MarkB
Legend
I've been having a bit of a retro weekend (watched Back to the Future at the cinema on Saturday, downloaded and played a Win7-compatible version of X-Com in the evening), and in the rush of nostalgia, I looked into playing some of those old, classic space combat sims, like TIE Fighter and Freespace.
Trouble is, I no longer own a joystick (my last one was bought when USB was just coming into fashion, and is long since kaput), and would have trouble finding desk space for it if I had one, and those old games' mouse support was primitive at best.
More recent titles like Freelancer (and heck, even oldies like Starglider II) show that it is possible to make a decent mouse-based dogfighting interface if you do it right, so I got to pondering - is there any such thing as a joystick emulator which would use mouse input to simulate the movement of a joystick and feed that into those old games to convince them there's a genuine stick there?
Unfortunately, my initial efforts to locate such a thing via Google have returned a handful of semi-promising shareware programs half a decade old or more, none of which quite seem to fit the bill.
Is this a hopeless quest, or does anyone know of a program that does the trick?
Trouble is, I no longer own a joystick (my last one was bought when USB was just coming into fashion, and is long since kaput), and would have trouble finding desk space for it if I had one, and those old games' mouse support was primitive at best.
More recent titles like Freelancer (and heck, even oldies like Starglider II) show that it is possible to make a decent mouse-based dogfighting interface if you do it right, so I got to pondering - is there any such thing as a joystick emulator which would use mouse input to simulate the movement of a joystick and feed that into those old games to convince them there's a genuine stick there?
Unfortunately, my initial efforts to locate such a thing via Google have returned a handful of semi-promising shareware programs half a decade old or more, none of which quite seem to fit the bill.
Is this a hopeless quest, or does anyone know of a program that does the trick?
