You're viewing a single thread.
Haven’t seen mine in… decades but it’s probably in my parents’ basement somewhere. I do know that this awkward looking device is in my own basement though:
And it’s sitting next to this more conservative looking rig:
The SideWinder! I still have mine but it has a broken connection somewhere. I need to find it and see if I can get it working again.
That's so cool! What the heck do you even do with that ball thing? My more contemporary controller is a Gravis Eliminator Aftershock. The D-pad kinda sucks, but the analog sticks have a precision setting that works nicely for casual flying games and sniping in FPS games.
A man of culture I see. This was my first controller, complete with years of grime. I think I had an old Logitech DualShock clone next.
Nice!! That's got some miles on it, for sure. I didn't get mine until a couple years ago, I like it a lot.
My first controller was the Gravis in my post pic, but not that one. Lost that one so many years ago. My second one sucked, it was a PC Propad by Performance. But my third one, that was awesome. It was a Gravis Stinger, it was serial for use with laptops, and you could also use it as a mouse. The joystick was hall effect, so it never wore out. Man, I used that from my first Compaq LTE-5300, until laptops didn't have serial ports standard anymore. Gravis made the best stuff back in the day.
Whoa. I haven’t seen or thought about that game in 20+ years and instantly recognized it. That was weird. I might have to dig that out.
edit: I played it on a microsoft sidewinder 3d pro
Great game. And E.V.E., the ship's computer, is voiced by the lovely Gillian Anderson.
The ball thing was basically on a set of hinges and could move on all three axises and could be used in place of a mouse in a traditional mouse and keyboard setup. There are plenty of videos to watch it in motion, just search for Sidewinder Dual Strike. The controller itself was… just okay. It was an interesting idea but it was not a substitute for m&k. Maybe I’ll dig mine out and give it a try, as it hasn’t been used in 20 years now. It would be interesting to see how it feels in a post-dual stick world.
Both of these controllers were under the “Sidewinder” branding. There was another model called the Sidewinder Freestyle that contained some early motion detection too I don’t think I had one of those, but I do recall having one of these:
