Gadroc

I run blackshark under parallels when testing cockpit code and it runs fine (albeit in a small window with the lowest graphics settings.). I have a iMac i5 with 8GB ram and a ATI 4850. I'd image DCS A-10 would be similar in nature of running but not well enough to really fly at full screen. Bootcamp will give you MUCH better performance, but it should run under Parallels at least and probably the latest version of Fusion as well. Make sure you turn on 3d acceleration in the config of your VM!

Just to be clear it does require active adapters past the first two monitors. All dp to VGA adapters are active. Passive DVI/HDMI adapters will not work. I'm currently running 6 monitors off one eyefinity edition running 4 of the monitors off VGA adapters.

WOW!! Hard to think of anything else to say. Excellent work on the trigger mechanism and the cyclic setup!

I have two 10.4" touch screens I've built up in my cockpit. 1) 10.4" 800x600 LCD Panel - $114 2) VGA Driver Board for LCD Panel - $35 3) 10.4" 5 Wire Resistive Touch panel w/ USB Controller - $80 You could fit these into about an 1" / 1.5" deep case, but I'm not sure how cooling would be in that configuration. Each LCD panel has 1/4 to 1/2 or more metal around it on each side and the visible area of the panels does not go all the way to the metal. So if you tried to join two you would have at least a 3/4" bezel in the center. Not to mention that would require two VGA inputs to drive, unless you add another $100+ for a Matrox Dual Head to Go setup. You're just not going to find an LCD keyboard or build one for <$300, especially since it would be pretty much the only device which needs LCD panels of that size and shape.

Unfortunately I wait as you guys do on this. I have not had (yet) a lot of time to poke around with the beta for things like this. I could not even get the regular MFDs to work on my setup and since the beta clearly states this is not ready yet I haven't futzed with it.

This will absolutely work as I have run nearly an identical setup.

This is simply not true. The eyefinity cards can run the monitor completely independently. I run 6 separate monitors from one Eyefinity 6 5870 card. I can combine identical monitor resolutions into a monitor group making windows and games seem them as one huge monitor. The reason to do this is game tend to run better in "fullscreen" mode. With one huge monitor you can run in fullscreen mode to gain FPS, but for the DCS games in particular you don't have to. You can just as easily run in windowed mode with out combining the monitors into one big display group. My cockpit has done this for a long time with Black Shark as well as BadCRCs and others. Now be careful as well because there are two kinds of 5xxxx cards. Normal cards have two DVIs, one HDMI and one Display Port. Even though these cards have four connectors they can only drive three monitors simultaneously. In addition if you are driving three monitors you have to use the display port (the HDMI port switches off one of the DVI ports). The second kind of card has 6 mini display ports... these cards can drive 6 monitors simultaneously but you will likely need display port to DVI or VGA adapters.

Yes you can use a second video card. I used to use a second PCI video card to display the shkval. You might need to play around with the multi-monitor config to get things performing well. You don't need softth to do it.

Well I wouldn't say turn key always = $$$... turn key w/o compromise = $$$... turn key w/ comprise = $$ and build everything yourself = $. Everyone takes this hobby to different levels. Some folks buy real panels and gauges then adapt them, demand 100% dimension accuracy and milspec switches. The other end just wants a few radio shack push buttons to have fun, and there are many more in between. Unfortunately the market is pretty small and their are not many (any?) high polish solutions to do the hardware interfaces. There are many options with a lot of elbow grease.

The problem is there are A LOT (if not a majority) of switches in the shark which match your problem statement. Take the PUI-800 Weapon Status and Control Panel the only keyboard commands available for every switch on that panel are toggle commands. That means you HAVE to have them in the right position at flight start up time or they will not sync unless you pause game or prevent keypress from being created till you sync them. They will not "just stay off" as you put it. To fix this with a keyboard emulator process it would still have to monitor the state of the switch via LUA and then send the correct number of keyboard toggle button presses. If your going to do that it would probably be simpler to just send the switch position in via LUA where you can set the absolute position. Doing simple keyboard mapping of switches will work, but has a limit on how well it will work. I still advise taking a bit to think about it before ordering a bunch of interface cards. If you're ok with those limits then by all means, if not it's probably best to start learning the rest at first so you're not reworking as much.

