23rd June 2003, 9:04 PM
(This post was last modified: 23rd June 2003, 9:19 PM by A Black Falcon.)
So, I decided to list all my PC gamepads/joysticks... oldest to newest.
-Oldest is a Kraft Thunderstick joystick. It came with out Pentium 90 that we got in early/mid 1995. It has 2 buttons (trigger and a button on top that has 2 seperate parts but both just activate button 2) and a throttle, so its a 3 axis, 2 button gamepad.
This stick has almost no resistance so it is very, very touchy and inprecice. It also is analog so you have to constantly adjust the trim pots to get it even. Its not a very good joystick, but it'll do when its all you have...
-Next, I got a Capcom PC Fighter 6 in the box when I bought Mega Man X for PC. It is a 6-button digital gamepad. The only problem is that it has no drivers so its got to use the windows default drivers. This means that buttons 5 and 6 aren't buttons like the other 4 -- they actually are the Z axis. Which means that in most games you can't use them since most games don't let you assign normal game functions to axes. Very annoying...
Of course, Mega Man X (and Street Fighter 2 Turbo, which also shipped with the pad) aren't games that let you assign buttons to axes. Great planning there guys.
Still, if you have games that do or that only need 4 buttons its a quality pad. And it still works to this day -- unlike two newer pads I have...
-Microsoft SideWinder 3D Pro -- I got this one in mid/late 1997. I badly, badly needed a new joystick since my Thunderstick was awful for most games... Rebel Assualt was hard to play with that imprecise stick. So I got a Sidewinder 3D Pro. Its a very good stick... 8 buttons, 4 axes (X/Y, Throttle, and Twist (R/Z)), and its digital so no more of those annoying trim pots. And it works very well for any games that are for joysticks... I still use it for flight sims and mech games. It made TIE Fighter and Rebel Assualt 2 a lot more fun... and came with HellBender in the box. :)
-Microsoft SideWinder Gamepad -- great, great pad. It was my main pad for years after I got it sometime in 1998. I'd still be using it sometimes if it hadn't gotten dirty... 10 buttons and a d-pad are on this pad. Its still the most comfterble gamepad I've ever used... others are close but nothing quite matches it. And its got the best shoulder buttons (triggers) on any pad ever.
The only problem is that mine got dirty over the years, and the d-pad doesn't work right anymore. I did open the pad once and clean it, but within 6 months it was dirty again and I realized that I had to get a new pad... I couldn't get it open again, probably because of how the screws chew up the plastic and become hard to get out, especially without the correct screwdriver, which I didn't have.
-Though the Sidewinder still worked, in 2000 I decided I needed an analog gamepad -- lots of games use analog pads and I thought that it'd be great to be able to play gamepad games in PC in analog too. So I got a Gravis Xterminator Gamepad. Its a nice pad with LOTS of buttons -- 11 buttons, a analog stick, a d-pad, a throttle, and a rudder axis put on two shoulder buttons. That's 6 axes total, 4 analog. The D-Pad can also be assigned to 8 buttons. It also has a hat switch, allowing 4 more actions. Its nicely designed. Its not as comfterble or as well designed as the SideWinder, and the triggers are a bit awkwardly placed, and the main buttons are very close together, and the analog stick doesn't have much range of movement... but its a solid pad. Not great, but good. However... after a year and a half or so it began to fail. It'd fail to respond sometimes. I tried installing and uninstalling the drivers, downloading the latest drivers, and anything I could think of... but it got worse. After a few months it wouldn't work at all... since then I think I got it to work once or twice but not for long, and for no apparent reason. Then it'd fail again. Its very, very frusterating... and I couldn't return it since I didn't have the reciept. So I've still got a gamepad that doesn't work lying around.
-And the last is of course the Saitek P880 that I've discussed here several times before. Very high quality pad with 10 buttons, a d-pad, and dual analog sticks (with the d-pad or main analog being a hat switch when disabled). And very large shoulder buttons.
Why write this? Well, I spent a while today trying to get that stupid Capcom pad to work as a 6-button pad. I tried to get it to work using generic Saitek 6-button and Interact 6-button drivers... but it didn't work. So I went to 3-axis 4-button. That worked.
And that darn third axis still isn't recognized as buttons in most any games.
