(Not so) poorman’s Joystick
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
I like playing flight simulator, although never ever invested a whole lot of time into it. Anyway, playing without joystick is hard, real hard.
Especially with Jet, it’s very difficult to control the engine output precisely with the F1-F4 key, and easily end up with overspeed or underspeed or even stalling if not paying enough attention, but using mouse would be a real waste of time. Landing a Jet with keyboard without Autopilot? It’s barely manageable.
Though I know in the next few weeks I will be playing another game again, I don’t want to spend a buck on joystick.
But there is solution…ha, after all i got quite a number of human-interface devices around me.
By using Glovepie and PPJoy, I converted my MIDI keyboard and Wiimote nunchuk signal into a virtual joystick. With some fine tuning in the FS’s input settings, finally here is the poorman’s joystick! Only downside is that radio tuning and autopilot settings still require the use of mouse, but for control surface and engine control, I could finally say goodbye with the keyboard!
Here is the GlovePIE Script customized for my set. I mapped the MIDI Keyboard controls to MIDI ControlChange event.
My cockpit controls.
The autopilot panel, it’s far lot easier to disconnect autopilot while landing and flaring the plane…
The engine quadrant, completed with spoiler and flap control. The TOGA button is on the left hand side of the keyboard.
P.S. I never knew why in the world there is a elevator trim control…but when I take off with the poorman’s joystick for first time, I finally feel the immediate urge for having this control within finger reach.
P.P.S. I am running all these on Windows Vista with Microsoft Flight Simulator X SP2 without a single glitch.
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