Laurent Grossman started playing flight simulation when the horizon line was a screen divided between blue (sky) and green (land).  Here’s the cockpit he is building after some 30 years.

Builder: Laurent Grossman
Location: Antwerp, Belgium
ICAO: EBAW, Antwerp International Airport

Project Notes:
I was playing flight simulation on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum when I was 15 (30 years ago btw), when the horizon line was a screen divide between blue (sky) and green (land).

This is my temporary setup because I still miss a few hardware pieces and I’ll fully integrate it all once it’s all there.

I started by purchasing Saitek’s yoke, rudder, multi and radio panels. I then added 3 more gauges, switch and bip panels, then purchased the GPS5.

It took me a few days to install the GPS5 properly, but once I got it working, it blew my mind away, as it works as a basic fsx-gps, but it also takes over the ATC communication, which means that once the fsx and other software are launched, I don’t have to use either the keyboard or the mouse (even for ATC, as the GPS5 buttons turn into numeric values when switching from GPS to ATC).

I have an brand new ASUS CG8270 quad core i7 – 3400 MHz (turbo 3900 MHz) – 12 GB RAM DIMM DDR3 – 2 TB on 2 HDD+SSD (Cache-SSD 64 GB).

Current graphics card is AMD Radeon HD7770-1024 but thinking of getting a NVIDIA 6xx or something soon.

As I managed to make my hardware work properly, I now intend to put my mind into improving fsx’s performance using as much addon scenery I can while maintaining a proper fps. Tweaking software (fsx.cfg and CGU) and maybe pushing the hardware (oc-ing etc).