Question relating to building home cockpits

[hsvfan]

Hi all

I have a couple of questions relating to home built cockpits
that I am sure some knowledgeable people here can answer.

Firstly.
If you are  using separate flightsim avionics, gauges and radios etc, can one  high end computer handle running flightsim and cope with the separate avionics or ,do you get one  computer to run the flightsim visuals and one to run the external gauges and avionics etc

[JBaymore]

hsv,

Hi and welcome to the "Homebuild Cockpits Forum."

Answering your first question...........

MOST people run external gauge programs on separate networked PC's to keep the "load" off of the main flight sim PC.  Unless you have a bear of a machine, you likely need all the horsepower you can get to deal with just running fs2004 or (particularly) FSX.

It IS possible to share some instruments.... on a second monitor from a single PC.... or even MORE monitors with multiple graphics cards ........... but few find success with that approach.

The good news is that the PCs to run most add on panels / gauges are pretty minimal.  My PFD (along with some FSXpand gauges are running on a 100 mbit switched network on a 300MHX Pentium II.... and I get acceptable performance.  Most of the time "junker" PCs are easy to find free or almost free.

Hope this helps get you started on the road to insanity (along with the rst of us).  

best,

....................john

[hsvfan]

Thanks for the quick reply
Just on my second question,I have found one wed site, Simkits.com that produce instruments, are there any other companies that make instruments for flightsim  


Cheers

Rhys
New Zealand

[npbosch]

Yes, seagull and flightillusion are also on the market.

see on my site for the url

scroll down to hardware/instruments

http://home.wanadoo.nl/norbert.bosch/links.html

regards

Norbert