Thrustmaster/Hercules/Guillemot HOTAS Cougar Flight Stick - $227.50

Thrustmaster/Hercules/Guillemot HOTAS Cougar Flight Stick: MODEL- 2960534 VENDOR- GUILLEMOT INC. FEATURES- HOTAS Cougar Flight Stick Hands On Throttle and Stick, for use with PC, USB connector. The HOTAS Cougar is a joystick and separate throttle, used primarily with PC flight simulations. It is modelled directly after the joy- stick and throttle (we call them controllers) inside a real F-16 cockpit. It even has all the lettering stamped into the joystick and throttle, just like the real ones. But this is only the beginning of the story. It is the most programmable joystick and throttle. Ever. With a Cougar, you never need to take your hands off the controllers. It excels in its level of programmability, so that all your aircraft s functions can be assigned to its various hats and buttons. It can do anything you can do with a keyboard and mouse, but it can do a whole lot more as well. It s fantastic for beginners, because in its default mode you don t need to do any programming. You just plug it in, and go fly in your flight sim, allowing it to assign functions to the various hats and buttons. You don t even need to learn how to program it either. It comes with over 30 pre-written files to program it for different flight sims and games, and you literally just need to press a button and it s ready for you to use. If you want to learn how to program it, no problem. It comes with wizards, and tutorials to gently ease you into it at a pace of your choosing, as well as extensive online and a superb printed manual to get help from. For all its programmability, there s one factor above all else that makes everyone say Wow when they first feel the Cougar. And that quite simply is that they are made of metal. Once you ve flown with metal, you ll never go back to plastic - the difference is like night and day. The cold feel of metal adds hugely to the realism and immersion factor, and being metal, these things weigh a ton. Again, it just feels great and helps lose you into your flight simming experience. Even all the hats and buttons on the controllers are metal - it s just unbelieveable. A metal joystck needs some serious serious springs to offer reistance to movement and return it to its central position, and the Cougar feels just right in this respect. They re strong, and impart much finer control. You ll never go back to the traditionally sloppy sticks after flying with a Cougar. Replaceable joystick handles. The main joystick handle can be detached simply by unscrewing it, and Thrustmaster are planning to develop other handles, like for example those you d find in an F-18 Hornet. A great idea and a first once again for any stick developer. Flash upgradeable. The Cougar s programmability amongst other features can be easily updated without you needing to replace any components within the stick. You ll find updated firmware here at Cougar World and flash upgading your Cougar is a simple mouse click away. Driverless. Unlike other controllers, the Cougar doesn t need to operate through a software driver layer. It does everything in hardware, even holding its calibration data in hardware, and that means that all your computing power is available to your flight sim. It also means that the Cougar is fully compatible with Windows 98 Second Edition, Millenium Edition, 2000, XP and future versions. Rudder connectivity. You won t need to throw away your old gameport rudders when the Cougar comes out. You can plug them into the joystick base directly. And it s not just Thrustmaster rudders that work with the Cougar. Any compatible analog gameport rudders work just fine. Precision. The Cougar generates over 3,000 discrete values from each of its two joystick axes, for increased precision when flying. Compare that to the best of the rest - 256 discrete values. The Cougar uses high precision sealed pots and fast digital oversampling to eliminate spiking issues. Auto calibrating. The Cougar continuoulsy calibrates itself as you use it, so calibration issues become a thing of the past. Of course, if you want to manually calibrate it, that option is also available fro you. A single USB connector. The throttle (and rudders if you have them) plug into the joystick base, and only one full speed USB lead connects your Cougar to the computer. There s 2 advantages to this. The first is that your controllers are seen as a single controller by the computer and that s important for most flight sims. The second is that you don t need to spend money on a USB hub if you ve got another USB device like a mouse conencted to your machine. CONNECTION- Universal Serial Bus port REQUIRES- USB port, DirectX 8. 0 (Microsoft ), Pentium (or compatible), Windows 98/2000/ME. Us. Thrustmaster. Com