Page & Image
That one was a nice job : I had to program a driver between a PC and a flight simulator for a french company called Page & Image. The commands were coming from the joystick or the mouse, and the goal was to move the simulator’s cockpit according to the user input. Not too slow, not too fast, using a PID controller built on some sophisticated PC card connected to huge engines, powerful enough to move the turret of a tank at full speed…I made thousands of tests before it worked, but that was really fun.
We then installed a plasma screen inside the simulator’s cockpit, and I wrote some demos for it. I first adapted Tim Clarke's MARS for the simulator : it smoothly followed the relief of Mars, going where the user wanted to move – very cool. Later I talked about the simulator to Simon Caby, a friend working at PolygonStudio. He saw the beast and had the idea to adapt one of their games, June, for it. So we did it. It just took us one evening to hack the code and make the game dialog with my driver. One evening and that was it ! We had a built-in version of June, hardware rendered with a 3DFX, playable in a Flight Simulator ! What can I say ? I played…oops, tested my code for hours, and the only painful thing was the heat inside the cockpit…
The most recent version of this simulator (here with a racing game) :