Finally got FA-18 working in XP and the X52 & eMagin software still functioning. I also discovered that to get the most out of mouse emulation, you need to go into the mouse control panel of the O.S. and turn off Enhance Pointer Precision. The eMagin has just gone from zero to hero. FA-18 is phenomenal. Dizzying. Vertigo inducing. I can look around, drop a bomb, watch it to the ground, and look directly forward with little or no recentering required much of the time. And I haven't even tweaked the response speed within the eMagin software yet since I turned off that acceleration curve option (Enhance Pointer Precision). Now I have to figure out ways around both the funky jumbotron water and the AA slowdown. With all the D3D options maxed out on the x800xt AIW atitray tools, it does look excellent. The sim was obviously designed specifically for 800x600. Any larger and the HUD gets too small. Any lower...well, you get the point. It's very clearly designed and optimized for this res. With antialiasing and alternate pixel centers the HUD looks so cool...transparency, varying line thickness. We need to figure out a way to fix this radar-HUD conflict that occurs in AA mode.

Just wish FA-18 had an HMS. I'm a little frightened to try F-15. I don't want to spoil my good luck.

Ladies and gentlemen, the age of virtual reality has arrived.

I just spent an hour tweaking WWII Fighters' eMagin mouse emulation settings. I got it to a perfect representation and proportion of motion within the cockpit. I've been flying aerobatics with rarely a need to recenter. Totally fluid. Completely natural. Instantanious headtracking. I move, I see. I look back to front, I'm forward. Small movements, big movements. The only thing it's not translating is my head roll, but I'm getting use to that. 1/11/14 on the settings. FA-18 was 1/19-22/22. With Enhance Pointer Precision off, the settings have changed on both for the better to compensate for the linear response. This is just sooooo right. OH MY GOD. And I strongly suspect both FA-18 and WWII Fighters will translate extremely well to 3D. I know Longbow 2 was considered the best for shutterglasses and the VFX for 3D, and these other two don't seem to be mix and matching 2D (especially shadows) and 3D in the same scenes like IL2 does.

The fastest card that does D3D stereoscopics reliably at this point is the 6800 series (GT, Ultra, etc). The 7800 does not have stereo drivers. The Fire GL line from ATI only has optimized quad buffering frame sequential 3D for Open GL, and I'm getting mixed info on whether it can do D3D stereo at all. eDimensional claims to have stereo drivers for ATI, but I tried them last night (actually, two nights cause I haven't slept tonight!) and it only messed things up. I might have done something wrong, but I'm a little worried about trying. Everything I've heard about the eDimensional shutter glasses and their third party drivers has been bad. So it looks like 6800 GT/Ultra is the best in town right now. It's oddly a relief, because I didn't want to get a new motherboard.

Anyone know how WWII Fighters and FA-18 are going to behave with a 6800 and the older drivers you need to go with the stereo ones?

JF-18 will exhibit 16-bit color banding with a 6800-series card. This is fixed by using DXTweaker, described in the "banding..." thread that is 16 pages long and counting.

There shouldn't be any problem using older drivers with JF-18; I've reviewed some old posts where we were discussing 12.xx series detonators, and they were working fine. Detonator 30.82 was the nVidia/JF-18 driver of choice for many years. The only problem would be to make sure a 6800-series card can actually work with the older driver you have in mind.

I don't like the fact that this is not a helmet design like the VFX-1. I have an indention on my forehead from it like Thing from the Adam's Family movie (see also Twin Peaks and Star Trek: TNG). Thing's the giant, right? It's really wrecking my forhead, so I'm going to try going back to the skiiing headband underneith. God, I feel hung over from lack of sleep and brain drain.

Lurch, not Thing.

The Z800 can scale two horizontal resolutions (vertical lines): 1280 and 1600. It cannot seem to scale the vertical resolutions (horizontal lines) at all. With those it either doesn't work at all or just uses the top 600 lines. If you run your desktop at 1280x960, you should be able to get it to run anything that can run at that resolution, though the aspect ratio will be distorted and the bottom 168 lines will be cropped out. You can also get it to crop most resolutions to 800x600.losing the bottom and right edges, but keeping the correct aspect ratio. You do this by changing a program's resolution to a non-standard one. For X-Plane I go into either the resolution config file or the program itself and simply bump the resolution from 1024x768 (the minimum X-Plane will run at) to 1025x768, which Windows doesn't know what to do with. That seems to be the best way to fly twin seat aircraft where you're not in the center of the canopy. For single seaters I use the 1280x960 desktop method, with either "set resolution on startup" within X-Plane off or no, depending on the ATI drivers I have and the X-Plane 8 version I'm running. Right now I think it's doing the opposite it's suppose to. With both these methods I can reach pretty much anything I need to if I switch to the 3D cockpit and look at something and/or zoom in. A few cockpits are a bit more problematic because there are nav aids at the bottom of the range of motion. Usually I can just reach these on my 30 inch screen a few feet away by just tilting my head back and looking under the visor. Emagin definitely needs to find a way to get the unit to scale 960 and/or 1200 vertical resolution to 600 lines. I don't see any reason why they can't. It's obviously scaling the horizontal resolutions of 1280 and 1600, so it just doesn't make any sense to me. If they can do this, Austin Meyers would consider programming native tracking support into X-Plane, something that currently uses an accelerated mouse curve that's difficult to use well with emulation. Turning off Enhance Precision Pointer only helps so much on this one.

