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Remember the Virtual World BattleTech Centers? http://www.virtualworld.com/

These guys have been pushing the non-goggle & non-glove VR for use in entertainment for a long time.

The system uses a mirror & beam splitter combo to create the illusion of 3D.

On top of that, it has 7 monitors and over 90 buttons (they all work)

Its a shame that this kind of 'Virtual Reality' is often ignored in favor of goggle tech, in spite of its success in entertainment and in flight and military simulations.

After 18 years, they are still around. Sort of.

They've have a similar thing in the States called Virtual World Entertainment (VWE).

The VWE simulator 'pods' has 7 displays and over 50 buttons. Each unit new cost more than SUV, and some sites had 16 of them. They had sites all around the world. During its peak (mid-to-late 1990s), it could cost $8+ a game (which included a briefing video, mech-selection, mission, and post-mission review). Later they move the pods to normal arcades and dropped the price to about $4.50.

Now there are only a couple places where you can play. I bought a set of 8 two years ago for less than the cost of a Mini.

My point is, when an economy is doing good (like the US "geek-conomy" was in the late 1990s), you can find people to spend $$$ on something really cool. But these places are like the "canary in the coal mine", when the economy goes down they are the first to suffer.

Under BattleTech, you'd have control over your power systems, power management, weapons systems, cooling systems, all sorts of stuff.

You could control which weapons fired from what triggers.
You could control which weapons received recharge priority after firing (want to make your PPC come up faster, sacrifice power to your lasers, etc). You could reroute coolant away from areas that had been cored out to help increase cooling efficiency.
You could switch piloting modes from just your joystick and throttle to add the pedals and decide whether pedals or the joystick controlled the torso-twist of the mech.
Your radar and sensor displays were controllable.
You could even monitor the weapons themselves in various ways.

Heck, just look at the Firestorm manual.

The original Tesla stuff was twice as complex.

http://www.virtualworld.com/btfrstrm/manual.shtml

With FASA Interactive MS dead, it means that the only true heir remaining of the original FASA legacy is VWE. So far, it's still alive and kicking, but then again, the Pods are a bit bigger spec than most people can arrange for. :(

Since I played at the Dallas site in 1994 I have traveled all over the country, met pilots from all over the world and spent thousands of dollars.

There is still nothing else like Martian Football out there, it is best multiplayer game ever created I have ever played (and I have played most of them). I even liked it so much, when the opportunity came to purchase a set of the Tesla cockpit simulators, I did. If you live in or near Dallas, check us out at http://www.vwlegends.com/.

That was my impression too. That and most arcades that have a dancing game only have one. I think every D&B I've been to (It would take both hands to count them) has Pump it Up. Which I'm fine with because I prefer it to DDR. But they don't take care of the machines and most of them sound like they have a blown speaker.

That aside, I don't go to D&B anymore, but it's not really their fault. I used to go for the Virtual World games, until Virtual World "upgraded" their mech simulator by making it (literally) just MW4, and ditched the unique martian racing game completely.

Sounds like you need to visit Virtual World They used to have one in Walnut Creek, CA, when I lived up there, but now they seem to have shifted to selling pods to arcades and stuff. It was great when they had thier own buildings though. Everything was battletech themed, there was a big mech arm hanging from the cieling, and a bar where you could order drinks that were mentioned in the battletech books.

I remeber Battletech, I wrote the darned thing (or a goodsized piece of it anyway) I was the Chief Engineer at the company that made the games and simulators.

A good portion of the company was swallowed by Microsoft in '97 to become the MechWarrior development team but what's left of the original company (Virtual World Entertaniment) continues to operate quite a few sites.

True, it's not as nice looking as today's games but considering that the hardware hasn't been updated since '95 I'd expect that. What's really surprising is that this game has been in continuous play since 1990! How many games hold people's interest for that long?

I understand they are going through a hardware/software upgrade right now.

For some time I've been interested in starting up a new company to do something like this but haven't found anyone interested in putting up the money.

There's more info on the BattleTech cockpits on my website (which is a mess right now, look here and also here). And don't forget about Red Planet, the less popular (but in many people's opinion) more exciting second game we had.

You're thinking of Virtual World. They tried this with a couple of games: MechWarrior and Red Planet. Very cool, kinda expensive.

Virtual World gave up on running the sites and went into the hardware business. They've sold their hardware to some Dave & Busters and other gaming places. You can check their site out to see where the games have moved to.

That would be here

Preferred the Double-Gauss Sunders, myself, but they took that out of the current build.

FYI FASA itself wasn't purchased by Microsoft. Microsoft only purchased the computer games division - FASA Interactive Technologies (FIT) and it's parent company VWEG (makers of the Virtual World pods). FASA was a major shareholder in them, but FASA themselves is not owned by Microsoft. Though they did just announce a deal to be acquired by Decipher so they can become a bigger force in the gaming industry. So M$ may have the rights to the computer game versions of FASA's games, but at least the paper versions won't be tainted by Redmond. I do agree though that the chance of MW3 or any game based on a FASA license being ported to Linux now is extremely slim as is a port to any OS not made by M$. It's really a shame though as I'd bet that games based on Battletech such as MW3 and the Shadowrun universe (cyberpunk with magic) would probably be popular with Linux users.