How it all started....

[zorlac]

After a few years playing the DesertCombat mod for Battlefield 1942 (I was the video guy for the DC test team), I moved house and lost broadband for nearly 18 months. Towards the end of that period, I started playing Lockon (LOMAC) in single player. My HOTAS provided me with what I thought at the time was more buttons than I would ever need... yeah... right :)

After a while (i.e when I needed more buttons again), I got myself a Belkin Nostromo gamepad, and mapped a load of options onto that as time went along:

This worked fine for a while, with multiple shift states, and a mouse wheel and a D-Pad, but after a while it started to become a bit clumsy. Having to take my left hand off the throttle and place it on the gamepad made it a bit tricky to use at points. I needed something with more buttons that didnt require a shift state to operate (and didnt require my brain to have to work out what shift state I required :) )

I did toy with the idea of getting a Saitek PCDash from somewhere:

But it just didnt look like something that would do anything more than the game pad.

After a while, I got myself an X-Keys unit:

58 keys of USB goodness. And it was good.... easy to set up, easy to print out custom key tops to group buttons together.

I used this for a while, adding new key top images as I went along.... but something was nagging at me, and I couldnt work out what it was.

Battlefield2 came along and suddenly I knew what that nagging was. Once the X-Keys have had custom key tops inserted, it was impossible to change them on a per game basis without having to go through the fiddley process of taking the key tops off and changing them.... and changing them back again.

What I was looking for was a gamepad type device that would allow the quick and easy swapping of the key tops, but I could not find such a device :(

[zorlac]

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:

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?

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.