At it's basic level yes those are your two options. Keep in mind that if you ever want any gauges or indicator lights in your pit you will have to deal with LUA export sooner or later. So think about how you might do it before selecting your input cards for option 1, so you can take advantage of it when the time comes.

There is no export data for the UV26 Displays, PVI-800 Displays or the three indicators above the EKRAN. For the weapons panel and it's segments do a search on this thread, panel builders and some of my old threads.... I know him, Oakes and myself discussed the algorithms for the weapons panel and posted LUA code at one point.

There will be no limit on the inputs to the simulation as anything you can do with the keyboard can be setup in Helios (aka everything). As A-10 is not out yet I can only speculate on full detail, but based on Black Shark we will be able to have 90% of the gauges and most switches synced as well. I'm dependent on being able to extract the data displayed on LCD read outs, in black shark the 7 segment displays for PVI-800 and UV-26 are not exported at all (that anyone has found yet). Assuming the radios are exported like in Black Shark fully displaying a radio panel will work as well. Gauges and synced switches do require Export.lua support so you will have to fly on servers that don't restrict that (which I don't really understand why any do).

It is a complete a self contained system which has gauge rendering and touch screen controls. We don't want to flood ED's forums with to much chatter here. It would probably be best if we moved the discussion to the scsimulations forums. We don't want to out live welcome on these boards nor force people who are not interested to wade through it.

There are a few advantages to a touch screen setup. Fist as everyone else has pointed out is versatility. Being able to just pull up a cockpit out of a menu is great! It is not the same as having all the switches, but pretty close once you have a decent set of screens surrounding you. Second is nice with DCS based sims is the switches follow the in-game cockpit. So you don't have to worry about resetting everything for the next mission. For Falcon and others where you are just interfacing via keyboard commands you still have to worry about sync. It can be a LOT cheaper to start off with. You can really get started with just a $340 touch screen and get a long way. But it all depends on what your goals are for your simulation pit. I'd tend to agree that there is a great feeling of all the proper switches, but it is locked down to just one pit. I personally tend to jump around a lot. Yes it does save time. It's MUCH easier than trying to hold your head steady with Track IR and then use the mouse. Helios also has the capability to render gauges (as seen in the A10 pit we did for the HOTAS Wartog launch). We'll have much more on that shortly as we are getting close to a feature complete panel editor, so I can switch gears back to drawing out all the gauges.

The video card you have should do fine for 1440x900, but that's a pretty small monitor by current standards. If you step up to a 21" or higher in the future you will be at 1920x1080 which could start to push that card to the limits for more heavy FPS games. Just keep that in mind. Depending on how long till you think you may make that jump it may be better to back off on the CPU from a 950 to a 920 and get a 5850 or 5870.

Go with a brand name power supply (I like the corsair's line of hx and tx as well). But you don't need to overspend on one either. Check out corsairs website they have a power supply selection utility, there are some of these on independent sites as well. Many people have jumped on the bigger is better bandwagon for PSUs which is not always the case. Try out a few different combos of video card combinations to get a feel for the range needed. A high quality 650 should be fine for even SLI 57xx system, but you want to step up higher for 58xx or nvidia cards. The question is how much head room do you want for potential upgrades before you have to buy a new PSU. You won't be doing yourself any favor by getting a slower PC today just to get a bigger PSU for possible future upgrades, on the other hand if you want an upgrade path it is overall cheaper to get a slightly bigger one today.

