Stick & Throttle

December 20, 2012 12:44 PM

Sim pilots: help me join the 21st Century by sharing your opinions of the current crop of available controls.

So, over the last couple years it seems like there's been a mini-renewal of compelling sim and sim-style titles that can support and benefit from the use of a full features HOTAS controller. e.g. the DCS sims, MechWarrior Online, etc. Other titles are nearing release, like Elite: Dangerous. With frugalsworld dead and gone, I'm hoping some of the veteran sim pilots here can steer me in the right direction on replacing my hopelessly worn out X-36/X-45 HOTAS.

I've heard conflicting things about the current Saitek gear. I've also heard that the CH gear is not what it used to be, which sort of leaves me scratching my head. Do I really need to pony up for the Thrustmaster Warthog? Is there a decent F-16 style set out there? The bulk of my experience is with Falcon, so that would be the most comfortable and familiar layout for me.

posted by snuffleupagus to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I have the Saitek X52 Pro and can't imagine being any happier with anything else. It's got a lot of metal parts where you'd usually find plastic, tons of controls, a dual spring setup and adjustable height palm rest/lower trigger on the joystick, customizable illumination, and an API to interface with sims that support it - this handles things such as the secondary display, the color/action of the LEDs, et cetera.

The negative things you may have heard about recent Saitek stuff MIGHT be with regards to the (non-pro) X52 which had some issues that the Pro (released later) sorted out.
posted by destructive cactus at 9:51 PM on December 20, 2012

I have an X-52 Pro as well, and primarily use it for the DCS titles and Falcon BMS. I like it so far but have owned it less than a year, so can't really comment on long-term reliability.

A few things you should know about it:

• It installs a "DirectOutput" service which causes some OSes to crash horribly. I'm talking frequent blue screens of death here. It is easy to fix this by disabling the service though.
• The buttons and wheels on the throttle base aren't programmable and aren't reported to the OS are regular buttons and wheels. There is a special Saitek API that needs to be used to get at these and most titles aren't written to do that. So consider these inputs to be not useful.
• The mini-stick on the throttle can't be set up as an axis or a hat. It can only be a mouse controller, or programmed for keyboard macros through the Saitek software.

Depite having lots of buttons, hats, and other controls, it doesn't have enough to map every HOTAS control on an F-16 or A-10C. So you are going to want at least one modifier/shift key programmed. The DCS titles have a really nice controls editor that makes this easy to do, and you can have more than one modifier key so that each control can be re-used many times.

Falcon BMS does support a single modifier key, which is enough, but you can't set this up through the input editor. You have to edit config files in notepad, which is a pain in the ass, but if you want help with that just send me some MeFi Mail because I've already done it for my X-52 Pro.
posted by FishBike at 5:19 AM on December 21, 2012

Do Dhauzimmer's drivers and hazardscript work on the X-52? I still have all the binaries. (Used to be hosted at freebirds, maybe? Or Ron Hunt's saitek page? Hard to remember.) It sounds like its as needed tfor the 52 as the 36.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:56 AM on December 21, 2012

Do Dhauzimmer's drivers and hazardscript work on the X-52?

I don't think they do, no. The way I've got mine set up is a profile in the Saitek software that just maps everything as a DirectX control except for the mini-stick (which sends some keyboard commands for up/down/left/right control). Then I set up everything else in the game itself.
posted by FishBike at 1:23 PM on December 21, 2012