GT4 and a Sweet Rig

I just played a version of GT4. It is looking amazing. I had the most fun I ever had playing GT. Here at the studio we have a sweet GT4 rig setup. It has a racing seat, one of the really good Logitech steering systems, and three LCD TVs. You might ask, "Three TVs? What for?" GT4 now has a feature where you can hook multiple PS2 units together and get peripheral vision. It makes a huge difference in the quality of the gaming experience. The three PS2s are networked together. One is the main view and the other two are the left and right views.

It actually reminds me a lot of a helicopter simulator that I worked on in 1995. The OH-58D simulator for the US Army. It had 4 big screen monitors 1024 x 768 res each all driven off a Silicon Graphics Reality Engine.

In the photo you can see how the monitors are laid out around the cockpit. Similar to the GT4 multi screen feature. Except the GT4 visuals are 10 million times better.
This simulator could be hooked into SimNet. You could join in battle simulations with other helicopter and tank simulators. Keeping the terrain and visuals identical in each simulator was very important for communications and fair fights. So we had to run the standardized US Army commissioned terrain database. It looked like poopie, but it had to run on the much older simulators we connected to in battles.

In the picture the simulator was configured as an OH-58D. It was also could run in UH-60 and AH64 configurations.


This is a picture of the OH-58D helicopter that we were simulating. It was at the same conference, Army Aviation Association of America or Quad A for short.