Socket7

With regards to lubing up your stick...:music_whistling: When I first investigated my CH pedals, I held hope I could make them smoother with some lube, and did a bit of research on what's best for plastics. Based on opinions expressed around here, I ended up buying a small container of PAO grease. (Synthetic Polyolefin grease/lube) It's made by M-kote, product# EM-30L NLGI#1 Its specifically designed for plastics so it won't rot anything out, and because it is a thick grease, it will stay where you put it, unlike oil. I've gooped the stuff all over the plastic bits in my CH pedals, and well over a year later it hasn't harmed anything at all. :thumbup:

The mini stick on the warthog acts as a joystick, and thus you can adjust it's sensitivity with with response curves and such inside of DCS. If you have problems with it being to sensitive or too useless, you can tweak that.

Yes! That is the doppler hover indicator right above the VVI! The navigation part is over on the left side of the cockpit but you don't need to poke that for the hover gauge to work. [ame] [/ame] The first 10 minutes is all on the doppler system, including that lamp on the gauge, and how to use the navigation system. It then moves on to navigating with the ARK-9 and ARK-UD.

If you have to ask about the price of those bugeye tech units, you can't afford them. :music_whistling:

Well, I've met Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, and as far as I know, Logitech kept him on the payroll with his own little workshop until his death. So to say they forgot their roots is a bit silly. The problem is that there is not a demand for it at the price it would cost to produce. If they wanted to put out something top of the line, they have to beat the quality of the TM warthog at a similar price. If they want to put out something cheap, they have to beat the price of the X52 at a similar quality. So let's say that Logitech makes a competitor to the TM Warthog with a similar feature set, and they want to distinguish themselves by making it have high quality force feedback as well. That just added $40 or more in components alone to the design. That also doesn't account for designing the stick itself. You have to pay someone to do that, and the best ways of accomplishing a task might be patented, so you might have to licence it, and spend yet more money. The extra complexity of the design means more steps to assemble it, and that costs more too. Suddenly your $450 joystick is now a $550 joystick, and you're only going to sell a few thousand units a year. If they tried to beat the cost of the X52, they run the risk of producing a piece of garbage that will ruin their brand name. What there is demand for is a TM warthog with a force trim capability, with the X52 Pro's LCD and LEDS, and easy to use programming software, with zero bugs, and a 0.01% failure rate. All for the price of a Logitech Xtreme 3D pro. I know this because it is what I want as well. But it's not realistic. I imagine that if someone set to work in their garage, they could blow the pants off what is on the market now, but I also think that they would be charging $800 or more. The joystick would be worth it too, but I wouldn't be buying one. It won't make me a better pilot.

Everyone wants all the features for free. Myself included. ;) The high end joystick market seems to be pretty competitive. The materials cost on high end stuff is pretty high, meaning that companies can't make a lot of money on them. You couldn't add features to an X52 or a TM warthog without making them cost a lot more. Some of the features asked for are features people who will pay a lot of money don't actually want (I don't ever want a twist grip rudder on my Warthog, even if that was the reason I tried using an X52 before the Warthog). Force feedback in joysticks never really took off, despite a small loyal following. The cost of adding it means you have to skimp on more popular features to keep the same price point. The joystick market is small. It's not like mice or Xbox controllers. If you want to make a successful joystick you've got to knock an established player out of the park, and you don't want to dilute your market and increase manufacturing costs by making a dozen different models. You aren't going to get 10,000 people to buy each model by making a bunch of different joysticks, you'll just split those 10,000 people among all your models, and multiply your support and supply chain headaches. It's just economics. Your dream joystick will cost more than you are willing to pay for, so manufacturers make compromises, and we call them cheap-asses for it. Such is the way of life ;)

I'm so glad I asked for more information about the tail rotor. So much good info comes out of asking "can you show me why you think that?" :)

Mi-8's tail rotor is so strong it can damage things, which is why you have a pitch limiting system for it. It's not like the UH-1 where a 10 knot wind will give you trouble if you try and push the tail into the wind. I'm not sure there is anything wrong there, but if you've got some evidence current behavior is wrong, I'd love to hear it. :)

Most people avoid using the saitek control software at all costs. Almost all of what it can do can be done directly from the DCS controls configuration. The same goes for TARGET, Thrustmasters joystick config software. I'm not sure what you mean by "downloaded a profile" For DCS? or for the saitek software? each kind of profile has to be handled differently. I would try and configure everything you can in DCS, and only use the saitek software for the things that only it can do. If you set the saitek or thrustmaster config software to use a custom profile to do things, you also need to make sure it's active when DCS is running. It's been a couple year since I messed around with that stuff, but generally it involves selecting the DCS exe file, and checking a box to apply the profile when the software detects the specified exe is running. There are button maps that people have made, I usually look at one of those maps, and use it as a guide to configure things in DCS, rather than bother with loading someone else's presets into my system. Good luck!

