FS 2020 A320 Multiscreen setup help to an old school simmer

Hello there,

This is an old school simmer. I remember back in the days of FSX, one could dock everything easily, external view was a breeze, all could be moved from one monitor to another with a simple drag and drop.

Two days ago, I purcahsed FS2020, and to my surprise I realized or at least to my knowledge there is only one screen to deal with…

I have a 4 screen setup →
Monitors 1 and 2 are meant for external view without the Virtual cockpit on the screen
Monitor 3 (below 1 & 2) is meant for virtual cockpit only
Monitor 4 (above 1 & 2) is meant for forward overhead panel
Is it possible to do this?
If yes, how?
If no, which platform is the best in 2024 to do this?

Thank you

Nick from Athens, Greece

The answer is yes and no. Sorry, it gets a bit complicated from here!

You can’t have undocked views with different cameras. So you can’t do what you can with P3D, for example, and have a new window with the ‘Virtual Cockpit Only’ camera and then place that view so that it focusses on your overhead panel. And even if you could, the sim has no direct touch support, it’s mouse-only. You can’t have multiple undocked external views with multiple view frustums, either.

You can have multiple external views, but these views have to be adjacent and they will all use the same camera at the same time, and if you shift the camera viewpoint it will shift the view on all of the views at the same time. You can have, say, three monitors with your outside view, covering a wider FOV than you can have on one screen. This is the ‘experimental’ multi-monitor support. All monitors must have the same viewpoint origin, so the only setup you can really do well with this is three screens, one to your left, one to your right, and one ahead of you. You can adjust the angles to match the angles of your screens, so it’s not limited to 45 degrees, but that’s what it was made for.

You can ‘pop out’ some parts of the virtual cockpit. Unlike FSX, however, there are no 2D panels and you can only pop out the glass element of avionics, not the bezel. So you can, for example, pop out the G1000 PFD display onto another window, but you can’t interact with the controls on that screen.

If you want to interact with popped-out instruments, or have an overhead on a separate screen, the best way to do this will be with Air Manager, which gives you 2D panels and instrument bezels that you can put on whatever screen you like and operate with touch. You’d need to know that panels for your particular aircraft are available, however.

So, if not MSFS, which platform will let you do what you used to do with FSX? Prepar3d. That’s it, really. With P3D you can do what you used to do and more. But P3D is dead in terms of add-ons, no-one’s making anything for it any more, and the latest version 6.0 is basically useless for home simmers. MSFS has become the only - or at least the main - game in town for add-on developers.

It’s a very unsatisfactory state of affairs for home cockpit builders, certainly. There’s a faint hope maybe something will have improved in MSFS 2024, but I’m not holding my breath.

You might find it useful to hang around the Simstrumentation Discord to see examples of how people can set up very complex home cockpits even with these limitations.

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My dear friend!

Thank you for your message, it is really appreciated!!!

So instead of going forward, things went back!

I will give a try to Air Manager, and get back…

Thank again

Nick from Athens, Greece