[Sandwich]

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.

LOL thats a fair upgrade I think   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.

[jr2]

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? 

[Nuke]

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

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.

[Cyker]

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...

[jr2]

I've heard something about USB for DOS drivers, but I'm not sure if they work much.

[Nuke]

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.