Thrustmaster Cougar Interview Part 1 - The Hardware - Page 1 of 2
Last week James Hallows treated me to a demonstration of the Thrustmaster Hotas Cougar. The prototype that he showed me is not the full metal version but rather an F22 pro and TQS with the internals of the new hotas. What I was shown absolutely stunned me. I expected the Cougar to be something akin to the Digital F22 but made of metal. Far from it, the capabilities of this hotas are way beyond anything that has gone before. Thrustmaster didn't just raise the bar with this hotas, they sent it into orbit!! By the time this interview was over James had a huge pool of drool to clean up. James showed me that something I have believed for years was wrong. Here I was at 38 old and I just found out that there really is a Father Christmas, and his name is Thrustmaster :). The following interview will explain my excitement.
FRUGAL: Hi James, thanks for sparing the time to talk to us about the Cougar. Can you give our readers a little background about yourself?
Sure. Well the first thing that may surprise those who don't know is that I'm a dentist, so it does seem rather bizarre that I should be on the team. I started my flight simming days probably around 13 years ago now, with F-16 Combat Pilot on the Atari ST, and I've been hooked ever since. When I migrated to the PC, I stocked up on various flight sims, and in the manual for one of them, was a picture of a Thrustmaster joystick. The expression "love at first sight" comes to mind as I recall what my heart was doing when I first saw this, and after some difficulty in finding them, I was soon the proud owner of the Thrustmaster PFCS joystick and WCS MkII throttle. I've been in heaven ever since. About 4 years ago, I started working on a Windows editor, Fox Two, to program my controllers, purely as a fun programming project to help me learn Visual Basic better. I uploaded a few screenshots onto my website to show others what I was up to, and my e-mail in tray has been full ever since. I'd never realised up to that point just how large the Thrustmaster community was on the net, and it's a great community to be a part of - there are some good eggs out there :) I think it's fair to say that Thrustmaster has been and looks like it's going to continue to be a major part of my life!
FRUGAL: Can you tell us a little about your role on the team, and how you came to be involved with the project?
I started talking to Peter Kreft, the then project manager of the HOTAS 2000 as it was originally termed, about my proposed involvement round about February/March 2000. I met up with Peter at E3 in May of the same year, where he was proudly showing off another joystick, the "Fox 2 Pro." I won't comment further regarding his choice of name. Some time afterwards Peter left the project and was eventually replaced by Guillaume Lelevι.
I first met Guillaume at ECTS in September 2000, along with Martin Vargas, and Mark Mooney. Before ECTS, I wasn't on the team and to be perfectly honest, I wasn't that interested to be either. My only face to face contact to date was with Peter, and that didn't turn out well :) So I wasn't really expecting that much when I attended ECTS, but they had invited me, and so I wanted to go and see for my own eyes who the new guys were and whether the project was going anywhere.
Well, all I can say is that that meeting, and the discussions in the pub afterwards were nothing short of inspirational. I won't go into all the details because I could rabbit on here incessantly. So I'll summarise the main points here:
1.) Martin (Martin isn't a flight simmer) and Guillaume were hard core flight simmers, and what they wanted to do was to produce the ultimate joystick and throttle, and give something great back to the Thrustmaster community.
2.) They weren't interested in this being a high profit mass market product. Nope. What they wanted was to produce something revolutionary, and ensure that when it came to hard core flight simming controllers, one name would stand way above any other. Thrustmaster. So long as the project broke even, then that would be fine. If it made a profit, even better, but this isn't a profit driven project.
3.) Mark was bringing to the project his electronics expertise and his ideas as to how to go about implementing everything were very exciting.
