MiGMan
2004: AMD 2100
With the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 it was time to bite the bullet and get some serious PC grunt happening - albeit on a modest budget.
This is a picture of the 2006 - P4 3.0 GHz - Rigged for Silent Running - but in it's earlier AMD incarnation it looked exactly the same, with a Green "AMD inside" sticker instead of the shown "Intel inside". OK - and the "Powered by ASUS" sticker was absent.
Case - Standard PC tower with 4 optical drive bays and 3 3.5" HDD bays. As you will read in 2006 - P4 3.0 GHz - Rigged for Silent Running I have concluded that for many reasons the medium to large sized PC towers are the way to go.
Motherboard - Gigabyte
RAM - 512 MEG
Hard Drives - 1 x 30 GIG | 1 x 120 GIG
Optical Drives - SONY DVD Player
Floppy Drives - 1.
Well - you never know when you are going to need one, and a large portion of the Flight Sim Museum's physical collection uses floppy disk media so I still need to be able to access it.
External Storage - 120 GIG USB 2.0 Drive. Coordinating the Flight Sim Museumarchive had become a real pain using rewritable CD ROMs. The collection spanned a box full of disks. Now I could backup the archive painlessly - and quickly - to one device.
Network - PIC Network card connecting to the Celeron 466 Mk II. Using a network in conjunction with HyperSnap-DX enabled me to dump screen captures to the slower computer and use that computer to edit and publish them without having to quit the sim itself.
Monitors - 2 x 17" - SAMSUNG and Mitsubishi. At about AUD $ 220.00 each that was equivalent to the cost of just one flat screen LCD - and for flight simming the CRT technology still delivers more contrast, better viewing angles and quicker response.
Operating system - Windows XP Home Edition
Controllers
Thrustmaster H.O.T.A.S. Cougar
Microsoft Game Voice
Logitech Game Pad
Microsoft Strategic Commander
All housed on a simply constructed aluminium and plywood desktop console.
Thrustmaster rudder pedals.