The datasheet says it's a 10 bit DAC, but it only does 8bit on each axis. :lol: I say a couple naughty words in this, so use appropriate viewer discretion. :smartass:

Reliability is relative. I've had to RMA my warthog throttle twice, first for a bad coolie hat (TM sent me 2 switches to install myself but they didn't help), and then the one TM sent back to me had a flaky throttle that I could not calibrate out. If I hadn't asked TM to pay for shipping costs it would have gotten quite expensive (TM happily obliged BTW, so ask for them to pay if you RMA). In my eyes, paying more money is not going to get you a lower failure rate. You're paying for fit and finish, extra features, and precision/accuracy. So the X52's programming app doesn't work very well. Neither does TARGET for the Warthog. For the most part everyone avoids using them anyway. So what if you can't give it to a 5 year old to beat on? just be an adult and treat it gently, you won't snap anything in half. The X52, for all it faults, offers a feature set that the mass consumer wants for the lowest price possible. You even get a rudder in it. If you move up to a Warthog, you're going to need a set of rudder pedals, and you're not going to like what you find there. They cost a lot of money for the cost of what is inside of them, unless you get into hand made stuff like the MFG Crosswinds. I do sympathize with you waterman, there is no philosophical reason for any joystick software to have problems, unfortunately it's just the way things are these days. At least all the problems can be worked around without any real problems.

Maybe this will sound better, you are getting an incredibly good value for your money with an X-52 or X-52 pro. You get a high resolution hall effect sensor on the joystick. Dozens of buttons and switches, Several rotary pots, a slider or two, dozens of LEDS, an LCD display and a programmable chip to drive it all, along with whatever support electronics are needed. All for $130. There is no way that MadCatz is walking off with your money to make a boat payment with how much they cram into those sticks. Compare this with the CH ProPedals. For $120, you get 3 100Kohm potentiometers, a 10 bit DAC and demuxer, pumping out 256 points of resolution on each axis, and a USB chip to make it talk to your computer. Not counting the plastic and springs, you're getting $10, maybe $20 worth of electronics, all of which have not been improved upon since the 90s.

I've used a Logitech Xtreme 3d, an X52, an X52PRO, and a TM warthog. I was never impressed by MadCatz offerings. The X52 with the LCD display had some serious issues. When you pushed a button, it would tell you on the LCD what button was pushed, and what it was named. If it was named something over 16 characters it was supposed to scroll on the display. Instead it would throw my whole computer into a seizure, where I would get one screen update every 5 seconds or so. Killing the X52 driver in task manager let the system recover, but pulling the USB resulted in a BSOD. I believe I ended up getting the X52 pro because of that error, only to find that I still was not impressed by the build quality of either the X52 or the pro. I didn't have it long enough for anything to fail, but all the plastic was just a bit too flexible, and the buttons too mushy. As far as precision goes, it's about as good as a TM warthog. Once you get the thing setup, and learn how to keep the drivers from throwing a fit, it should be an acceptable input device. The fit and finish leave something to be desired with the X52/Pro though. The slider on both my X52 and X52 pro were incredibly jittery. No way you could ever assign an axis to it and use it's position as an absolute zoom. I'll tell you a secret though, the Warthogs slider will jitter too unless you turn the backlight to 100% or 0%. In general I feel it's best to avoid axis for zoom. In summary, the X52 and X52 pro are cheap plastic peices of crap, but you won't find a better piece of crap on the market at the same price point and feature set. My advice would be to spring for the warthog if at all possible, but I feel that an X52 will function just fine once you figure out how to avoid the things that make it have seizures. I really hope they fixed those driver and firmware issues in the 2 years or so since I last used an X52... The jitter in sliders and pots is probably not fixable without a complete hardware rework, which will never happen.

I've always found that trying to run DCS in 3 monitor mode made it take a huge dump in terms of frame rates. It's hard enough to wring 60FPS out of DCS, asking it to do 5760x1200 requires a beast of a machine, and putting DCS to 3 monitor mode in DCS ends up tanking framerates to slideshow territory. I just use Surround mode with dcs set to single monitor as it gets me playable results.

What did this redditor say would wear out? There is only one spring that handles all centering. When you move the joystick, a plate is lifted, and the spring is compressed. As the joystick returns to center, the plate lowers and the compression is released. There is no way to wear out the re-centering of one axis instead of the other. The cup and ball joint shouldn't really care that it's at an angle either. The worst case scenario, you wear out the centering spring, and have to buy a new one. It's a 20 dollar item, and any mook who can turn a screw driver can replace it without breaking something. (I've also never heard of it happening.) I've taken my warthog apart, and though I'm no mechanical engineer, I saw nothing that would make me worry about using it on an angle. If this redditor has empirical evidence of damage caused by using a warthog on an incline, I'd be very interested to see it and know what the problem is, but I have serious problems with the credibility of the source "Some random person on Reddit."

Finally! People will stop asking about them! :D Good job! It's a very silly thing, but for some reason everyone who looks at it asks if it works, so it's good to finally have it work.

