A few weeks later, near the end of December 2005, I was standing outside my house at 2am, having a ciggie with a friend after a long LOMAC session, when this idea popped into my head. The only way to get all the features I wanted in a game pad was to use a LCD touchscreen.
This was a revelation... but I was sure that because it was such a simple idea, someone somewhere must have done it before... i spent a few days searching, and found nothing. So, I started coding...
27th January 2006, Ruggbutt and his Gadget madness (aka "My New Toy") thread started on the lockon.ru forums:
http://forum.lockon.ru/showthread.php?t=13472
You have absolutely no idea how much I wanted to jump in and say what I was working on, but I couldnt... I had nothing to show. Just a small POC application that people would laugh at and ignore. I had to keep quiet, even if it was difficult to do so.
Then, on the 1st February, there was a post on the thread from FlyHigh73 that made me sit up and blink... twice:
Quote:
Creation of the ultimate toy....
That is a nice toy. What about a completely programable touch screen that you could change any key combinations and have multiple layers of screens with different functions? You press a key on the screen and the PC that it is hooked up to sends a message to the PC that is playing your simulator?
Sound interesting?
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I didnt find this message until 4th March (been a bit busy, you understand :)..... I sat there, looking at the screen, grinning smugly to myself. Should I? Shouldnt I? Oh man.....
By this time, I was already using my TB system in real flights in LOMAC on a regular basis, and had posted a few pics of it in use to some close friends, so I just posted one of them on the lockon.ru forum and sat back, knowing the "wha...! eh? ooooo!" kind of responses that would happen over the next few hours/days.
The rest of the TB development has been pretty much public, and described in that thread on the forums. Little did I know that it would take on a life of its own... nor did I know it would end up with its own website and forums.
My personal project, designed "just to see if i am capable of doing this", has taken up a lot of my time, but its been worth it (almost) all the way. I look forward to learning more, and adding more features as TB progresses towards a more robust future release.