So I tried to find a joystick keyboard emulator (to map those two axes so that the games think I'm pushing some keyboard key)... but it ... didn't work too well. I found a few, but they all were either for DOS or didn't seem to work in programs... :(
-Oldest is a Kraft Thunderstick joystick. It came with out Pentium 90 that we got in early/mid 1995. It has 2 buttons (trigger and a button on top that has 2 seperate parts but both just activate button 2) and a throttle, so its a 3 axis, 2 button gamepad.
This stick has almost no resistance so it is very, very touchy and inprecice. It also is analog so you have to constantly adjust the trim pots to get it even. Its not a very good joystick, but it'll do when its all you have...
-Next, I got a Capcom PC Fighter 6 in the box when I bought Mega Man X for PC. It is a 6-button digital gamepad. The only problem is that it has no drivers so its got to use the windows default drivers. This means that buttons 5 and 6 aren't buttons like the other 4 -- they actually are the Z axis. Which means that in most games you can't use them since most games don't let you assign normal game functions to axes. Very annoying...
Of course, Mega Man X (and Street Fighter 2 Turbo, which also shipped with the pad) aren't games that let you assign buttons to axes. Great planning there guys.
Still, if you have games that do or that only need 4 buttons its a quality pad. And it still works to this day -- unlike two newer pads I have...
-Microsoft SideWinder 3D Pro -- I got this one in mid/late 1997. I badly, badly needed a new joystick since my Thunderstick was awful for most games... Rebel Assualt was hard to play with that imprecise stick. So I got a Sidewinder 3D Pro. Its a very good stick... 8 buttons, 4 axes (X/Y, Throttle, and Twist (R/Z)), and its digital so no more of those annoying trim pots. And it works very well for any games that are for joysticks... I still use it for flight sims and mech games. It made TIE Fighter and Rebel Assualt 2 a lot more fun... and came with HellBender in the box. :)
-Microsoft SideWinder Gamepad -- great, great pad. It was my main pad for years after I got it sometime in 1998. I'd still be using it sometimes if it hadn't gotten dirty... 10 buttons and a d-pad are on this pad. Its still the most comfterble gamepad I've ever used... others are close but nothing quite matches it. And its got the best shoulder buttons (triggers) on any pad ever.
The only problem is that mine got dirty over the years, and the d-pad doesn't work right anymore. I did open the pad once and clean it, but within 6 months it was dirty again and I realized that I had to get a new pad... I couldn't get it open again, probably because of how the screws chew up the plastic and become hard to get out, especially without the correct screwdriver, which I didn't have.
-Though the Sidewinder still worked, in 2000 I decided I needed an analog gamepad -- lots of games use analog pads and I thought that it'd be great to be able to play gamepad games in PC in analog too. So I got a Gravis Xterminator Gamepad. Its a nice pad with LOTS of buttons -- 11 buttons, a analog stick, a d-pad, a throttle, and a rudder axis put on two shoulder buttons. That's 6 axes total, 4 analog. The D-Pad can also be assigned to 8 buttons. It also has a hat switch, allowing 4 more actions. Its nicely designed. Its not as comfterble or as well designed as the SideWinder, and the triggers are a bit awkwardly placed, and the main buttons are very close together, and the analog stick doesn't have much range of movement... but its a solid pad. Not great, but good. However... after a year and a half or so it began to fail. It'd fail to respond sometimes. I tried installing and uninstalling the drivers, downloading the latest drivers, and anything I could think of... but it got worse. After a few months it wouldn't work at all... since then I think I got it to work once or twice but not for long, and for no apparent reason. Then it'd fail again. Its very, very frusterating... and I couldn't return it since I didn't have the reciept. So I've still got a gamepad that doesn't work lying around.
-And the last is of course the Saitek P880 that I've discussed here several times before. Very high quality pad with 10 buttons, a d-pad, and dual analog sticks (with the d-pad or main analog being a hat switch when disabled). And very large shoulder buttons.
Why write this? Well, I spent a while today trying to get that stupid Capcom pad to work as a 6-button pad. I tried to get it to work using generic Saitek 6-button and Interact 6-button drivers... but it didn't work. So I went to 3-axis 4-button. That worked.
And that darn third axis still isn't recognized as buttons in most any games.
So I tried to find a joystick keyboard emulator (to map those two axes so that the games think I'm pushing some keyboard key)... but it ... didn't work too well. I found a few, but they all were either for DOS or didn't seem to work in programs... :(
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