Sinterklaas, the original Santa Claus, still honors his country of origin. December 5th he visits the Netherlands to shower kids of all ages with presents. This year that included some in-house shuffling with the gaming PC and game controllers. As old Santa has difficulties in staying up to date with all this new technology I had to give him a hand.
The better older motherboards included a game port connector to plug in your joystick, gamepad or even MIDI-cables. In case the motherboard didn't provide the connector there was often one on the soundcard; all Sound-Blasters had one.
My old MS FF stick has been used like this for years with a lot of PC's.
We also have a simple but efficient gamepad with such a connector. My kids want their gamepad, for instance to make their gameboy-emulator even more realistic. I already confessed being somewhat a FS addict; I did not want to lose (my) control(er) either in the shuffle. The kids got a new XP machine, I went to Vista.
Newer motherboards do not have a game port. When running Vista inserting a SoundBlaster did not help either. Vista perfectly identified the "Unsupported Creative Gameport". So for me it would be end of the game or back to XP.
Sitecom produces a gameport to USB cable. This is known not to work with a complex controller like the MS FF joystick. But we gave it a try for the gamepad. At first sight it worked, Windows recognizes the controller and you can calibrate it in the control panel. But it ended there. Most of the games either didn't see the controller or it ran haywire having lost all calibration. Droids running all over the screen without even touching it. So to prevent disillusioned kids my suggestion is to stay away from that. This weekend I will plug in an old Sound-Blaster again.
For my personal games I needed a more drastic solution. There did not seem to be a chance of getting my joystick hooked up. Thank goodness Santa found a very good deal on a Saitek aviator (and even rudder pedals !). The joystick does not have an electronic force feedback, but does have a large mechanical spring which always returns the stick to the central position when you let go. Sounds simple but it works very well. American top stunt team the Blue Angels fly standard planes. The only modification made is such a spring fitted to the stick.
Modern game controllers all use USB. An extra good thing with that is that it's no problem to hook up several controllers at the same time. Games know how to handle that. Vista instantly reported both Saitek devices after plugging in and in most flight sims you simply assign control surfaces to levers on the sticks attached. Most flight sims, the older pre-USB CFS1 can't handle it. It does see several controllers but refuses to hook up. That's the end of that game as well, but to the others it's a new game. The gameport may be dead but I'm soaring up to heaven.