Question: what is the very best joystick, yoke, and rudder pedal hardware available for FlightGear? Preferably USB based.
I've been talking to an ultra-high end PC manufacturer about having them offer a couple PC/laptop choices out of their product line that are specifically designed, setup, and optimized to run FlightGear as fast as possible. Essentially they would build and sell *the* ultimate FlightGear computer and bundle it with a complete install of FlightGear. They would select components that are tuned and matched for the best performance, stability, and longevity. They go in and do a variety of OS (windows) performance optimizations, they tweak the bios settings to squeeze every bit of performance possible out of the systems, and they would also tune the FlightGear settings for best possible performance, and best possible graphics display. Then they test, test, test. If anything glitches even once on the test bed, they toss it and replace it with a new part. As part of this, they would like to be able to offer a choice of the best joysticks, yokes, and rudder pedals if people would want to buy those at the same time. So here's your chance, if you were designing the ultimate FlightGear computer, what flight control input devices would you pick? I don't want to sound too much like a sales person here, but let me say a bit more about what this company offers. - First of all, they aren't a low end, el-cheapo pc seller. They are here to build the Ultimate FlightGear/gaming computer with the best hardware, the best tuning, the best testing, the best service and support ... the best of everything. So that is going to be more expensive than a commodity PC seller, but you are getting the best of the best, and the ultimate performance possible from a PC. That's not the best route for everyone, but if you can afford a nicer system, this will blow your socks off. - They offer a custom air cooling design that's quieter than a water cooled solution and works better. - They can have the FG logo etched on the side of the case for any of these "special edition" flightgear machines. - They go so far as to use all stainless steel screws with rubber washers rather than the el-cheapo typical computer screws. And they'll even make sure all the screw heads are lined up north/south/east/west rather than at a variety of odd angles. - They have zero tolerance for failures or even shady performance. Each system goes through a minimum of 53-58 hours of bench testing and if any component glitches even once, it gets replaced. - The very last thing they do after all the OS and software is installed and any license keys and all the OS patches and upgrades are installed is to make a recovery DVD. This makes it pretty simple to recover a failed HD (or upgrade to something bigger) later on. Much simpler than with other PC's where you have a stack of 20 Cd's to go through and a pile of individual installs to recover a system. - They will ship a spec sheet detailing all the performance tweaks and optimizations made to the machine. So for instance, if you upgrade your video card drivers, it's easy to go back in and redo all your optimal settings for your hardware and software. - If the standard system isn't quite what you want, you can get on the phone with one of their systems engineers who can walk you through the tradeoffs or benefits of different upgrades or changes. - Oh memory ... I'm not a big RAM expert, but when you read or write any value to/from RAM, you have to wait a small amount of time for the operation to complete before you can continue. In your bios you can setup different wait states ... sort of analogous to counting one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, after each memory operation before you can continue. These guys specifically select high performance RAM with the minimum possible wait. So if a typical system requires two wait states after each RAM operation, their RAM is designed to only require ONE. Multiplied out over the huge number of RAM operations required in the course of executing a program, that gives a *huge* boost in performance. But most PC sellers don't offer RAM that is fast enough and high enough quality to run with these reduced wait states. Oh, and they individually test each ram stick so they can do best-matching on pairs of ram sticks to go into each machine. So yeah, these guys are a bunch of pretty crazy hardware geeks. Basically, we are talking about the biggest, baddest ass system you can buy, and it will come with FlightGear preloaded and optimized for best possible graphics and performance. I'm excited about the whole idea. I'm not sure I'll be able to afford one myself, but I'm excited. :-) So anyway, I'm looking for suggestions on the best flight controllers available so these can be offered optionally with the computer package. More details to come, hopefully sooner rather than later ... Thanks, Curt. -- Curtis Olson http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/ FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org Unique text: 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? 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