings, back it up first and then go for your life :) see what you think. this one is 640x1024 @ 0.625 heres one @ 1280x341 @ 3.75 and another for good luck, emulating multimonitor displays across one screen 1280x341 @ 3.75 i hope this helps and keeps your hopes up :)

after some experimenting with the 6800gt and the fx5200 i have been unable to accelerate the 3rd screen, i can get as far as stretching a window into the 3rd monitor but it is just a still shot and does not display game action. i have so far only tried it with different driver versions for the 2 seperate cards and perhaps this is where the problem lies. others have got it t work with fps games like quake 3, yet i only get two screens working even with this quake3 game so i think once the driver issues are sorted we might see some more progress. the system specs of the rig i saw running it had a ti4600 as the main card, and it therefore was also compatible with the same driver as the pci card, i'd say thats the key to success. i have also heard you can modify the driver files to make it think its written for your card, by editing the config or ini or whatever, this would be good too as at the moment if i try and install the same driver for both cards it just won't do it, saying its not compatible. an older driver and the gt complains, a newer driver and the old pci card complains. something around the forceware 56.xx series may be suitable for both cards. if you are familiar with editing them or know a driver that will work with both a 6800gt and a fx5200 please let me know.

ok team, its all good, as from all this i have learnt about this brietling setup and i was previously unaware of it so that a bonus as it looks great wags, the screenshot is indeed a fake in the sense that its not actually 3 screens in the one game, its 3 pc's with the game running on each one with a view panned in the side screens. the image in the the second post is my home setup and not the brietling setup but i do agree it looks very similar, although it seems more zoomed in, very cool all the same, just to clear the mud. i understand you can parhelia it across three, unfortunately i don't know if this is really powerful enough these days so that is why we are here. groove, thanks for making your own thread about dual, this is an honourable decision, as it keeps this thread focused, thankyou. let keep it casual and benefit from each others efforts and knowledge. so far its working for me :) so keep it civil and play nice, its easy to get heated but its counter productive, and usually regretted. just now got home and installing the fx5200 pci, with any luck some new results to come.

monitors stacked would be great too, i did try it out and it looked good but i didn't have the monitors stacked, i had a similar idea in this thread: http://forum.lockon.ru/showthread.php?t=13721 i think you should just be able to set it up as vertical spanning, another thing i have been doing is moving the second screens position to compensate for the blank area between the two, this is about an inch on my thin bezel lcd's, but for crt's it may be about 2inches. it makes things look like they are aligned when going across both screens, adding to the realism as in your eyes flow across the join rather than notice a badly aligned view. good to see your interest and the fact that the idea is gaining momentum, surely this would be great to add a feature to allow exporting instruments or views to other screens, or atleast a 3 screen wide view without the need for other software like nview to deal with. ED, please consider.