You’re welcome! Glad to hear it worked.
JMJ replied to none of the recent “baby powder on my sticky stick” posts
Thanks, Obama
Arise, joystick thread!
I’m really impressed with the recent joystick hardware that’s out there. I thought the late 90s were the heyday of joysticks, but it’s looking like we’re hitting a better time than ever (other than the loss of force feedback, which is sad). I’ve really been enjoying my new VKB Gladiator NXT Evo, and my friend just showed me his Turtle Beach VelocityOne FlightStick, which seems both really solid and even works with Xbox! I’m impressed, and good on Turtle Beach for surviving this long and getting into this market!
FFB is slowly making its way back into the joystick market, but currently is too niche to be affordable (imo)
So satisfying having the stick vibrate in your hand while you shoot machine guns. Something almost… ahem.
Why did they ever move away from FFB? 800 EU is TOO EXPENSIVE.
I’d like to say the 80’s held their own as well. A multitude of 3rd party joysticks for the Atari and later the Commodore64. Wico holds a place in my heart for over-engineering the hell out of theirs.
This is back during the time when companies that made the damn near indestructible stand up arcade items decided to make some things for the consumer market as well. Wico was one of those vendors. The switches and base were rated for heavy abuse.
I realize nobody is going to be flying with this thing anymore but even though I love my thustmasters, they are made cheaply in comparison.
You could say the 90s were the heyday of flight joysticks and I’d be 100% on board.
Also I appear to be being too pedantic on a Friday afternoon 30 minutes before quitting time. Beers are on me, yall come on over.
I loved my Wico bat joystick!
But my favorite joystick of that era was the Epyx 500XJ. Man, Epyx did some cool stuff, hardware and software. They also made my first fastload cartridge. RIP.
Nowadays my Winwing setup’s a wee bit more expensive, but has about 300 more buttons too.
Those Wicos were truly tremendous. We had two of them on our C64 and they were indestructable, dependable workhorses. I bought one with a USB adapter to use on PC a few years ago, but I always forget about it!
Man those Winwings look nice. They look, uh … “Skipper spilled his beer,” averse, however. My Thrustmaster throttle has take a couple of those at this point. I love the hard switches on those things though, plus what looks like full radio pot switches on the bottom? Is that correct?
The problem with those early joystick designs is that they were an evolutionary dead end. Not enough buttons and too much movement to operate them. The consoles evolved the modern gamepad as a solution to the problem of general game control, and it’s far superior. This is why I’m only talking about flight joysticks – it’s the only domain that even requires a joystick.
What a thing of beauty that Winwing stuff is, even if it is way too expensive for me. Seriously we’ve never had such a wealth of options for flight sims. I wonder if it has to do with 3d printing lowering prototype costs and tiny microcontrollers becoming so cheap.
They’re not pots but encoders. They send a keypress when turned one way, another when turned the other way and a third when pressed. They are very neat.
I replaced my TM warthog throttle with that winwing unit and it’s an improvement.
They sounds awesome. Like a multiswitch in a way.
TM has really been upstaged. They owned this field and thought they’d be facing clown shows like Logitech (Saitek). There are now 3 serious contenders, all of whom have excellent products that exceed TM’s standards.
So I love my Hotas but having tons of buttons isn’t great, I’m constantly fumbling around and hitting all the wrong things. Turn out Voice Attack is the next best thing to nice joysticks. I just say “attack my target” “gear up” “flaps down” “target incoming” “dock with target” And it just does the thing, letting me keep my hands on the sticks and not have to finger crawl my way to the third d-pad from the left to press the wrong thing. You guys should try it, it’s cheap, and can probably replace half your button pads and things.
Strong disagree. That said, I did use Voice Attack in Elite.
Let me rephrase that: I like having tons of buttons in case I need them, but I prefer to not need them because they’re covered via my VoiceAttack profile.
Sounds sweet, and I could see this working really well. The beauty of voice is that it bypasses mapping from nameless button/key to function. I still like my HOTAS with a ton of buttons, but supplementing with voice makes a lot of sense.
Processing-wise, VoiceAttack doesn’t drain too much for heavy games?
I haven’t noticed any hit at all running Voice Attack playing heavy games, ie most sims. I guess it would be more CPU than GPU, so it’s not where most PCs struggle these days.
Playing Ready or Not: “Alpha, Stack Right. Breach and Clear. Cuff him. Bravo, watch that door. Fall in.” It’s really good, for any game with menus and/or too many controls.
I’m still a strong disagree on this, at least for realistic sims. At least half the point of the buttons, for me, is immersion, and it’s not immersive to control my Cessna 152 by saying “flaps down”.