The following was written two days ago:
After realizing that my MS Sidewinder Precision Pro will never work
reliably with the Gameport Joystick adapter of my Creative SB 32PnP
sound card (ie. "joystick not connected" is not fun reading), I have
been adviced by Creative Tech Support to switch over to a dedicated
gamecard such as the CH Products Automatic Gamecard 3 for this demanding
joystick.
Several issues pop into mind with this proposed setup; first, even
though I can disable the SB's gameport through Device Manager in Win95b
(OSR 2.1), will Win95b then correctly recognize the CH card?
Also, even though the CH card boasts a dedicated gameport, it still is
just an analog gameport as there are no "digital" gameports. Will this
still give me intermittent and hard to fix joystick "not connected"
errors on reboot using this digital joystick (using DirectInput of
DirectX 5)?
What then is the advantage of using a dedicated "analog" gamecard for a
"digital" MS joystick?
This is what followed:
Well, it didn't work, and two more hours with MS Tech Support editing
the
Registry didn't work either (changing the Interrupt Delay). They are
ready to
give me my money back!
I called CH Tech Support, but they were closed for the day. If they
can't help,
MS said to remove the game card and try it on the old gameport joystick
adapter
on the Sound Blaster 32 PnP; they say that OSR 2.1's software disabling
of the
sound card gameport is not as solid as a hardware disable, allowing the
"disabled" gameport to suck up some resources.
If that doesn't work, then I am going to get a CH analog joystick and
stick it to
the SB 32.
BTW, I think the problem is with Direct Input that the Sidewinder
software
installs; when I try to use my old Gravis Analog Pro joytsick after
having
installed the MS software for the SW Pro, it too fails to work! When I
installed
the CH Gamecard alongside the SB 32, & before reinstalling the MS SW Pro
software, the old analog joystick worked like a charm .
What we need are Digital joystick ports, and DirectX 6 with a Direct
Input that works!
Thanks for the attention, and that's my last breath on this subject,
failing any miracles from the CH tech team.
Jorge
I have the same setup and it works fine. KH
