Revvin

I've not tried the X52 so can't comment on that though I have owned a Cougar. My experience of the Cougar was a very bad one, so bad it really killed my enthusiasm to go and play sims as the HOTAS kept letting me down and it just became too frustrating. As the failures were mainly down to the electronics I did'nt want to throw good money after bad and mod one if it was going to let me down again so I sold the fourth Cougar and bought a CH Fighterstick and Pro Throttle to go with my Pro Pedals and Flight Sim Yoke. I'm still using them three years on with no issues and they feel good as new. Programming is easy using the Control Manager software, its a straightforward GUI but if you want to take it further you can program buttons do to all manner of things using CH's powerful CMS scripting language. CH's support is well known in the flight sim groups for being among the best there is and their programming software is constantly being updated by Bob Church with new features and support for new OS's like Windows XP 64 Bit and later Vista. My sim controller setup has expanded somewhat over the years to add a Throttle Quadrant and the new Multi Function Panel but adding new controllers to existing maps is no problem at all using the Control Manager software.

I think Ferrari and Renault will be strong though both teams have lost their world champions. Massa was a good driver last year and I've always thought Raikonnen would do well in a better car though he can switch off sometimes if things are not going his way. McLaren may be the dark horse, to me they were on a bit of a downward spiral after recent years of being at the top but maybe they have something up their sleeve, something that tempted Alonso apart from the money - I'd be dissapointed if he did just do it for the money. I think Williams were way too far off the pace last year to suddenly come good this year. BAR Honda may upset a few people this year.

Hyperlobby is pretty good though its interface is clunky and lacking in features. I prefer to use Xfire which provides a instant messenger and game server browser all in one. If a friend see's me on a server they can just click on my name and join.

I'm not saying its the best but look for a server called 'Warclouds' and 'Warclouds touch of history' they are pretty good fun.

Thats a link to the v4.07m dedicated server. The v4.071m BETA patch can be found here, here, here or here with the dedicated server v4.071m patch here.

The ECB should send a bill to the players to pay back the cost of the tour as they've effectively had a nice Australian holiday on their tab.

Nice review! Ghost have combined the commands for a few games into one .cmc fiel. The .cmc file holds the game commands assigned to names which you then just apply to buttons in the Control Manager software. I don't think Ergodex will be offering any kind of trade up on the DX-1. You can connect up to 16 MFP's should you want to and there are official 64 Bit drivers available for Windows XP and Vista support will likely follow once MS releases it publicly and stops changing code :D

LOL Wenger and Pardew must have been watching that before last weeks game ;)

It seems that there are huge differences in quality at a regional level. Early on when South Wales was running pretty good there were lots of complaints from people in the North - Newcastle etc. I got fed up of loss of conenction sometimes happening for a few days at a time and their only reply was "its not us, try turning your modem on and off..blah blah" the same canned response. Fortunately now in the UK we've got a good choice of providers. Sorry for drifting OT a little, but to get back on to the subject of spam, as I said above I've used Norton's Anti Spam software and found it to be pretty good at blocking out mail though its worth complaining to your ISP and finding out what steps they take to combat spam as most reputable ISP's now filter customers mail. Other than that there are some free alternatives (though I've not tried these): Mailwasher Spamihilator

Well at least it seems they have finally installed a spam filter on their mail server, one they told me two years ago they could not do. I wish it was just a case of too much spam mail as I could live with that by providing my own spam filter (which I did - Norton's Anti Spam) but the poor service quality - frequent loss of connection and the way they screwed up my account and left me without email for a week when they mistakenly tied my account to another when they found no details for me on their systems despite the fact I had been a customer for seveal years and actually beta tested the service in the Cardiff area. The final straw was when I gave them notice in October a few years ago only for them to charge me for November, December, January and February. Luckily I refused to go on direct debit because of the poor service so they took no money from me though we ended up splitting the difference on the charges just to stop the madness of letters threatening bailiff's despite the fact I was in frequent contact trying to resolve the dispute, it was a case of one hand not knowing what the other was doing - there seemed to be little communication between departments at their end. Glad to hear you're getting good service from them but I hope you understand why I would be extremely reluctant to be a customer of theirs again.