We spent some 4 hours talking about the project, where we could see it going, talked about possible release dates and costs. It was great. Actually whilst we're here, let me digress here slightly, and talk about one subject that keeps cropping up on the net. And that's the price. There are all sorts of rumours flying around, and they are just that, rumours. I do not know the final price. In my own personal opinion, I am all for these controllers costing a lot of money. I think it helps make them stand out above the rest of the market. You'll be pleased to hear that Guillaume and Martin didn't agree with me on this point :) (Of course with a project like this there are much higher development and materials costs that need to be met.) Anyway, I have no problem with the concept of paying someone well for an excellent product, just as I would want to be paid well if I did a job well. I have long maintained that we pay too little for flight sims, or more precisely, I'd pay a lot more for a polished product. Begin rant here I have to say that some of the stupid numbers I've seen floating around on the net by some people, knowing what I know about what has gone into this project, how hard we've all worked and the ridiculous hours we're putting into the project, well . quite frankly make my blood boil. Rant ends Thankfully, these seem to be a few minority postings. There, I'll get off my soap box now.
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Anyway, you were asking about my role in the project.
Well my job has been principally to:
1.) Develop and define the Thrustmaster syntax and programming capabilities of the Cougar, in conjunction with Mark and David Block (who's developing the Compiler and supporting Thrustmaster applications.)
2.) Write the editing software, based on Fox Two Professional.
3.) Work on the programming side of the manual.
4.) Work with Guillaume on various other aspects of the project.
FRUGAL: What is the one thing that stands out most about the Cougar.
Oh easy - "all metal" metal . metal . and with that .. the weight !!! Every person who's picked up these controllers, and I was exactly the same, comments on their weight, and the cool feel of an all metal joystick and throttle. Seriously, the weight of these things is ridiculous. You drop one of these on your foot and you're in big trouble! I said "all metal" . this means practically everything, that's the hats, the trigger, all the buttons, the whole thing, the base . everything. It's the same with the throttle, practically everything on it is metal.
The next thing that hit me was that the hats on the joystick are much better - they stand out more from the stick and therefore provide a lot more control. And of course, detaching the handle . how cool is that! I haven't really mentioned the throttle yet, because I saw the joystick a few days before getting my hands on the throttle. Oh much as I love the joystick, my favourite is still the new throttle. One of the things about this being metal is that it's got adjustable sprung metal detents. I sat there for a good hour pushing the joystick forwards and backwards going "clunk, clunk, clunk," and it really does go "clunk" at the detents. It is gorgeous!. Some of the other guys who aren't gamers came up and said "Is this going to get fixed?" - little did they know, that's how it's meant to be. I just can't describe it here in writing, you've got to experience it to explain it. I have to say that no matter how programmable this stick is, it's just the fact that they're going to be metal that will turn most people on. I mean it's really something to feel the throttle and the coldness of the metal in your hands. It's different to use and quite exhilarating.
FRUGAL: There were lots of complaints about the pots in the old F22. Have these been addressed in the new sticks?
People have always complained about pots in the F22, because let's face it, many people did have real problems with them. Ok, people like me took them apart, cleaned them out, and then they were fine. But that's not ideal, and when you'd forked out all that money for a new F-22 PRO, ($200 for us in the UK) the last thing you expect to see is a joystick spiking. So rest assured, the pots that are being used aren't the same pots as were being shipped with the F-22 PRO.
When I went to spend time with TM out in Montreal, they were looking at the three options available, namely pots, magnetic and optical devices. Many people assume that optical devices are the way to go. Apart from the fact that they're expensive, the main argument against using them, is that they have very poor resolution for use in a joystick. The ideal resolution for a pot is greater than your screen resolution. So if you had a cursor that is one pixel on your screen and you were using it as an aiming reticule in some space sim, you'd love to be able to move it up one pixel at a time. So if you are looking at a 1280 x 1024 screen, that's what you want as the resolution from your pots. Of course that's not what you get from today's controllers.
If you look at the digital TM controllers, the values from them lie in the range 0 - 255 which is 256 discrete values. With the Cougar it's about 4-5 times better than that, so it's well over 1000. (At this point James moved the stick a little and the cursor on the screen moved in tiny increments). See, much much better. So we weren't impressed with optical solutions with their poor resolution. Everyone liked the response from good quality pots, and the decision was made to go with those.
