APRIL 2008 - many, many changes since 2005!!! I'm now running FSX on
an Intel QX-9650 (FOUR 3GHz cores) with 4GB of OCZ Reaper (cooled) DDR-3 at 1333 MHz FSB and an nVidia 9800GTX video card
on an i790 chipset board... with FSX SP1 (which enables partial multi-threading) I get over 100 frames per second (!!!!) with
moderate display complexity... but let's start at the beginning...
Hi! If you reached this page, you must have clicked it from one of
my entries in the GoFlight or RealityXP forums (fora?...)
This is a set of pictures and descriptions of the FS9-based sim I've been putting together since
the late fall of 2005.
I'm not a professional pilot, but over the last 30 years or so I've built up about 2,000 hours,
got my ATP, Citation type rating, and Single, Multi and Instrument Instructor's tickets.
Every year I go to Flight Safety in Long Beach to take a Cessna Twin recurrent, both because
my insurance company sez so, and because it's lots of fun! The instructors are superb (though a bit sadistic... they
choose them that way, and for good reason!) and the sims are very, VERY good. For a great blog on what's it like to
train at FS (from 1995 - before blogs were invented!) see Mike Busch's great article in
my first experience at FS was exactly like Mike's!
Last year I took the Citation recurring rather than the Cessna Twin class - it was a lot harder
than the Type Rating/ATP check ride on the real airplane I had in the spring!!!
I enjoy flying the sims; they are different from the real aircraft, but that's not a bad thing.
There are things you learn in the sims that you don't learn as easily in the aircraft. For instance, all my (real airplane)
instructors think I have a pretty fair instrument scan pattern; I think that's because of all the time I spend on
sims.
Anyway, with the recent advances in "hobby" flight simulation SW and HW, and the increasing home
computing horsepower, I decided to try to build a useful (at least from MY standpoint) home simulation, while spending less,
over an already good computer and CRT display screens, than the equivalent of 1 or 2 hours of Citation rental (does
that tell you how expensive THAT is?)
The next three pages (August 2006: now four!) show pictures and factoids about my simulation.
I'd like to share them with other sim hobbyists to exchange ideas and experiences. If you need additional info, contact
me via the forum you came from to get to this page.
Finally, I apologize for including rather large, high-res pictures. I hope the inconvenience
it may cause those of you with lower bandwidths and smaller monitors may be overcome by the additional information the high-res
pictures convey.
Enjoy!
