Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: Dysko on April 30, 2007, 04:12:38 am
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Some days ago I was playing X-Plane. I was landing on a carrier, and when I had to do the "bolter" (when you give max power to the engines when touching down to avoid splashing in sea in case of a missed approach) and I discovered the throttle on my joystick stopped working!!! :(
My joystick is a Trust GM-2500 Predator. I went immediatly on the Trust website, only to discover that my joystick model is the only one for which are not available troubleshooting programs.
Since this is my 3rd joystick (over 3 joysticks bought :doubt:) which has problem to the throttle, had anyone of you problems with the joystick throttle? Is it a common problem with joystick throttles?
Oh, and BTW I landed safely ;)
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The throttle was probably the last thing to go on my MS Sidewinder Precision 2. My original Precision 1 had a good life and then the sensors died. MS replaced it with another one and then few more years later the sensors died again. Then finally I got the Precision 2 which had sensors that still work to this day but most of the buttons have long since ceased to respond. On the other hand the throttle on that stick works quite well :)
Now I have a Saitek X-52 which I expect to be able to hold on to for quite some time and this throttle is a big solid heavy piece of engineering and *touch wood* I hope to get allot of use out of it.
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saitek rocks :)
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Yeah. I thought the x52's MFD showed waypoint times for FS2004 though. That's what it looked like in the promotional pictures and the ones on their site.
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Icey, I still have the MS Sidewinder Precision Pro I bought ages ago. :p Unfortunately, my latest motherboard upgrade removed the game port connector, so I have no way of plugging it in anymore. But it lasted until today - not that it's seen much use over the past couple of years. And the joint between stick and base sometimes clacks when you turn it just so...
Anyway, I've long been keeping my eyes open for a replacement (USB this time), but I do have one near-requirement: a shift key. :) I loved that feature of the original Precision Pro, was gutted that it was omitted from the PP2, and have yet to see it on any other joystick. Do you know of anything with the same functionality? I loved being able to have the trigger fire my primaries, and the shift-trigger switch between primaries. :)
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The Saitek Cyborg Evo (http://www.saitekusa.com/USA/prod/cyborg_evo.htm) has two shift buttons, one on either side of the base. They might require the Saitek profiling software to be running in order to function properly; I just use one of them as my afterburner button myself.
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Icey, I still have the MS Sidewinder Precision Pro I bought ages ago. :p Unfortunately, my latest motherboard upgrade removed the game port connector, so I have no way of plugging it in anymore.
I still have the gameport/usb adapter, but not the joystick. :D
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Yeah. I thought the x52's MFD showed waypoint times for FS2004 though. That's what it looked like in the promotional pictures and the ones on their site.
The x52 pro's MFD shows the radio stack in FS X. I don't have anything else that makes use of it. It does show a clock though.... :)
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Mine has a clock, date, and stopwatch. :)
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The Saitek Cyborg Evo (http://www.saitekusa.com/USA/prod/cyborg_evo.htm) has two shift buttons, one on either side of the base. They might require the Saitek profiling software to be running in order to function properly; I just use one of them as my afterburner button myself.
Hallelujah - IT EXISTS!!!!!!
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Icey, I still have the MS Sidewinder Precision Pro I bought ages ago. :p Unfortunately, my latest motherboard upgrade removed the game port connector, so I have no way of plugging it in anymore. But it lasted until today - not that it's seen much use over the past couple of years. And the joint between stick and base sometimes clacks when you turn it just so...
Erg. Buy yourself a decent sound card (read: one that has a gameport).
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Ok, that is the most :wtf: statement I've ever read. Soundcards with gameports?
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you get better precision with an old sound blaster + analog stick. the best usb seems to be able to do is 10 bit precision, where a game port can run about 16 bit.
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If I remember correctly, old game ports are the same as old midi ports for music keyboards and such, so I could see why a soundcard would offer it.
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Ok, that is the most :wtf: statement I've ever read. Soundcards with gameports?
ROFL. Now I know how often you look at your hardware.
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Not worth getting a gameport for the Sidewinders; If your compy doesn't come with one, chances are it won't work even if you get one for it due to MS' retarded design.
(A guy called Grendel on one of the sister sites, descentbb, made a box that converts a Sidewinder into a USB device, but alas I found out too late to buy one :()
The sticks themselves are awesome - Unlike most other sticks, which use resistance strips and pots, all the Sidewinders use optical sensors so the damned things never wear out!! ;)
I still have one plugged into my SB Live!, but I have to use it in analog mode (So the 8-way hat is only 4-way, and half the buttons don't work :( )
I really wish somebody would start making decent 'sticks again... I'm really not impressed with the ones available these days...
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hear hear Cyker.
Although i do like my X52.
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Erg. Buy yourself a decent sound card (read: one that has a gameport).
Pardon me for getting an X-Fi! I was only upgrading from a SB16. :P
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Erg. Buy yourself a decent sound card (read: one that has a gameport).
Pardon me for getting an X-Fi! I was only upgrading from a SB16. :P
LOL thats a fair upgrade I think :D You managed to miss the crappy Audigy days...decent hardware encumbered by terrible drivers. I hear the jury is still out on the X-Fi drivers although its better than before.
Saitek Cyborg Evo should do the trick as Mongoose points out. Good sticks...I wanted something a bit heaftier this time around as I spend allot of time playing IL-2 Sturmovik and all of the expansions.