Dolby Home Theater V4 on that card looks like it will do what you want on paper, but I've never used it, and only heard of it today, so caveat emptor. I'm completely ignorant of it's actual capabilities. I wound up getting a Sound Blaster Z series after going through the whole analog/optical conundrum myself. I hate their software, their documentation is worse than awful, but in the end it does what I want, and the normalizing / dialog enhancement DSP's are really nice.

Depends on your soundcard, what decoders you pay for, and what you are doing.:) SPDIF (optical) is only capable of transmitting stereo sound by default. It can only do 5.1 with some kind of compression algorithm such as DTS or Dolby Digital Live. Your onboard realtek sound card does not have DTS or DDL, and is unable to provide 5.1 output for computer games over SPDIF. You have to use analog. Your onboard realtek soundcard CAN bitstream a DTS or DD encoded file though. The result is that if you use just an optical cable with a cheap soundcard, you can play your movies in 5.1 with DD or DTS by bitstreaming the signal to your reciever, but when you try and play games or MP3s or whatever, you only get stereo output. :helpsmilie: The realtek chipset can support DTS and DDL output, but it is disabled for licensing reasons. your motherboard manufacturer was too cheap to pay the fees. :mad: I believe there are add-on packs you can buy to enable DTS and DD output on realtek chipsets, but I've never looked them up. There used to be a highly convoluted driver hack too, but I refuse to get into that nonsense. If you get a sound blaster or something, it comes with DTS and DDL licences (it will tell you on the box). Then you can set the soundcard to run in DTS or DDL mode at all times. All your games and applications will have 5.1, all your movies will have 5.1, all over a single optical cable.:D Everything will be magical and perfect until you realize that your keyboard volume and mute buttons no longer do a damn thing and there is nothing to be done about it, because windows doesn't let you assign them to a different volume mixer.:doh: Ah well, in life every problem you solve creates two more. The trick is to make sure the 2 new problems are smaller than the first. :joystick:

You want to be watching the Engine Pressure Ratio, and the Power Turbine Inlet Temperature I think the max EGT should be limited by the engine governor and not be an issue unless you've got some kind if fault, but I could be completely wrong on that, so i figured I'd mention both. I think your problem is more likely to be seen on the EPR gauge. Takeoff power is only supposed to be used for a limited number of minutes, and it's easily reached especially when you've got a heavy load of cargo, or when you're hovering (Which requires more power than forward flight). From what I've gathered, Takeoff power is limited to 6 minutes by the flight manual, and is indicated by area between the top and middle pins of the red indicator on the EPR gauge. The area between the middle and bottom pins of the red indicator is max continuous power, anything below that is cruise. Engines never exploded no matter how you abused them in 1.0, but I haven't spent any time messing with 2.0 yet, so I don't know if either of these are your issue. Try flying a mission while avoiding Takeoff power unless you're actually taking off, and see if it helps any? :dunno:

If you set the LED brightness to 100% or 0%, the pot will not jitter. "Doctor doctor, it hurts when I do this!" "Well stop doing that." :music_whistling: TM could fix it easily by not allowing you to dim the LED's at all anymore, so you can only have the choice of on or off. While I'm surprised their tech support department doesn't have this info in their standard script, I don't think it's worth re-designing an entire PCB, and doing a recall campaign of thousands of units weighing 11 to 14 pounds. FWIW, the issues I've had with my TM warthog and TM customer support, have all been much better than my experiences with the X52 / X52pro and MadCatz support. :joystick:

"Well. It's worth several million dollars, but what you have to understand is that there is a very specific buyer for a piece like this, and they don't come along often. This is going to sit in my shop taking up space for a very long time. I'll give you $5,000 cash or $7,000 in trade." :lol:

All their names are going to be even more misspelled than they are in real life! :lol: I'm going to spend a lot of time in the MI-8 picking out the best landing spots for each hotel on the strip. I've got ideas for a campaign where you fly rich tourists around, and get paid extra for meeting their unreasonable or drunken requests. Whoever said being a taxi driver has to be boring? :)

Those new screenshots sure are purdy. I'm amused, but not surprised to see ED couldn't get name rights for all the hotels on the strip. Harrah's is on the ball about getting free advertising, but "The Murage" apparently wanted money to use their name; I'd love to know how much money they wanted to have their name spelled correctly.

OPSEC is important! Your units personal tactical map isn't going to have the same grid pattern as an atlas you can buy in a store, right? That's also why the grids don't have a more logical numbering pattern. :) To be quite honest, I went out to find a box of grid squares years ago, and I haven't come back with them yet. It was easier for me to blunder my way through the two or 3 times knowing grid references would have been really handy.

By default, you can move "cargo" items. In the stock game, cargo items are some boxes wrapped in a net with a weight value in the mission editor. There are some different models for cargo though in the mods section. You can then carry around a cargo item that looks like a AA gun, or a jeep, or a bambi bucket etc. There is also some scripting, CTTS I believe, that will allow you to sling load several cargo items to a location, and then spawn an actual AA gun or a couple other things.