What ISP do you use? I'm with BT and while I have been tempted to go elsewhere because of the price I stay because they have an excellent spam filter that cuts out 99% of the spam mail out there but I can log in to the mail server online and check the spam filter incase a legit mail is held there. I did'nt check it for a few weeks and logged in a few days ago to find 127 spam mail's and yet I did not get a single piece of spam end up in my computers mail box thanks to their filter. Contrast that to NTL where I used to get 120+ A DAY! and there were nasty rumours (though I should say unsunbstantiated) circling around the net that they actually sold customers email details on to companies as NTL was strapped for cash.

Debby McDowell, Director of Sales and Marketing at CH Products has announced that the next product to be released by CH Products will be the Multi Function Panel (MFP). This new product incorporates the programmability of the CH Control Manager software with technology from Ergodex to provide a versatile panel that will appeal to fans of all gaming genre's as well as being a useful device for daily computer use. Up to 16 Multi Function Panels can be connected providing up to 12,800 button combinations. You can read Debby McDowell's press release by clicking below.

I have some new hi-res pictures up at the CH Hangar in this thread and also a confirmed price.

You could set it up to mimic any cockpit you want. Michael posted a little more on the capabilites of the MFP at the CH Hangar:

The CH Hangar also has the files mirrored, you can find the links in the announcement here.

I don't see you having any issues, IL-2 supports up to 4 devices IIRC. You could program your stick and pedals using the Control Manager software and program the X45 throttle in the Saitek SST software. As long as you map the axis correctly in game it should all work together.

The official IL-2 site has posted news that the official Pe-2 bomber add-on will be released on Friday the 28th. It's a payware add-on costing £9.99 and will be downloadable from Ubi.com. There will be some other flyable aircraft added (mainly Eastern Front) as well as 95 campaign missions, 5 single player and 5 multi player missions.

Yes you can never have too much RAM, been considering another GB to add to the one I have after seeing the loading times drop and performance increase on heavy resource hogs such as Battlefield 2. That said though IL-2 can be tuned to suit a great many specs so the one posted by eightlein should be enough to get him into the sim and then he'll end up as sad mad and addicted as the rest of us :D

The specs on the box say: win98/Me/XP PIII or AMD Athlon 1Ghz 512mb RAM 64Mb vid memory 1.1GB HDD You're specs should be ok, you will have to turn down a little detail though but the IL-2/PF sereis is very scalable to suit a wide variety of specs. Before you buy though did you see the main page at Combatace? There is a DVD version coming which includes IL-2, the Aces Expansion and Pacific Fighters and all the content (planes and terrains) included in the free patches. It's well worth getting both IL-2:FB and PF as that is generally what is played online but also offline you will have a huge array of missions and campaign's to fly not to mention over 200 planes to choose from! It's out at the end of the month which is not far away!

Bill ?Son of Hew? Hewett has written an article on 531_Ghost's impressive mod for CH's Pro Throttle called the 'Franken Potato'. You can read the review here.

Been playing Lock On v1.1 a little more with these drivers and I'm impressed with them, with 77.30 installed the whole game runs much smoother even down low looking out of the cockpit watching the terrain speed by

The 77.30 drivers that come with the Battlefield 2 demo seem to be pretty good

Congratulations, I'm a Liverpool fan but my son has supported West Ham for years despite all their ups and down's. He was gutted last year when they missed out but was over the moon yesterday.

Not much to choose from in the WWI sim genre so you might want to take a look at Richthofen's Skies a WWI mod for the Targetware game engine. It's in BETA at the moment but may interest those who like modding as the game engine is pretty open to modification and adding planes etc and you can host your own large scale server as well.

Looking forward to seeing what's added in v0.65