Mac OSX and Joystick

[stardotstar]

Hail and well met fellow 'farers,

When I originally played Elite I used an Apple ][ stick - similar to an RC thumb/pinch stick. I had a friend who swore by the keyboard.
Now Macs seem to be notorious for ignoring game controllers in system prefs, drivers and so forth - so much so that I have not looked at that aspect for years.

I pulled my old Wingman Force 3D out of the cupboard of cables, drives and hardware cruft the other night and imagine my delight when not only did it respond but the game recognised the USB name of the stick.

Unfortunately my delight did not last as it became evident that the stick is way too slow and completely mis/unmapped.

I didn't spend a great deal of time playing with it and only did a couple of quick searches here which indicate that plenty of commanders use and prefer the stick (I am finding the keyboard a little jumpy for fine tuning my cross hairs in battle) and wonder if anyone can help me with some starting points for either getting the Force3D to work well or encourage me to purchase a particular kind of stick.

I noted that when trying to calibrate the joystick it didn't seem to be reading the maximum deflection in an axis and never completed the calibration on any axis. When I hit ESC it would ask if I wanted to abort the calibration etc...

Hints, opinions, (force)feedback guys?

\'\'

[Gimi]

I have no experience with Macs, but I have a lot of experience with the Logitech Wingman Force 3D. So much in fact that I no longer own one. I binned it. I have used it for various games, including flight simulators without any trouble. With Oolite however, I could never make it work. It was imprecise, it drifted (mainly on the Y axis), calibrations would only last until next reboot and lots more.

My only recommendation when buying a joystick for use with Oolite is to avoid any force feedback sticks. They seem to have problems with calibration in Oolite. Also, I have personally chosen one without a twist handle for the same reason, but here experience differs. I now use a Logitech Attack 3. Seems to be cheap and reliable. (If I could afford it would buy one of these, but not sure if Mac drivers are available.)

[stardotstar]

Hey Gimi, that's a great stick system - wow - can't see a price but I bet its out of my range too!
Interesting if you go up one level and look at platforms the Mac is not even listed and under Multi-Platform there are no joysticks...

Classic - I can't understand why something as essential an input device as a joystick is not more widely supported and available for mac.

Google brings in hundreds of discussions about sticks for mac and x-plane et al - quite hard to find anything definitive though.

I hear what you say about the Logitech I have - it was drifting - slight roll or pitch I noticed at various times even when the stick had not been moved and the rates were slow slow slow none of the buttons or throttle were mapped to anything...

Don't really need twist either personally.

JUst been looking at the classic Apple ][ ones and harking back to the good old days when sticks were sticks and apples were computers and so on and so forth

[stardotstar]

I have found a shop with Attack3 available and I think I'll try that and see what milage I get - been reading some threads here where some notable commanders are happy with it, including your good self Gimi!
W

[Smivs]

The Attack 3 is a good budget choice....it works out straight out of the box (on my Ubuntu computer) and is well endowed with buttons etc. Tough and robust, it 'feels' good in your hand as well.

[stardotstar]

Yes for a cheap solution it rocks, I'm carving up offenders again
Makes such a difference to me.
Definitely works straight out of the box on Mac. Button count just starts at 1 instead of 0 - I guess a bit like the Mac approach to the Ethernet controllers eth0 vs en1 lol