by James "Nutty" Hallows

3.) Calibration

When Bob first e-mailed me to tell me about the chips, we discussed several possibilites as to where this could go, and I offered to develop a new version of Foxy, namely Digital Fox Two Pro to take advantage of the new chips.

The first thing we set out to do was to write a better calibration routine. I've always hated the fact that if I wanted to recalibrate my rudders for example, I had to go through and recalibrate every aspect of my controllers again. Well with these chips and the new software I've written, it's possible now to calibrate your joystick, throttle and rudders independantly. It saves a lot of hassle and it's so much more intuitive. You'll like it :)

Click on the images below for some screenshots of the new calibration routine. So much friendlier, more precise and less frustrating that the Game Controllers Applet!

4.) DOS
The new chips take the controllers into a purely Windows environment. At long last, there's no DOS software required for downloading or other aspects of these sticks - it's all in Windows, and about time too!

5.) Download speed
So, how long does it take you to download your Falcon 4 file to your controllers? Well, this is one of the things that will hit you straight away with these new chips. It's instantaneous. And I mean instantaneous. Well, Bob wouldn't agree with me on this I'm sure (he's very modest).

I think somewhere along the way he quoted me a figure of 500ms for a download. Well, I haven't been able to measure it. In fact, Bob had to put a delay on the window that pops up to tell you that the file was downloaded, otherwise you'd think it hadn't been downloaded.

6.) 32 button joystick
Many games these days don't have many commands associated with them - for example Need for Speed. The new chips allow your controllers to be seen by Windows as a full 32 analogue button setup, and what this means is that for such games, you don't actually need to program your controllers. Instead, within the game itself, you can assign all the functions directly on to all the buttons. This makes it much simpler to setup, not requiring programming or downloading for that game.

When Windows starts up, a simple icon in the system tray tells you that you're in this 32 button mode, and clicking on it effectively "turns the joystick on" to work with the current file downloaded into it. There's another advantage to this. Do you remember downloading a faulty file to your controllers to see them go haywire generating characters rapidly or randomly, often resulting in various Windows popping up, or crashing your machine? And then you had to reboot and use F22Clear.exe or F22Reset.exe to try to get your controllers to behave again, followed by recalibrating?

Well, if that for any reason should happen with these new chips, just a simple click on the system tray icon "turns off" the joysticks allowing you to take control of them immediately and stop them generating nonsense. Mind you, I've yet to see these new controllers doing that. Something got fixed along the way, which should put a stop to this issue I see being raised time and time again in my e-mail inbox and the newsgroups.

Click to continue

7.) New functions and increased programmability

Now where do I start here? The real beauty of this setup is that functionality can be completely redefined in the driver, so updates are downloadable and don't require chip changes. So once these chips are in, new functions can be added to enhance the programmability of your controllers without a hardware upgrade. Wow! Let's look now at some of the new commands available to us with these new chips.

There are three new USE options and two special throttle statements. First, the USE options.

How we've all needed this one! This is a great new feature which allows you to set how your mouse will respond in a game. Personally, I have found that using the mouse control on the TQS to be very sim dependant in its usefulness. In some sims, it's just too slow, and although I like to maintain true hands on throttle and stick, it just isn't practical if you spending ages waiting for the mouse to slew over to the apprpriate MFD.

With the new chips we have a way of changing the sensitivity of the mouse per sim, and suddenly my TQS mouse can be made to behave the way I want it to. That's a big plus in my book. Here's the new command for this:

USE MSENS nn

where 'nn' is a value between 0 and 100. That sets the overall sensitivity for the mouse. What you guys are currently using is a mouse that's roughly equivalent to a USE MSENS 25, or 25% of maximum sensitivity.

The other two USE commands are in effect when an analogue throttle is used (ie. no THR statement). They are:

USE MTSET nn

and

USE ABSET nn

where 'nn' is a value between 0 and 255. These 'warp' the throttle response in analogue mode. It looks a bit complex and the values would need to be determined empirically for each game/system.

What happens is this. The throttle normally generates a raw value between 0 and 255, though it doesn't normally achieve either of those values in practice because of mechanical limitations in the throttle stroke. The value returned at the AB and MT detents is pretty much just a result of where they happen to end up on the overall travel. These let you move the RAW value that the system generates at these positions.

For example, suppose a particular TQS returns raw values of:

10 - Max
25 - AB Detent
220 - MT Detent
240 - Min

Suppose you had a sim like Falcon (I know Falcon deals with this on it's own now, but just as an example) that kicks in it's afterburner at a raw value of 40. Adding a command:

USE ABSET 40

would force the driver to rescale the output so that at the AB Detent a raw value of 40 would occur. At max throttle, it would still produce a raw value of 10. This would force the sim's afterburner to kick in at the AB notch as it should.

Go to Part III.