Originally Posted by
xCav8r
I'm new to cockpit building too, and my head is spinning with all the options for I/O cards out there. I've been researching for a while, but the more I read, the more questions I have. I've been leaning toward the cards from Open Cockpits, but I've also thought of ordering something simpler just to get me started. The cards from Beta Innovations and Leo Bodnar look like they fit that bill. Only, I don't want to regret that I didn't go with something that was going to meet my long term wants better. Perhaps you can offer me some advice?
My ultimate goal is a multi-functional cockpit: multiple planes, multiple games, multiple game-genres. Some of these games have limited support for game controllers, so I'm looking for advice on cards that will give me the flexibility to use any analog input for any game.
Let me give you an example. MechWarrior 3 is a game that only supports a single game controller, and you can't choose the game controller that it uses. When multiple controllers are plugged into the computer, they seem to be ordered in windows by some immutable (vendor) ID, and MechWarrior 3 always uses whatever is at the top of the list. If I end up with a bunch of controller cards managing my analog axes for things like my throttles, pedals, control stick, etc., I won't be able to use all of my stuff for this game.
I've read about different cards (or systems of interlinked cards) supporting more than eight axes, but I always heard that there was a limit imposed by Windows of eight axes per game controller and 16 game controllers total. I assume there is some truth to that, but I don't know if it's dependent on the operating system or that some I/O cards have figured out a work around. FSBus, for example, seems to support 32 analog inputs. This just confuses me.
I guess my ideal situation would be to take all of my controls and present them to the computer as a single controller. This would give me the most flexibility when it comes to supporting different games. Is there something that can do this?