Sidewinder 3D Pro

[Cyker]

Just a heads up for any gameport Sidewinder joystick owners who would love to get their stick working again:

Sickone and Grendel over the DescentBB.net 'board have made a converter box that lets you plug it into a USB port while retaining all the digital mode features, which has been impossible on faster computers, computers which have no Gameport and Windows Vista/7.

It's about $30 plus delivery (relatively pricey as it uses a Teensy microcontroller; The ATmega was cheaper but you need a chip programmer!), but you do have the option of building it yourself.

If you want a pre-made one, Sickone only has 6 left as of today (2010/08/20) as I bought two for me and a friend, but tbh it doesn't look that hard to make (Esp. compared to the ATmega version!)

Grendel's DIY thread

Sickone's ready-made converter

HTH!

[Tripredacus]

This was a good joystick for me. I wish I hadn't lost mine in a flood.

[CoffeeFiend]

Such joystick-to-HID (USB) "adapters" are pretty trivial to build these days. There's dozens of hardware designs out there you can reuse (from very popular NES HID conversions to boards that can connect to ATARI/COLECO joysticks and plenty of others). And on the software side, there's plenty of projects with full source code too, although a lot of them just rely on the popular V-USB lib to do the heavy lifting. Even V-USB's website has a whole category of example projects dedicated to this kind of stuff. PCBs of that kind are very easy to route as well (even for a n00b), but unfortunately making PCBs available for a decent price (pennies) requires having to get a lot of them build at once...

The ATmega was cheaper but you need a chip programmer!)

Nah. You don't need a "real" programmer for this. You can build a very simple ISP programmer out of little more than 3 resistors and a DB25 connector (assuming you still have access to a machine with a good old parallel port). Like this one for example.

Not that I've had any gameport joysticks in 10+ years...

[Tripredacus]

that can connect to ATARI/COLECO joysticks and plenty of others

Included in those "plenty of others" (that is if you reference 2600) you can put in the Sega Genesis as well. You just try playing a 2600 game with a Genesis controller...

[CoffeeFiend]

Included in those "plenty of others" (that is if you reference 2600) you can put in the Sega Genesis as well. You just try playing a 2600 game with a Genesis controller...

If you really want support for a large number of older joysticks, have a peek at this

Working, fully tested game controllers:

* 3DO gamepad

* 9-Pin digital joysticks with 1 or 2 buttons including:

o Atari 2600

o Atari 400 / 800 / 1200XL / 600XL / 800XL / 65XE / 130XE / 800XE

o Commodore VIC-20 / MAX / C64 / Amiga

o Amstrad CPC464, CPC6128 and CPC6128 Plus Digital Joysticks

* Atari 2600 Driving controller

* Atari 2600 Paddles

* BBC Micro / Master original 2x joysticks on one cable and 1x Voltmace 14B joystick (adapter box not required)

* Commodore C16 / C116 / Plus4 Joystick

* Commodore CD32

* Dragon 32 / 64

* MSX Joystick

* NEC PC-Engine gamepad

* Neo Geo joystick / gamepad

* Nintendo Famicom / NES

* Nintendo Gamecube

* Nintendo N64

* Nintendo Super Famicom / SNES

* Nintendo Virtual Boy

* PC Gameport

* Sega Master System / SG 1000 / SG 1000 II / Mark III

* Sega Master System Araknoid (paddle) controller

* Sega MegaDrive (Genesis) (3 button and 6 button)

* Sega Saturn standard 6 button pad / arcade stick

* Sega Saturn Analogue (NiGHTS) Controller

* Sinclair ZX Spectrum Plus3 Joystick

* Sony Playstation 1 (PSX) original / Dual Shock / arcade stick / dance mat

* Sony Playstation 2 (PS2) Dual Shock 2 / arcade stick / dance mat

* Sony Playstation Densha de Go! (train) controller

* Tandy TRS-80 CoCo (Colour Computer)

* TurboGrafx-16 gamepad

* X68000 Joystick

Not tested but expected to work:

* Sinclair ZX Spectrum Kempston Joystick

* TI-99 / 4A Joystick

Fully tested mice / trackballs:

* Amiga 2/3 button mouse

* Atari 2 button mouse

* Nintendo Famicom trackball

* Nintendo SNES mouse

Planned support:

* 3DO mouse *

* Apple IIc Analogue Joystick

* Apple IIc Paddles

* Apple ADB joystick *

* Amstrad Analogue Joystick

* Atari 5200 controller

* Atari Enhanced Joystick

* Atari Mouse

* Fairchild Channel F joystick

* Fujitsu FM Towns / FM Towns Marty

* NEC PC-Engine multitap *

* NEC PC-FX *

* Nintendo Famicom paddle controller *

* Nintendo Wii "classic" gamepad *

* Sega Dreamcast gamepad / joystick *

* Sega Dreamcast mouse *

* Sega Saturn multi-tap *

* Sega Saturn mouse *

* Sony Playstation mouse *

* Vectrex Controller

Getting old joysticks to work on a PC is fairly simple in the vast majority of cases. The hard part is acquiring the old joysticks (if you're into that) -- preferably in good condition, and also finding the mating parts for all the proprietary connectors. A lot of them very much sucked, but I guess using the authentic joystick adds to the experience when you're playing an old game.

That thing is also using an open hardware design, will open source code as well. You could very easily make something out of a slightly fancier atmel (like a mega128) and be able to support even more and fancier stuff... And it uses the V-USB lib too, so it's quite straightforward.