What is your goal exactly? To save money? To have a neat project? To bring back memories? but me id just gut the stick (or use circuit bending techniques) and hook the signals up directly to an arduino. if it has jumpers or dip switches for changing protocol, make sure there is a setting for your stick. so if you do go with an adapter be sure it supports your stick. in those cases you have to reverse engineer the protocols. weird tricks like using the digital signals as sort of a parallel bus (ms used a clock bit and 3 signal bits, and used some of the midi signals for force feedback, logitech uses two signals, where a transition on one line represents a 1 and a transition on the other represents a 0). you may also be able to just buy an adapter dongle if you dont want to get your hands dirty.ĭo note that a lot of 90s sticks really used a lot of game port hax in order to put out more axes/buttons than were supported by the gameport (which was 4 analog, 4 digital). attach analog signals to analog pins, digital signals to digital pins, and then use one of the many arduino joystick libraries to emulate a usb hid joystick. Get yourself an arduino based on the atmega32u4 mcu (or anything that can pose as a usb device).
The name of that software eludes me though so if it rings a bell to you, could you chime in please? I seem to remember there is freeware that allows me to have multiple physical sticks report to Windows as one virtual one. The reason is the Saitek has a throttle unit with all the buttons I need for additional control of an Imperial star fighter.
Secondary: I also have a Saitek X-52 pro which I also plan to use parallell to the Interceptor.
I assume the drivers would have to be compatible with Windows 10 64 bit but I have no idea how backward compatible W10 is (knowing Win 8.1 was not backwards compatible at all most of the time).Īny insight on how to go about it? Again, the goal is to have a gameport joystick fully working with the programming software that came with it, in a DOS environment as well as a Win 10 environment running Win 95 programs (TIE Fighter 98 from Steam to be exact). I do run DOSBox though for older games and there just might be a possibility that the Interceptor has DOS friendly software. I have absolutely no idea if this software will run at all on a modern computer with a 64 bit OS. The Interceptor was programmable and came with the necessary software. I'm assuming that there are adaptors for the job but would like to hear from first hand experience which adaptor to go for, if that is indeed the solution.ĭrivers and software.
So, I am looking for the most reliable, and easiest (if not mutually exclusive) way of hooking this stick up to the laptop. Unfortunately, gameport sockets went out with my last SB16 card and this laptop running Windows 10 (64) only has USB sockets. I have an old Logitech Wingman Interceptor joystick that has one of them gameport plugs.