Using a Midi Sound board with Flight Sim

I happen to do some music recording, and own a novation midi controller. A Midi sound board creates digital signals based on the positions of its controls that a computer can read, as opposed to manipulating analog signals like a traditional sound board.

It looks like this:

Bottom line- this thing has 8 sliders and 8 knobs for a total of 16 axes, plus 46 usable buttons, 8 pots (Like knobs but they spin forever, instead of only going around once), and large customizable displays capable of displaying a name (like "Autopilot master" or "Select Comm 1") and position for each and every one of those controls. Though it was designed for music production, does that not scream use me for freaking flight sim???

Unfortunately, getting the thing to actually work with flight sim was quite an ordeal. There is a lot of software that will take a joystick and convert it to a midi controller, but almost none that will do the opposite. Apparently not many people own specialized midi controllers and want to use them to play video games... 😀

After almost giving up, I found a program called GlovePIE... It was designed originally as an interface scripting tool for virtual reality gloves, but eventually grew to cover just about any piece of hardware that can talk to a computer. (Right now it's pretty well known for being able to set up a WiiMote as a game controller on a computer over a bluetooth connection.) It looks like the midi function was added as an afterthought, but it was all I needed! (Though a little more documentation and reference would be nice... The help file was nowhere to be found 😛 )

What it let me do is write a script that took a given midi output and send it to a virtual joystick (Program called PPJoy, looks like it hasn't been in development in a few years!) This virtual stick shows up to the computer (and therefore flight sim, or any game) as an actual piece of hardware. I had to make 2, because each virtual joystick can only support 8 axes. It took awhile, because I had to set up my midi controller with specific outs (Each output gets what's called a control change number), name each out (So each control's name would show on the displays), and then set up each one in GlovePIE before I could start mapping them in flight sim. Most of this was done by manually entering controller numbers for each control, as well as a few other parameters that needed to be set in order for them to behave properly. It was pretty tedious.

Worth it though! Now in addition to my x52 joystick, I have 4 individual prop, mixture, and throttle controls, left, and right brakes, flaps, and trim set to physical controls. I'd cut down on the mixture and prop controls, but frankly FS doesn't have any other useful axes left. I've also got most of the important stuff mapped to keys; autopilot controls, radio tuning (I fly on FS-MP, tuning radios with a mouse sucks), engine starters, lights, and whatever else.

I haven't quite finished though; figuring out how to make the pots behave is pretty difficult, as is getting the pads (the big squares at the bottom on the left side.) as they are velocity sensitive and don't work like regular buttons do. That's a project for another day though, i have enough buttons for now 🙂

Having a gazillion buttons is worthless if you can't remember what they do...The displays are the freaking awesome part-- They show information for a selected row, which is shown by the buttons and lights on both ends of the board. When I want to know what a control is, I hit the button for the corresponding row and just read.

Here it's showing info on the second row of buttons (The "off" means that the button is not being pressed, not that the corresponding system in FS is off. I wish I was smart enough to figure that out...)

And here it is saying what each of the sliders do, as well as giving their position on a scale from 0 to 127. (Except for trim, which is shown from -64 to 65).

So yeah basically I don't use my keyboard or mouse anymore...

The controller cost about 300 bucks when i got it. I'm not sure how this compares to your average fs-designed piece of hardware, but for the functionality it seems like a pretty good deal.

Oh, I strongly recommend glovepie for anyone who owns a joystick and wants a little more control over it. It gives you a very powerful scripting interface that lets you mess with the raw data that your joystick's feeding to FS. It also lets you set up your wiimote as a joystick 🙂