Heh, I used to own one of these 1000-series machines. In my case it was a unit that had been owned by a company's R&D department, so they'd stripped out a bunch

Heh, I used to own one of these 1000-series machines. In my case it was a unit that had been owned by a company's R&D department, so they'd stripped out a bunch of the "arcade machine" stuff, and all it had when I got it was the (19" rackmount) box with the computer in it, plus the helmet and bumbag -- I didn't have the pod you stand in or the hand-held trigger unit, and the software installation was a bit screwed up. Still, you could play the flight-simulator game. I think the main problems with it as a technology were low resolution and the fact the helmet was stupidly heavy. As the Kotaku article says, it's basically an Amiga A3000 -- the 19" rackmount box had an A3000 with the lid off screwed to the bottom of it. The A3000 had two custom graphics cards with TI graphics processors, one per eye. Head and glove position sensing were handled by what I think was an off-the-shelf Polhemus tracker board, which sent its output via RS232 to the Amiga serial port. Mounted above the A3000 was the "format board" which was a big custom PCB which did a bunch of miscellaneous work: power supplies, audio amplifiers, joystick calibration circuitry, etc. (I don't have the thing any more, passed it on to somebody else many years ago, but it was a fun toy to have for a while.)