WideFS and remote controllers?

[Analias]

I looked for a FAQ for this, but didn't find one. Please forgive the annoyance if this has been asked before.

I am building a cockpit. One of the things I would like to do is have the cockpit built in such away that I can simply turn off the power and move it out of the way to use my PC as normal. To this end, the cockpit will have it's own PC to run LCD gauges, other FSX apps through widefs, and the interface to my microcontroller based avionics and cockpit indicators/switches.

I was wondering if it was possible to connect the yoke, throttle, and pedals through widefs back to the system running FSX? I can think of several uses for this, including backwards support for legacy controllers that are not supported under Vista or FSX directly. I suspect that widefs doesn't support this directly, if not, is there any tools that monitor the controllers and communicate back to FSX through widefs?

If widefs doesn't support this, is there another way to do it?

BTW, Pete - thanks for one hell of piece of software. I was happy to register my copies of FSUIPC/WideFS for both FS9 and FSX.

-Freeman

[Pete Dowson]

I looked for a FAQ for this, but didn't find one.

I tend to add answers to all questions asked in the past to the documentation of the programs. Since the documentation is with them and really needs to be read before purchase and use, it seems the best way.

I was wondering if it was possible to connect the yoke, throttle, and pedals through widefs back to the system running FSX?

No, only buttons and switches. Analogue axes are not supported in that way, though a program could certainly be written to do this via WideFS.

The reason I never added such is not just a lack of demand (you are only about the third person to ask in the 10+ year life of WideFS so far), it is aslo that it doesn't work very well, at least for the main flight controls. The little bit of extra latency you get due to the network makes flying that much more difficult. You tend to over control.

It would be okay for other axes no doubt, but it simply isn't worth it these days, when USB connections and extensions and hubs are so plentiful and easy to deal with. It was different in the "old days" when you only had a measly one or two game ports with up to 4 axes each, at most. (And you only got two game ports with some expensive add-on cards). That would have been justification for such an implementation, merely to multiply the number of connections. And in fact I did implement it via my EPIC drivers at the time -- of course that was with less heavyweight operating systems.

I can think of several uses for this, including backwards support for legacy controllers that are not supported under Vista or FSX directly.

I can't think of any off-hand. Old game port devices can be connected through very cheap game port-USB adapters, and anything with the few buttons and axes legacy devices had will be supported easily by one or other of the default generic drivers.

I suspect that widefs doesn't support this directly, if not, is there any tools that monitor the controllers and communicate back to FSX through widefs?

There might be some programs already around which will do it. I don't know. Maybe if you ask on the cockpit builder's forum you might get lucky? Otherwise it would mean writing a little program to do it.

Oh, BTW, I hear that the Microsoft XBOX game console can be used as a game controller for FS, or at least for FSX. Not so sure about FS9.

Regards

Pete