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i wasnt to happy with my x-fi. it had some probs, first off no headers for front ports, no gameport, and the sound quality wasnt that much better over my old extigy, or even my older soundblaster live (which was on the computer i had built to play fs2 on). there were game ports before there were midi ports though. the idea was keep all the analog circuitry on one board. later as the midi standards emerged, sound card manufacturers wanted both midi controllers and joystick adcs on the same card, so they just doubled them up on the same port.
game ports are fun to tweak with, you cross the right 2 pins through a 100k ohm potentiometer and its recognized as a joystick. really cool stuff. i would have perfered an extension to this legacy standard over usb any day. im actually contemplating designing a custom pci board which dumps the output of a bunch of high bit depth adcs into memory, for use in building custom joysticks. but i probibly lack the expertise. theres like a $10 circuit board on the net for buiilding your own usb joystick interface, complete with pre-programmed microcontroler, i think it was called the joy warrior, but it suffers from the one thing i always complain about, low bit depth, and every arc-second counts. :mad:
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Erg. Buy yourself a decent sound card (read: one that has a gameport).
Pardon me for getting an X-Fi! I was only upgrading from a SB16. :P
LOL thats a fair upgrade I think :D You managed to miss the crappy Audigy days...decent hardware encumbered by terrible drivers. I hear the jury is still out on the X-Fi drivers although its better than before.
Actually, I posted that late last night, and I knew something felt wrong about it. My SB16 was upgraded to a SB Live X-Gamer years ago, and that's what I upgraded to the X-Fi from. :shrug:
But cheers for the joystick recommendation - I've contacted local retailers about it, since the closest thing they have is the force feedback version of that stick, for around twice the price. No thank you. :)
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http://www.soundblaster.com/products/welcome.asp?category=1&subcategory=208
5 out of 7 X-Fi's have a joystick port - and you had to pick one of the two that didn't? ;)
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that thing that looks like a gameport, isnt. its a 26 pin connector for the optional x-fi i/o console. it doesnt have a gameport, but you can jack your guitar into it :D
i demand to see the return of the gamecard. old isa game cards (yes i was around back then), had a pair of gameports. unfortunately back then each one only supported 2 axes and 2 buttons. you could double em up with a y cable, but then you could only use one stick. mind you this is around the time that most games used the post speaker for sound, so the sound card gameport was aways down the line. ionfact some of the most recent sticks which still used gameports didnt support the game card and required the midi interface as well. id like to see a pci version, which would have support for about 8 axes + 32 buttons. each axis would have its own dedicated channel and would use differential signaling. using a headpone style jack and audio grade cable for each channel, you could hardwire your setup any way you wanted. auto-calibration would be handeled at the card. but thanks to infernal usb, i will never see another super-accurate stick ever again.
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I dunno, my bro's Cougar seems pretty accurate to me and that's USB ;)
In fact, they claim they went with pots over optics because pots had a much highter accuracy.
Which is probably true until you start using them for a bit, and find you have to take them apart to clear the carbon dust out...
Someone made a kit for it that replaces the pots with magnets and Hall probes 'tho...
Nothing really wrong with USB 'tho, aside from the fact it doesn't work in DOS so I couldn't play, say TIE Fighter, with a USB stick...
And if the HID accuracy was too low, you could always make your own hardware and driver interface using one of those microcontroller boards...
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I've heard something about USB for DOS drivers, but I'm not sure if they work much.
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I dunno, my bro's Cougar seems pretty accurate to me and that's USB ;)
In fact, they claim they went with pots over optics because pots had a much highter accuracy.
Which is probably true until you start using them for a bit, and find you have to take them apart to clear the carbon dust out...
Someone made a kit for it that replaces the pots with magnets and Hall probes 'tho...
Nothing really wrong with USB 'tho, aside from the fact it doesn't work in DOS so I couldn't play, say TIE Fighter, with a USB stick...
And if the HID accuracy was too low, you could always make your own hardware and driver interface using one of those microcontroller boards...
ive actually been considering doing that. i think the problem with usb sticks is simply the manufacturers cutting corners when it comes to parts especially on the semi-high end (x52 for example). usb certainly has the bandwidth to do 16 bit accuracy per axis. to do 8 axes requires the bus to transmit 8 long integers or 16 bytes. you need 1 bit for each button, 32 seems reasonable for a hotas, so were up to 20 bytes and about 4 bytes of serial overhead for a total of 24 bytes. most game controls refresh at about 25 times a second, id perfer more like 60 to be on par with a typical monitor refresh. that means 24*60 = 1.44kB or 11.52kbit a second. well within usb's capability. but sence theres almost no real competition in the stick market, they can get away using the cheapest microcontrollers available.
the extremely high end are the only ones doing it right. thats ch and maybe the cougar. back in the day you could buy a fairly accurate stick for about 60 bucks. i think its crazy to have to spend 5 or 6 times that to get the same performance. pots are always gonna be the best way. if youre not familiar with pots they have 3 leads, the outer leads are hooked into the ends of the carbon disc, and the centrer to the brush arm. the old way just run 5 volts through the center wire, and read the voltage from the outer wire (by means of the game port). the differential meathod is where both leads of the pot are read and the data compaired, usually by a microcontroller, which allows for automatic calibration through some assembally programming. its even more accurate too as your taking two readings. hall sensors require more fancy circuitry even then they can cause some odd non-linear characteristics which is why the x52 is so innaccurate. i wish stick makers would stop adding gimmicky features and focus on pure accuracy.