I started “flying” Microsoft’s flight simulator when it looked like this – on my very first “PC Clone”, back in 1985.  A few years later, I was at a Comdex convention, where someone was showing off the latest version, running on a new “PS/2” 80386 machine, with a yoke and throttles and rudder pedals, set up like an actual cockpit.  I only got to spend about 3 minutes flying it (after waiting at least 10 times that long in line!), but I’ve wanted to build one ever since.

Well, the time has come!  

There’s a lot of work involved though, beyond building it. I have all the parts- touch-screen monitors, three 50″ TVs, joysticks, rudder pedals, a throttle cluster, etc., along with four floor-recliner seats.  Assembling it all is a couple days’ work. 

The hard part is configuring the software.  I’m planning to use X-Plane for flight simulating. It supports multiple monitors that can show configurable points-of-view, and also cockpit displays. It’s made for multi-screen flight simulators.  For Space flight, I’m looking at one named Orbiter, as well as Astronomy Lab and Space Engine.  My RX-2070 video card supports Nvidia’s “Surround” mode (which makes the 3 TVs look like a single 3840×720 (or 5760×1080) monitor) so this should be able to play any of these games, but most won’t be able to remove the “Dashboard” part from the TV displays and put it on the monitors in the cockpit itself.  I’m going to experiment with DisplayFusion to see if I can improve on that by taking the image on a large “virtual display” and directing pieces of it to each physical monitor. 

I’ll post on this more when I get more progress made. At the moment, the project is back-burnered.