PC hardware
Since this cockpit is a cockpit with only one captain’s chair in the center of a semi circle of outside view monitors, we need some extra hardware for the outside views. I ‘m planning to use three windows to view outside. (maybe 5 ultimately) 1 straight ahead and 1 for 40 degrees to the left and 1 for 40 degrees to the right (and optionally 2 times 80 degrees left and right) . I haven’t found a way (yet) to let x-plane make two different views on two different video outputs in the same PC… maybe by running two instances of x-plane on the same pc. But that will take an awful lot of RAM and CPU power.So what I will do is take one PC per window. That is something that’s already foreseen in x-plane. You can configure it as a view only x-plane. It will listen on the network for coordinates, and will show an outside view of that part of the world. Including the same weather as on the machine where x-plane is actually controlled (the control-machine)
So I’ll need 4 PC’s for now. 3 view- and 1 control PC.
I still have the control PC from the previous Cockpit. This is a MSI K9N SLI main-board with 2 PCI-e slots. So I can connect 4 monitors to it. These will be the flight control monitors, and an instructors panel.
For the view-machines I just bought a few P4P800 boards with a 2.4GHz Celeron on e-bay. The were under EUR 40,- so that is quite cheap. I have the ‘old’ video cards from the previous cockpit. NVIDIA geforce FX5600 cards. They will still do the job 
Summary:
Control PC:
MSI K9N SLI main-board
AMD Athlon 3800+ (2.41GHz)
1.5 GB DDR2
350 GB SATA-II HD
2x Radeon HD4350 Dual head Video card
All 3 View PC:
P4P800 VM main-board
Intel Celeron 2.4GHz
1 GB DDR
40 GB HD
Nvidia FX5600 Graphics card
Tags: CPU, monitor, PC's, video card
Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 2:04 pm • Hardware • RSS 2.0 feed • leave a response or trackback
I have a working set: now:
The Control PC (Win-XP + x-plane 9.2)
and a view PC (Win-XP + x-plane 9.2)
Though I had to upgrade both to x-plane 9.43
My view PC wouldn’t start x-plane (probably the NVIDIA driver)
And when I upgraded the view PC to 9.43 it didn’t communicate with the Control PC.
After also upgrading the latter, it all worked fine.
The 2.4GHz Celeron with the FX5600 can barely make 20 fps. So maybe I should look for a real P4 or try to over-clock the Celeron.
A problem (challenge) is that I would like to share a few things from the control PC to the view PC’s.
Since x-plane wants to see the original DL-DVD #1 in one of the DVD drives,I would have to buy 4 sets of x-plane DVD’s… (not what I intended)
A solution to this is use a (free) virtual DVD drive (virtual clone) for windows, Put an image (iso) on the control PC and share it via the network and mount the virtual dvd to it. Or just mount the iso in the Linux file system.
The second challenge is the Scenery info. this takes up over 70 GB. This is a bit tougher in windows and I haven’t found a solution yet.
I would like to mount a network share into an x-plane subdirectory. x-plane/Global Scenery.
I Used SFU (Services For Unix from microsoft) to install a NSF server on the Control PC, Export the ‘Global Scenery’ path, and mount it into the Linux View PC x-plane path.
Because Windows cannot mount into an existing file system. (as far as I know…) I moved to Linux on the View PC’s. Problem now is that I don’t have any sound working on the View PC’s since I installed the NVIDIA driver
OK, solved the sound ‘problem’.
For some reason, installing the NVIDIA driver removes something in the ALSA setup.
I solved it after some googling with:
sudo killall pulseaudio
sudo alsa force-reload
And I have sound again!
The SFU nfs server on the windows machine was a real pain.
I have it working now. Finally !!
Take a look at Services for UNIX – Interoperability to see excactly how to do this.
Just install the SFU package (don’t forget to enable the nfs server)
Share the Global Scenery directory with anonymous access.
And mount the share on the Linux client (view) machines in x-plane/Global Scenery in /etc/fstab like ‘B737NG1:/Global_Scenery /home/frits/X-Plane\0409/Global\040Scenery nfs ro 0 0′ (watch the \040 as the replacement for a space!)
Now you don’t have to install a scenery on the clients, they read it from the (windows) controller machine.
Same story for the ISO of the first DVD. Share it with nfs on the controller.
And mount the iso to a cdrom1 with loop. Like this in /etc/fstab
B737NG1:/xplane /mnt/iso/ nfs ro 0 0
/mnt/iso/XPLANE9.iso /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 loop 0 0
And the wining message-box disappears.
This way we can use very small and cheap harddisks on the view machines.
Works great!
PS: B737NG1 is my controller machine name where I have a nfs shared directory C:/xplane with the iso images in it of every X-Plane dvd called XPLANE9.iso, XPLANE9_2.iso … XPLANE9_6.iso
I am looking for a P4 3+GHz See if these are much faster than a Celeron…It should fit in my P4P800 VM motherboard.