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ECTS 2000
by Kurt "Froglips" Giesselman
COMBATSIM.COM European Bureau ChiefThe new stick has a much larger head which spaces the four way hats out much better than the old design. The F-22 Guilluame brought with him was an original F-22 with the new electronic installed. The modified stick has a connector for the TQS and RCS and a USB plug (Tada!).
Fig. 11 Modified F-22
Fig. 12 Note the USB plug and the labeled connectors
Guillemot is still considering whether to build a RCS style rudder pedal to match the performance of the new HOTAS 2000. I sure hope they do. The F-22 2000 is designed to accept the old RCS analog rudders. No digital rudders in this version of the Thrustmaster flight system. However, Guillemot is considering building a new version of the Thrustmaster Rudder Control System with proportional toe brakes. The original RCS is commanding a small fortune on eBay these days. We can only hope for now that a new RCS 2000 is developed.
Fig. 13 New electronics in F-22 2000
The stick has all new electronics inside, fully digital. A new custom chip set means that no custom drivers are required to load the HOTAS. In the demo we were shown, the USB from an F-22 2000 with a TQS 2000 connected were plugged into a PC running Windows 98. The PC proceeded to load a HID (Human Interface Device) for each axis it found using the standard Window’s HID device. When the load was complete we could go to the Game Controllers application in Window’s Device Manager and view properties to see all the operating axis (5) and buttons (28).
Fig.14 The old F-22 circuit board on left, new on right
The TQS has a mini-joystick with an integral push button replacing the mouse ball. The TQS has fully adjustable detents for Idle and Full Power. The Idle detent can be from 0% to 20% of scale and the Full Power detent can be from 60%-100% of scale. The stiffness of the detent and the throttle action is fully adjustable too.
The programming of the old Thrustmaster gear was always a challenge before an aftermarket program was developed. The good news is that Guillemot has gotten together with James Hallows, the creator of Fox Two and recently Digital Foxy, to develop the new programming software for the Thrustmaster HOTAS 2000. The new programming system, dubbed Thrustmapper 2000, has a number of features that should make it one of the most powerful HOTAS programming systems on the market. The plans are to include 32 programmable flags and up to 16 simultaneous macros. The simultaneous macros, as described by Mark Mooney, Hardware Engineer for the project, were quite interesting to me. They appear to be true multi-tasking procedures. This would allow all sorts of complex sequencing commands to be added to control AI or to prepare for planned events in simulations.
All eight axis can be reassigned except the X and Y. The stick axis has a higher sampling rate than the other axis for finer control. Hat 1 on the stick is an eight-way hat. All others remain four-way in the current design. The twenty- eight buttons are fully programmable and now support Direct Input to be automatically configured for some games.
The configurations that are built with the new Thrustmapper 2000 software load very quickly (less than 2 seconds according to Mark). The new software has an auto-loader that detects the active window and loads the appropriate configuration. I am looking forward to this with a little trepidation. Complex simulations that keep multiple windows open in the background trip up many of these types of programs.
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