Hey Cowboy10uk, The software will run on any monitor, so it really depends on your setup. Flim and I both run widescreen monitors for our center panel. As you can see in the attached screenshot you can move the panels around and you can size them as necessary to accommodate your pit's setup. I'm assuming your using an ATI card since your talking about displayport. Keep in mind that you can run the third monitor as VGA with a display port to VGA adapter as all of them are active. They cost about $25 which is MUCH cheaper than a displayport monitor or active DVI. I run a 5870 Eyefinity 6 port card with 1 DVI, 1 HDMI and 4 VGA Adapters.

WOW. Can't believe it's been 8 months, but a few other projects have kept me busy and not advancing my pit. Got a nice bonus from work which triggered a few purchases for the sim pit forcing me to spend some time on it. One of my three touch screens was only working for 15 minutes at a time so I retired it some months ago. So I picked up an Acer T230H 23" touch screen to replace the center panel. This let me migrate the remaining two 15" to the right console. I also rebuild my left console to accommodate both collective and throttle so I can bounce between Helos and fixed wing. It also now has a 10.4" touch panel with a second on the way (going to be place to the left of the collective stick). I still need to get bezels cut for the two screens and I may end up tilting them up due to viewing angles. Lastly I couldn't live with out my force feedback any longer so I pulled out one of the MSFFB2s I had in the closet and finally made and extension for it and swapped out the grip. I didn't want a secondary controller board so I was stuck with the existing button and axis count, but it turned out well. It works great but I may go back and add a counter weight to help with centering. I'll post back as I go back through and recreate all of my touch panels with screen shots.

Spot on hassata.

Switches and gauges can be re-sized and placed on any monitor, but in game displays (like the mfd contents, shkval and abris) are limited by all the same restrictions that they have in game today. Helios is a hybrid of your joystick mappings software, touchpal and virtual panel all with a WYSIWYG editor. I hope to get time this week to do some preliminary write up and screenshots, but my day job has been really crazy the last few months so no promises.

I'm not following your math as there are NO drives larger than 80GB for $200 at microcenter (I live 15 miles from you're corporate offices). You also have to be very careful on the cheap drives that you don't end up with a junk JMicron based drive. As I said before SSDs vary greatly on everyone's cost / benefit ratio. For my main development machine an 80GB X25-M is well worth it as I'm opening and closing apps all day. For gaming it no where near makes up it's cost relative to performance gains in game.

It really depends on what resolution your running at and the game. For Lockon unless you are running a high resolution eyefinity display setup I don't think you'll see much benefit. Since DCS A-10 is not out no one can comment yet. For other genre of games (non CPU bound ones) you may see great benefit. There have been some recent benchmarks comparing dual 460s against a single 480 at tomshardware. You're best bet is to look at various hardware sites and find benchmarks for SLI for the games you're interested in. Yes you will see performance gains, but you will pay for them and how much is dependent on the game. Most FPS / RPG games will see reduced load times for levels, while some sims that constantly stream large images from disk can benefit. This usually won't translate to higher frame rate, but potential reduced stutters. Keep in mind the cost here as most games are 10+ GB installed and an 80 GB SSD is $200 (Do research on good vs bad SSDs before you buy!!!)

Aggh. 10.8 seems not to enforce AA settings in window mode anymore. FSX before flight does not anti-alias anymore, nor does Black Shark which I always run in window mode. FSX once i start flying in full screen works just fine. Anyone else notice this?

The problem has been there for a while, from my reading on the boards. D3DOverrider does not fix the VSYNC for me in windowed mode (required for multi-monitor support). I have it at a tolerable level, but don't want to recommend with out pointing it out. The 480gtx made my old 8800GT and 275gtx sound positively silent. Now the 5870 is not silent but its not loud enough for me to notice over normal case fans. The 480 was truly ridiculous in my opinion in heat and noise. Get a good case. I did find the current incarnation of my current case which is the Antec P183. It's not a cheap case but very well made and comes with two 120mm fans with built in speed controllers (high, med and low). With all the fans set on low it very quiet. A regular 5xxx card can run three monitors, but the third monitor has to be using an active adapter (either VGA or dual link DVI adapter). Active VGA adapters run about $25 and active DVI adapters run $100-$150.