Comments on: Parallel Port and old Intel GPUs

By: Noel BEnnett

Noel BEnnett — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 05:07:39 +0000

Don’t be picking on us antiquated gameport guys (I’m only 32, and calling myself antiquated now. Get off my lawn!). I’ve got a treasured MS Force Feedback Pro sitting on my desktop, with an equally antiquated copy of WinXP sitting on a partition. XP is that last version of Windows to support an equally antiquated SBLive! card that I picked up cheap, since it had a game port. This is all so I could play Rise of Flight; a WW1 combat simulator. The FFB helps immensely when you’re trying to ride that knife edge between making a high G turn and stalling out.

Incidentally, Ben, if you’re really in the mood to hunt down bugs with gameport joysticks, I’ll be happy to loan my treasured joystick to you, lovingly packed up and shipped your way. Personally, I’m with the other guys; unless you’ve got an old MS FFB Pro laying around, there’s not much reason to stick with a gameport stick. Seein’ as XP doesn’t support FFB without a plugin (and I haven’t seen one around for the MS FFB Pro), I wouldn’t bother with it.

Just my two cents.

By: Gary

Gary — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 16:05:20 +0000

You might want to consider blacklisting gameport joysticks. They are a relic of the distant past and have always had problems with clock speeds > 300MHz or so.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 13:47:50 +0000

Ya know, Ben, I remember the time when there were pumps at the gas station for both leaded and unleaded gasoline. Big Oil had to be backwards compatible. 🙂

Your time is valuable. My take aways from this blog post are threefold. First, you seem to be “looking back” in terms of compatibility further and further as X-Plane moves further and further into the future. So your exposure to video driver (and other) issues expands, and the time spent on fixing your code, or likely injecting work-arounds, expands as well. Dude, you’re only one dude!

Second, they don’t seem to sell gameport joysticks any more. Why worry? They don’t sell leaded gas anymore either. A USB joystick requirement is fair.

Third, you’re a helluva dude. You find time to post these fascinating bits, you remain open about the things you’re doing and, despite the “are we there yet” queries, you manage to maintain an even strain and things go where no flight simulator has gone before (I think).

So…..rip out the leaded gas pump, dude. Equipment that would run X-Plane 6 happily probably needs to be replaced ’round about now. As always, thanks for doin’ that thing you do!

By: carrotroot

carrotroot — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 03:17:15 +0000

Gameport? You must have some extremely vocal red-assed baboons requesting support for this, to even consider taking-up this request! Don’t cave Ben! If you do I’m gonna demand Glide support for my 13 year old Voodoo3!

From Wikipedia “It [gameport] was the traditional connector for joystick input devices [throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s] until superseded by USB in the 21st century.”