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I was wondering are there any digital joysticks available for the PC (like the old Atari Joystick). the only one i've seen is from hanaho (hot rod)which is $200!!! is there anything cheaper?
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Thanks
Jonathan

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jonathand@vistatec.ie

Interact makes a couple, pc arcade pro and pc arcade. I've used mine
well for a few years but it's fairly unusable, the buttons still work
well though. it was 19.99$ with a 20.00$ rebate when i got the
compact version. I'm using an Interact 3dProgramPad now, has worked
great for years except it uses keyboard commands which sometimes
lock/stick if the real keyboard is pressed, I wonder if this will
happen with the hotrod, and if the pacman diagonal problem still
exists in the hotrod (where you move diagonally and pacman stops
after the first turn/wall, i could have sworn a diagonal movement
would move untill you reached a corner.)

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churritz@cts.com

This is what you want ( what you really really want )........
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http://www.4jays.com/

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AL

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alexweir@indigo.ie

I can tell you that the hotrod is useless for superpacman.
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This pacman game is the most sensitive with it's input, and I
borrowed a friend's hotrod to try for the high score. There's no way
I could make the high score with either a keyboard or a hotrod.
Keyboard for obvious reasons, and hotrod because of the diagonal
switches not being optional. Hanaho would have done a good job to
have a switch on the back to disable the diagonal part of the
joystick as some games handle diagonals as two buttons pressed
simultaneously.

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Not only that, but hotrod would have been even better if they had
limited their mapping to keys all on the same hardware "row" to
totally eliminate keyboard ghosting. This is a well-known phenomenon
of the keyboard hardware. For example, q, w, e, r, t, y, etc are on
one hardware row, and a, s, d, f, etc are on the next. If you press
a, q, & w at the same time, that's row 1 & row 2 & column 1 & column
2 that get sent as hardware signals. But if you hold q & a, when you
press w, the software has no way of knowing that s isn't also being
pressed, since s is row 2 column 2, both of which are being asserted.

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So ... the best option for a joystick in my opinion would be a 9 pin
din cable to PC joystick cable converter with resistors in it to
convert the digital on-off behavior of 2600/c64/atari/amiga joysticks
to the PC variable resistance (potentiometer) type.

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I did get high score on both versions of the superpacman game using a
MACH1 joystick from CH products (found in the clearance section of
wal-mart years and years ago and haven't seen any more since then.)
These are simple analog joysticks, but it was good enough for me. I
would still rather use my Epyx joystick from my C=64/Amiga with said
converter. If one exists, please post the info where to find it
here. If not, I might build my own and release the info for how to
wire it up as it should be possible to assemble one yourself for less
than $20 in parts from radio shack.

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- Aaron Hightower

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ahigh@yahoo.com