Flight Sim Version 2 was from early 2008 and had some minor upgrades from Version 1. It also needed an out of the way home, so why not under the basement stairs?

Monitors were the same as its predecessor, but I added a custom mixture control, elevator trim, and a box of switches. Mixture and elevator trim were potentiometers running to the switch box. The insides were just a USB board ripped out of an old joystick. That allowed me to read in three analogs (previously the joystick x & y and throttle axes) and a handful of buttons and send them over USB. Windows doesn’t know the difference, it still just looks like a game controller device, which makes them trivial to map in any flight simulator software.

The toggle switch on the upper left of the box was for flaps, and the red and black pushbuttons were mainly view changes and such.

I also added a parking brake switch to the Cessna Switch Panel I had bought from DekstopAviator.com for Flight Sim Version 1. It wasn’t until Flight Sim Version 4 that I started designing my own custom switch panels.

Same hand-me-down PC was running Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, which actually wasn’t bad.

This was all before I built my CNC or had a 3D printer, so it was a bit primitive. The monitor stand matches the staircase studs well though.

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