Ok so I imagine a few people around here still have a gameport joystick laying around...
particularly the old Microsoft Sidewinder sticks were all sorts of awesome back in the day.
I've got a MS FF Pro, the original one with the big motors in the bottom you can arm wrestle with.
It's not seen use in 11 years, poor thing sits lonely with nothing to do, so I set about how to get it working again.
The problem with the MS sticks prior to USB, is that no one came up with custom drivers that could send the right signals
for the force feedback to work. Regular USB/gameport converters also don't have the right pin setups either, due to MS using
a non standard arrangement in the drivers. There is however another option, you could breakout the breadboards and put together
a custom $80 gameport converter box.... there are non FF drivers for that... but honestly who wants to pay that much to get your classic
stick back?
So my solution, find yourself a nice old Sound Blaster Live! PCI audio card with a gameport. I'd suggest the SB0220 as it was one of the last made.
You can look up some information on the various models below, but do note that Dell put out a card with a different chipset, that is not compatible
with the drivers I'm about to discuss.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_Live! Really you should be able to very easily get a Live! card for $5 to $10.
Just check which cards are compatible with the drivers though before you buy.
Once you get your card installed, download the beta drivers from the KX project -
http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/Install it, reboot, then go to your device manager and disable the sound card KX entry. You should have a separate entry for the Creative gameport.
The Live cards were ok for their time, but they are not as good as what you have as onboard sound today, so in the interests of keeping everything
happy and working, just disable the sound card part. You can also use MSconfig, and remove the KX manager from your startup sequence.
Go back to your game controllers setup in the control panel, add a controller, and you should have an entry for Sidewinder Auto Detect. Hit that
and it should figure the rest out on its own. You can run a calibration if you want.
Now the above steps can be done as I wrote them on Win XP. For Windows 7, from what I've read the KX drivers work fine, but the manager does not.
So again, you need to forcibly disable it, and you should be ok. The drivers claim to be compatible with Vista as well.
If you want the old Sidewinder software for some reason, it is here -
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=24716If your game doesn't have a bindable key config, try using Pinnacle Game Profiler, or xpadder. Xpadder should still have the older free versions floating around
the net somewhere.
Note that even with these steps, you won't have the force feedback return. The motors may be powered, but everyone out there that made drivers thought
it was too much work to reverse engineer the midi port signals that set off the FF. So there isn't a solution still. This is just a really cheap way of getting your
old stick to work on XP through 7.
Happy flying.