http://www.c3dnow.com/Info/Support.htm

Cybertronics DirectZ ATI Stereo Drivers

Very rough around the edges and in need of major improvement. I'm not even sure if this company is still running. ATI is full of crap, though. Stereo on their cards is definitely possible. USAF demo just has a problem with the near textures being treated as close up like the HUD and the texture buffers aren't emptying like they should. I haven't figured out all the settings, but 3D is a reality on ATI pre-1800 consumer cards. The eMagin is capable of a fantastic, high contrast picture in 3D, let me tell you. USAF looks fantastic. When the textures are not getting fouled up the stereo 3D is also much easier on the eyes than 2D.

I"m working on a review of this product (Emagin Z800) right now.

I'm using a Geforce 6800GTOC with 78.01 stereo drivers.

Supposedly 71 drivers work for one group of titles (like Open GL ones) but you need 78 for Lomac...or maybe it was the opposite. Most D3D titles will work with either, though.

Here are my latest mouse emulation configurations with Enhanced Pointer Precision off and mouse sensitivity on the exact middle in Windows control panel:

Flanker 2.51: 6/11/7

X-Plane: 1/6/6 or 1/7/7

WWII Fighters: 1/11/14

FA-18 with those Janes files below normal priority: 1/22/22 or 1/24/24

F-15: 1/20/24

No mouse emulation for two sims that would work extremely well with eMagin tracking if they had it: Total Air War and Longbow 2. Ironically, both have full 3D pits and helmet mounted sighting systems. The Union Reality worked for TAW and the VFX for LB2, so it's been done before and is possible.

On all of them except X-Plane I put the cockpit forward button on the mouse fire on the X52. I also keep the mouse stick as the mouse, but turned down in sensitivity for more fine adjustments when abrupt front centering is not necessary and/or wanted. On FA-18 I make a band on the precision slider at the bottom (for the right mouse button) to turn mouse cockpit on/off. You also need to remember on that sim that when you switch to mouse pan it changes your view to match the current pointer position, so you can control where it will switch to by keeping this in mind. In X-Plane, I make the X52 mouse wheel button "ctrl-o" for switching on mouse cockpit. Like FA-18, it will move immediately to the current pointer position, so you need to be aware of that. Unlike FA-18, X-Plane does not have a true 3D cockpit center button, so you have to do all the centering with the mouse (mouse stick for me). X-Plane has the worst precision in mouse movement, probably due to some kind of motion curve, and seems to need correction even more than Flanker and F-15. Obviously native tracker support will be better than all this with both its orientation data based on a compass and its motion data. So reaching the pan limit or encountering drift will be moot since it uses both of these to determine the orientation of the HMD at any given moment, rather than just move a mouse. Native support will also be particulary useful for sims like FA-18 and X-Plane that have clickable cockpits so you can click and pan at the same time without changing modes.

Neither the 7800 512MB nor the 7800 AGP cards work with the 78.01 graphics drivers required for the stereo drivers. I'm in the process of trying out more demos with DirectZ for ATI, as well as tweaking the configuration on the USAF DirectZ .ini file. Here's a link on the eMagin board regarding research I've been doing into the history of Winx3D and DirectZ:

http://www.3dvisor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=82

I should point out that the newest stereo Forceware drivers supposedly work on the 7800 AGP, though their compatibility and stability has been questioned.

I also no longer use Windows 98SE...just XP.

There is now an OLED calibration utility.

Native tracking support now exists for MS Flight Simulator 2004 and Live For Speed.

Hadn't seen this before:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0008IC...glance&n=551440

The price has dropped $350.

Last I checked 800-550 was a drop of $250 , but that's still a whole lot cheaper.

That's the price I paid with the CES coupon. For everyone else it was $899 until today.

Ah. Well, even better, then.

$550 makes this cheaper than a high-end LCD monitor...

...or most of the DLP projectors worth buying.