Gameport… thanks for the memories
Managed to pick up X3 Reunion Game of the Year Edition at Woolies for £6 which given it has the latest patch from February and a whole host of other bits and bobs was a pretty good deal.
However to play one of these games you really want a Force Feedback Joystick (a space sim with a keyboard and mouse? ugh) which meant I found myself dusting off my SideWinder ForceFeedback Pro. Small problem, my latest gaming PC doesn’t have a midi / gameport.
Some quick thievery of an ancient Turtle Beach Montego 2 sound card from an ancient Dell tower later and I was trapped in the hell of old devices. This is a quick run down of what I had to do to get it working. The games machine is based on the Asus P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard.
- Plug and Play OS Support enabled in PCI section of BIOS (without this enabled machine would not POST with joystick connected!)
- Windows would not start without hopping into safe mode first after the above - go figure. All fine after a quick visit to Safemode and a reboot.
- The midi / sound features of the soundcard should be enabled as apparently these are used for the ForceFeedback (I’d originally intended to have the gameport only enabled)
- No Sidewinder drivers are available for XP. Use the Sidewinder option under add game device in the control panel. Force Feedback strength and other options is now game specific rather than configured within control panel.
The game takes up a shocking 4GB of disk space and takes a fair amount of time to install. Review coming as soon as I’ve played it 
Rowan :: Apr.25.2007 :: Game Hardware, Games :: No Comments »